With this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review we continue our investigation into the management of the IT shop and of the many issues surrounding it.

Early in the commercialization of agile development methods, project management professionals (PMPs) presented agile approaches as repackaged versions of conventional methods that integrated with many core project management principles. In 2003, Clement James Goebel III, PMP, mapped the development practices of a specific agile method, XP, to the core knowledge areas and processes in the PMBOK Guide, Third Edition.1 He concluded that the principles of project management theory were embedded in agile development methods.

Making business decisions is never easy. It becomes progressively more complicated as those around us offer their "two cents' worth" on how we should act or what practices we should adopt. And the sheer number of those around us sometimes means that we receive input from a host of different parties, all with different perspectives. As Kathryn Brohman points out in the previous article, these different perspectives lead to different approaches and different ways of thinking about project management and its implementation.

With the agile software development trend consolidating rapidly and no longer in the category of emerging trends, this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review focuses on a real challenge: the development, consolidation, and organizational acceptance of project management practice in the age of agile development projects. I am not a firsthand expert on either the agile movement or project management practice. Yet, this is an issue that we at CBR felt would have a great return on reading, if nothing else for the pervasiveness of the challenge.

SURVEY DEMOGRAPHICS

The enterprise needs marketing more than ever in these difficult times. But without the ability to measure the effectiveness of specific marketing activities, optimizing the use of marketing's resources is impossible, as is fact-based decision making. As discussed in this Executive Report by Christophe Meili, Michael Guttman, and John Parodi, marketing performance management (MPM) addresses these issues, thereby allowing marketing to use its central position to integrate efforts of other functions and to help achieve the strategic goals of the enterprise.

Today, companies are dealing with the ever-increasing pace of change in the marketplace. In these difficult times, companies will plan and execute even more marketing campaigns aimed at customers, partners, and stakeholders. Yet there is no good way to measure the effectiveness of such marketing campaigns, largely because the traditional view of marketing's function is to increase sales, and marketing's efforts to do so can only be seen and measured in the aggregate.

Strategic leadership is a mindset that looks at achieving greater integration between the way IT thinks and the way the business thinks. It’s all about promoting people with the right attitude who can take a strategic role in leading the company.

It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones responsive to change.

-- Charles Darwin

Successful IT organizations go far beyond providing efficient systems and service to the businesses they support. Instead, they create strategic advantages for their companies through their integration with the strategic business objectives that drive their companies' success.

In today's fast-paced global economy, you would be hard pressed to find a company that does not rely heavily on technology for its basic survival and operations. Computers, especially PCs, dominate almost every aspect of a company's operations. For IT professionals, this reality has created and will continue to create many opportunities in both the technical and managerial areas. Now more than ever, businesses need strong, visionary technical leadership.

IT has its unique wisdom to contribute to the strategic conversation of organizations. But what gives IT real strategic leadership is its ability to tap and extend the wisdom of the organization as a whole.

The relationship of IT to the business has evolved significantly over the years. Originally, IT functioned as a tool builder. In that role, areas of the business operations that were tedious and rote were targeted for automation. In order for it to make business sense to build these tools, it would have to cost less to implement and maintain the technology that could do the work than it would if people continued to perform the activities manually.

Scrum is a lightweight management process that incorporates many of the elements that later became part of the Agile Manifesto and provides a methodology-agnostic and empirical platform for handling the needs of complex programming tasks where requirements are constantly shifting.

In the past several years, Scrum has emerged as one of the most valuable tools in the agile workshop due to its versatility and lightweight characteristics. It is concerned with the basic processes of agile development and does not concern itself with programming style. For this reason, it has helped to provide unifying principles for agile that permit flexibility of development.

The business, project, and operational environments facing us today are becoming increasingly complex, interrelated, and interdependent. Without an adequate understanding of these complexities, today's programs are at increasing risk of partial or complete failure. But how does anyone acquire this understanding?

The business, project, and operational environments facing us today are becoming increasingly complex, interrelated, and interdependent. Without an adequate understanding of these complexities, today's programs are at increasing risk of partial or complete failure. But how does anyone acquire this understanding?

The business, project, and operational environments facing us today are becoming increasingly complex, interrelated, and interdependent. Managers at all levels are struggling to understand this complexity and make effective decisions about schedules, resources, and their products. Without an adequate understanding of these complexities, today's programs are at increasing risk of partial or complete failure. But how do you achieve an overall, broad understanding of risk in a huge, complex program without being overwhelmed by too much information?

The business, project, and operational environments facing us today are becoming increasingly complex, interrelated, and interdependent. Managers at all levels are struggling to understand this complexity and make effective decisions about schedules, resources, and their products. Without an adequate understanding of these complexities, today's programs are at increasing risk of partial or complete failure. But how do you achieve an overall, broad understanding of risk in a huge, complex program without being overwhelmed by too much information?

New buyers often come into an IT organization right out of school with neither the vision, the skills, nor the confidence to do their jobs well. Some thrive, some survive, and some drop out, but for many the path they wind up taking from newcomer to successful IT sourcing professional could have been more systematic, supportive, and effective.

New buyers often come into an IT organization right out of school with neither the vision, the skills, nor the confidence to do their jobs well. Some thrive, some survive, and some drop out, but for many the path they wind up taking from newcomer to successful IT sourcing professional could have been more systematic, supportive, and effective.

New buyers often come into an IT organization right out of school and are thrown into their first jobs lacking the vision, the skills, and the confidence they need to do their jobs well. Some thrive, some survive, and some drop out. However, for many of these individuals, the path they wind up taking, from newcomer to successful IT sourcing professional, could have been more systematic, supportive, and effective.

New buyers often come into an IT organization right out of school and are thrown into their first jobs lacking the vision, the skills, and the confidence they need to do their jobs well. Some thrive, some survive, and some drop out. However, for many of these individuals, the path they wind up taking, from newcomer to successful IT sourcing professional, could have been more systematic, supportive, and effective.

Let's face it, nobody today is thinking about anything other than the unraveling global economy and its effect on our companies and our lives. So we'd be crazy to write about any other subject. Our topic is trends, and this is the mother of all trends.

Let's face it, nobody today is thinking about anything other than the unraveling global economy and its effect on our companies and our lives. So we'd be crazy to write about any other subject. Our topic is trends, and this is the mother of all trends.