Expert Guidance to Ensure Business Agility & Top-notch Systems & Software
Make your software, systems, and software organization a source of sustainable competitive advantage in an era characterized by constant change. Cutter’s community of international experts provides a steady stream of alerts, updates, reports, and virtual events to keep your teams on the cutting edge of new developments in software engineering excellence, product management, and enterprise agility.
Recently Published
Setting the Framework for Innovation
The success metrics for the knowledge economy are less about output and more about outcome and impact. To measure such intangible qualities and how they are produced requires distinguishing efficiency from effectiveness. A team’s climate reflects the organizational culture, and it is an indicator of that culture’s levels of efficiency and effectiveness. From an Agile perspective, the combination of efficiency and effectiveness speaks to a team’s confidence that it is free to experiment, take risks, and learn from failure. In this Advisor, we assert two fundamental value-creation metrics for Agile organizations:
- How often do we release value to our stakeholders?
- How satisfied are the stakeholders with that value?
Agile Is Never “Done”: Sustaining the Pursuit of Agility Through HR
As companies evolve through the stages of increasing agility, the work of HR changes as well. At each stage, there are new priorities and new hurdles that should be both expected and managed.
On the Road to Software Development Automation: 20 Potential Disruptors
Many technologies exist today that have the potential to change the manner in which we get work done. Currently, the software developer job is heavily labor-intensive. Yes, we use software tools to perform many of the repetitive tasks; however, for the most part, the programming job is performed by highly talented individuals who specify, design, code, and test complex pieces of code and make them work. We have attempted to automate such tasks, but we can best characterize current efforts as assistance (helping workers by providing guidance and information) rather than automation (replacing humans with machines). In this Advisor, we identify 20 technologies that have the potential to alter this picture in both the near and long term. Some present opportunities, while others will disrupt our environments. And some will fall on both sides of that equation.
The New Age of Generalizing Specialists
An organization seeking to become Agile should look to have a preponderance of generalizing specialists on their teams. There is, of course, room for some pure specialists, but too often businesses seek to hire a Python or Linux or Docker guru, when what they really need is someone “good enough” at one of those specialties but who also has broader technological and business understandings. Certainly, hiring a generalizing specialist may have some short-term downside in terms of cranking out the next couple of specialized projects, but most often that cost will be repaid several times over because it will create more cohesive and Agile teams in the long run.
Using AI to Improve Agile Teams
In this on-demand webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Jon Ward, describes how an Agile team was able to cut time-to-market in half and reduce the cost to deliver by 60%. He addresses how AI could have been used to even further enhance the team's productivity, where AI might inhibit it, and he outlines where AI can be used to improve your productivity.
What I Learned About Agility from a Construction Company
From the moment a work crew from STS Construction (STS) showed up at my house until the whole project was finished almost a year later, I witnessed and participated in some of the best Scrum I have seen. Even though STS had never heard of Scrum and would not have known what the term meant, the company had come up with a way of working that was Scrum. Not only was I impressed by the tactical scrum onsite, but when I learned how STS did its project management and scheduling, I was equally impressed by its strategic scrum working habits.
This Executive Update discusses the primary Scrum patterns and practices I saw in STS’s work that helped make our home remodel a success.
Agile Team Success Workshop
Using AI to Support the Product Owner
Artificial Intelligence (AI) — is it hype, a new industrial dawn, or simply a means to increase leisure time? We are putting AI into nearly everything, including our refrigerators and other domestic appliances. So what about Agile teams — how should they use it? AI in project management tools is not new; indeed it has been a decade since global enterprise software company Planview introduced the optimization engine for capacity and demand. However, it is only now that this AI feature is becoming more widely used. This Advisor explores how organizations can use AI to increase the performance of Agile teams by supporting the product owner.