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
Agile Anywhere? Agile in the Classroom
Following the popularization of Agile in tech, educators in a small New York City startup who got word about it began experimenting with creating “agile classrooms” in an effort to increase student engagement and collaboration in otherwise conventional environments.
An Agile Path Leads to Breakthrough Product Innovation
In this Executive Update, we look at how non-software, product–based companies can successfully embrace Agile — and non-Agile — methods in a complementary way.
Statistical Project Management, Part VI: The Nature of the Project
In Part VI of this Executive Update series on statistical project management, we look at the “nature” of the project and its role as the firm’s “working memory.”
Challenging the Status Quo
A North American energy-producing company was seeking to understand how to change its status-quo pattern of finding new solutions only when it was abundantly clear it would be unable to meet its yearly market targets. In short, it was looking for a different approach to conducting its operations organization. To that end, I encouraged leadership to focus on several areas, including the topic of this Advisor: fostering a mindset of challenging the status quo on everything.
Transparency: A Tale of Success
We strongly believe our self-organizing model based in full transparency has been key to our success. In this Advisor, we take a look at each of the main positive results our company has been able to achieve thanks to this model.
Industry 4.0: Ethical and Moral Predicaments
Weiyu Wang and Keng Siau address the ethical and moral predicaments that Industry 4.0 creates. They discuss Industry 4.0 ethical and moral issues from the perspective of different business-oriented forces — stakeholders and business executives, employees, customers/clients, society — and different technical-oriented forces — designers and developers, users, intelligent agents. Their framework in Industry 4.0 considers ethical issues related to data and ethical issues related to systems, technology products, and services. Their discussion will enable business executives and technical designers/developers to have a better understanding and appreciation of the ethical and moral challenges in Industry 4.0.
The Skills Crisis 4.0: Accepting New Realities
Barry O’Reilly explores whether a skills crisis arising out of Industry 4.0 truly exists. Although organizations perceive a skills crisis as Industry 4.0 makes software a central part of every business, O’Reilly notes that the IT industry has complained of a skills crisis for years. He examines what the skills shortage really is, discusses past approaches to the crisis, and evaluates whether those approaches have worked. He then proposes a new view of the skills crisis and suggests alternative approaches to solving it. O’Reilly sees critical thinking and a reassessment of our view of skills as key components of resolving the perceived skills crisis.
From Resource Efficiency to Flow Efficiency
Our company’s Agile journey across a 2,000+-person product development unit in 10 locations in Sweden, Poland, and China, resulted in a quadrupling of value throughput; a doubling of speed; a tenfold increase in quality; and happier, more engaged people who are, ultimately, more innovative. The company made major shifts in a few areas. In this Advisor, we explore its shift from resource efficiency to flow efficiency.