Currently on my mind

The past year I’ve met numerous organisations suffering from outdated outsourcing strategies. Either very business critical areas or the entire IT has been outsourced. The typical symptom one meet from this are lacking support of new business strategies, a general lack of control of IT decisions, frustration due to differentiation of incentives and drivers between buyer and supplier. Also the vendor lock-in situation is common, leading to lack of gain of a healthy multi-vendor competition in terms of cost, skills and innovation management. In other words your business is getting hurt.  As a consultant in different roles such as strategic advisor, manager (Manager/Team Manager/Project Manager) or Enterprise Architect, I meet many organisations and people in many different situations; different cultures, different levels of maturity and different industries. However one thing they all have in common, they are all working with business where IT is business critical. ...

In the life as a consultant it’s very natural to talk about delivery, because simply put that’s what you do for your clients. But I know many companies and organisations would gain a lot by focusing more on the topic. Unfortunately delivery is often mistaken as something you do at the end of an initiative; when you turn in the report, delivery the codebase, delivery an architecture or deliver a project. But delivery is so much more. Delivery is something you do every day. It’s how you walk and how you talk. It’s how you take control and responsibility over challenges and opportunities, and how you drive them to come forward. It’s about never delivering any surprises but always be on top of things and clearly bring to attention if things start to get out of tack and not seem to end up as expected.  Unfortunately delivery is not as easy as doing exactly what your boss, stakeholder or client say, but neither about not doing what they’re saying, of course. No it’s about really u...

I’ve been in both situations, delivering large projects both with and without, and I must say it's a luxury to actually see what is happening under the hood, in real time, that you soon can't live without. Also I must suggest to have a  real time dashboards showing the full picture, ie. both tech and business KPIs in one unified view. I wouldn’t say no to using AppDynamics, Splunk and Qlikview for the job but there are cheaper alternatives (for example  Elastic search/Logstash/Kibana can be used to get full overview of your logs). The cost? Yes, it does cost but it pays back fairly quick in your distributed environment when you have the volumes. Do I need it, you might ask? It depends. How critical is quality? What's the cost of incidents and downtime? Do you want to provide the tools for development to take full responsibility of their code all the way into production?  Follow me on Twitter: mandus_engman

What would happen if you chose an open source e-commerce platform for your organisation , let say Hybris,  Magento , osCommerce or OpenCart, all based on the technical features provided. Then you outsource further development and customization of all those features to a big development team in India for a couple of months. First after this, when the above steps are finalized, you turn to business and want to start integrate with the business processes you actually have. Do you think success will be a fact? Learnings:  We all know it but still things go wrong – start by understanding your business and your business needs. Today, you can't expect a business critical IT project to be successful without business and IT/Tech running it together.   Follow me on Twitter: mandus_engman