How can IT managers tell the difference between projects and
enhancements? And how can IT departments decide which upgrades will
offer the most benefit to users?
As global organisations drive towards stronger co-ordination
between application development lifecycle tools and processes and
portfolio management, IT suppliers are beginning to enable
automated tool support.
With the advent of increasingly chaotic development environments,
such as complex web services applications, co-ordination and
customisation of enterprise resource management and datawarehouses
and fewer resources, IT organisations are increasingly debilitated
by function creep. As much as 40% to 60% of software enhancements
for application development involves small projects of a short
duration.
Cumulative costs result from the lack of organisational practices
and prioritisation for establishing which enhancements are business
imperatives and which can be bypassed. The expense incurred by
diverting IT attention from business-critical enhancements toward
creating functions of minimal or negligible benefit is exorbitant.
How do organisations determine the difference between an
"enhancement" and a "project"? How do they retain a clear focus and
establish a process for decision making and appropriate time frames
for the execution of one change versus another?
During 2003/2004, Meta Group expects organisations to structure
more effective processes and governance for prioritising and
managing functional enhancement requests, driven by the need to cut
costs and increase efficiency.
By 2004/2005, standard software configuration management products,
combined with more mature governance and improved organisational
practices, will enable users to co-ordinate change control and
version management across applications.
By 2005/2006, stronger repository management will enable improved
support for centralised control across the application lifecycle
via centralised data stores and effective management capabilities.
A critical path for managing the plethora of user requests received
by IT departments is establishing business priorities as the basis
for decision-making and culling the enhancement wish list.
Although this area is driven by lines of business, both IT and
business managers must buy into such criteria, which should be
established in up-front, joint application development sessions,
facilitated by a governance body such as an enterprise programme
management office (where mature governance exists), or by
appropriate advisory boards.
Decision-making criteria range from issues such as criticality of
the enhancement to improving speed of customer support or product
development.
Although major application releases may occur only once or twice a
year, smaller requirements should be grouped into "point" releases
on a regular schedule (every four to six weeks) that can be
supported by quality assurance testing teams.
Incorporating a strong system to track requirements and assign
priorities enables the development team to plan point releases with
a small enough scope to be manageable by both development and
testing groups. Requirements should be grouped iteratively by
module.
As high-priority items are put into the point release,
lower-priority items can be scheduled in a related module as
appropriate (the low-hanging fruit concept). The wish list is
thereby kept well pruned instead of growing into a long list of
"neglected" items that can hurt IT staff credibility.
As IT departments establish end-user trust in their delivery of
point releases at a quick pace (every four to six weeks), the
number of "hot" or "must do now" requests will drop. This further
increases the ability of the organisation to take a controlled
approach (and exemplifies how an organic system's feedback loop
helps to build stability).
From a process perspective, organisations should consider requests
for production enhan-cements as a pipeline. From the pipeline, they
should create portfolio releases of production versions of
applications, meaning there will be "n" planned upgrades to the
portfolio each year.
The pipeline is then set for a particular release. This approach
assumes that the major upgrade is being treated as a separate
project with clear scope definitions.
IT groups should use the prioritisation criteria established in the
business/IT joint application development sessions to determine the
business appropriateness of upgrading the portfolio with a piece of
functionality, versus waiting for a new project to kick in.
The portfolio manager must have the leeway to refuse or accept
which enhancements will be implemented. These are two separate (yet
related) efforts which converge at the portfolio. Increasingly, we
see a push toward co-ordinating automated project portfolio
management with lifecycle tools (exemplified by Mercury
Interactive's acquisition of Kintana in 2003).
Users should also evaluate and adopt standard software
configuration management tools along with requirements analysis
frameworks and testing. Automation of change management, as well as
increasing co-ordination between software configuration management,
requirements analysis, testing tools and application and project
portfolio management, facilitates the ability of IT departments to
efficiently prioritise and manage enhancements.
Meta Group expects to see stronger integration from suite players
for such capabilities in conjunction with best-practice templates
for functional prioritisation. Configuration management for ERP
products is still lagging in the general market (niche players such
as Quest and Mercury/Kintana provide support), with limited support
available from the suppliers them- selves and general players.
Organisations must minimise code changes while upgrading to new
versions of SAP, for instance, until the code base has stabilised.
Within that timeframe, they should gather and prioritise code
change requests, based on established criteria, to be poised for
implementation once the new release has been rolled out.
Users should set standard criteria for prioritising application
enhancement requests and establish automated tools to assist in the
management of change requests because of increasingly chaotic
development and customisation environments.
In 2004/2005, there will be increasing organisational maturity to
facilitate governance through enterprise programme management
offices and better co-ordination among software change and
configuration management, testing, and portfolio management
capabilities to facilitate increased efficiency.
Melinda-Carol Ballou is an analyst at Meta Group