I recently worked at an insurance company (let’s call it Freesurance) that had mandated a “glide plane” process to bring a semblance of regularity to the chaotic development practices in place. All projects were to pass through specified stages of the glide plane at specified times. Glide planes were staggered to start every month.

Employees were mandated to enter all tickets (work requests, enhancements, and bug fixes) into a requirement-tracking tool. All tickets were to track through each of the following phases.

• New: All new work requests (tickets) should be entered into the requirement-tracking tool by the business analysts or by the development teams. Tickets must be entered at least 91 days before a scheduled monthly release.
• Acknowledged: A service level agreement (SLA) mandated that the business must acknowledge tickets within 7 days of receipt of the ticket – 84 days prior to release. This 7-day period was used to triage the tickets to remove duplicates, close tickets if no action was going to be undertaken, and to prioritize the items.
• Accepted: The IS department is tasked by the business to analyze and estimate the tickets — target 63 days prior to release.
• Business Requirements: The business analysts were required to complete the business requirements 42 days prior to release.
• Committed: IS would commit to the tickets, 28 days prior to release, that it thought it could complete — create functional specifications, construct, unit test, and build within the release dates.
• IN/OUT List: Final date to decide whether tickets are going to be included in this release or not.
• Constructed: IS completes coding, unit testing, and delivering final build 14 days prior to release.
• Resolved: Business analysts complete all testing 7 days prior to release.
• Closed: Code merged into the production environment (“going live”) on implementation day; Business signs-off on the release within 5 days of implementation. more »

My experience is predominantly within large, Fortune-class companies.  It is possible that many of my observations apply on to organizations that have grown to tens of thousands of people over many, many years.  I do not know if many of the same ailments apply to smaller companies – although with the exception of the odd start-up, I suspect that the same commitment-issues plague us all.  more »

I am a huge fan of self-organizing, self-aggregating, self-directing teams. Huge! I have been witness to how much more productive and effective these teams are over traditional command-and-control teams subject to autocratic management styles. The self-organizing teams also foster an environment of elevated trust, shared responsibility and accountability. Gone are the days of internal finger-pointing or blame shirking. Without a doubt – these teams are better.

But on a few different teams I have worked with, I noticed some interesting things happen which I can only attribute to human-nature. more »

There is no doubt that in the past year or so there has been a huge surge in the area of internet technologies that is today commonly known as RIA – Rich Internet Applications. There are a few other techno buzz words I can throw in here that may or may not make it clearer to what the industry is referring to: such as AJAX, Flex or Lazlo and there are a host of others. Even more commonly we hear the now famous “Web 2.0″ moniker used to describe anything from blogs and vlogs to the “pageless experience”. more »