We just completed a Cutter survey on IT budget and costing practices (for more on Cutter's survey, see the Cutter Benchmark Review, August 2007). This is the second year of the study (see also Cutter Benchmark Review, August 2006).

On many offshore projects, there's a high degree of parallelism between the requirements and the build/code/test phase.

As project managers, most of us have experienced problems on projects. Most of us have also received help (that seemed more like interference) from concerned colleagues and superiors. Back-seat driving, nit picking, hindsight memos -- none welcome, none helpful. There is, however, an alternative. Let's start with the usual "help" and move onto something that is helpful.

nit: noun, the egg or young of a parasite insect.

nit picking: verb, inspecting someone closely for the presence of nits and then picking them off.

In the rush of sourcing issues that threaten to pull you under like a riptide, it is worthwhile sometimes to step back and recalibrate your perspective to better understand the current sourcing environment as a necessary step in planning for the future.

Several current sourcing issues loom over managers. Here they are in no order of importance or urgency. All are worth watching closely.

Here's an interesting finding: although on-demand BI and data warehousing solutions are receiving increasing interest from organizations, my research indicates that their use requires that companies modify their business processes.

Every once in a while, someone I respect gets something wrong -- I suppose that it just shows everyone is human. Michael Stonebraker is one of my longtime heroes.

In my last Advisor (see "On Tools in Agile Development, Part 1," 23 August 2007), I talked about tool requirements for agile developers. In this article, I focus on tools for team support, while the next Advisor will discuss tools that help in planning agile projects.

The latest Web 2.0-related developments to move into the corporate world are mashups.

Last month, we examined the first of the seven essential questions of planning: "what?" (see "Principles of Planning, Part 2: The Seven Questions," 15 August 2007). In that Advisor, I talked about the importance of clearly defining the business problem for which a solution will be developed or acquired.

Traditionally, assembly line schedules are centrally developed and controlled. Any change in the schedule must be centrally reconfigured. When the line is small and has few unplanned stoppages, centrally controlled schedules work well.

As a practitioner of agile software development, I've had to participate in and lead collaborative work sessions. People remark on the strong feeling of collaboration during those meetings and the speed at which we get results. Other skilled facilitators manage the same. People ask my colleagues and me how we achieve these effects and whether it can be learned.

Last week, we saw Cognos acquire multidimensional database and performance management analytics vendor Applix, Inc. in an effort to broaden its BI and financial business performance management offerings (see "Keeping Up With the Joneses: Cognos Buys Applix," 11 September 2007).

In my last Advisor (see "Doing a Tap Dance on a Waterbed, Part 1," 30 August 2007), I posed a question that has plagued large systems project managers for a very, very long time: "where do you start your systems requirements -- with the inputs, database, or the outputs?" I suggested that defining the o

I've been thinking recently that the term "self-organizing" has outlived its usefulness in the agile community and needs to be replaced. While self-organizing is a good term, it has, unfortunately, become confused with anarchy in the minds of many. Why has this occurred?

A client recently solicited my help to run an extensive set of Monte Carlo analyses on their projects. It seemed a compelling prospect at first, but as I examined the opportunity more closely, I instead offered it to a peer, seeing it as definitely more of a numbers-crunching exercise, rather than an examination of overall risks in their program.

I've been thinking recently that the term "self-organizing" has outlived its usefulness in the agile community and needs to be replaced. While self-organizing is a good term, it has, unfortunately, become confused with anarchy in the minds of many. Why has this occurred? Because there is a contingent within the agile community that is fundamentally anarchist at heart and it has latched onto the term self-organizing because it sounds better than anarchy. However, putting a duck suit on a chicken doesn't make a chicken a duck.

In my last Advisor, "Ten Things an Architect Does to Add Value" (29 August 2007), I provided a list of activities that an architect performs, roughly organized along the lifecycle of creating and applying architecture.

Several Business-IT Strategies Advisors ago (see "Understanding Change in the Context of IT Investment," 6 December 2006), I discussed the concept of change and the need to understand its powerful influences to manage information technology for value effectively. Change is the belle of the IT management ball, which is why within an array of business contexts it frequently attracts our attention.

Organizations seeking total visibility into a sourcing initiative's financial impact will find the task easier if they explore the cost/value equation through the lens of IT asset management (ITAM). The principles of ITAM offer managers a unique perspective into cost and value drivers. Here's how.

In the Cutter IT Journal, "Exploring the Agile Frontier" (Vol. 20, No. 5), I pointed out the importance of coming up with teams that are structured around features (see "Agile Development in the Face of Global Software Projects"). As I explained in that article, these so-called feature teams will have to assemble all roles, knowledge, and skill that are necessary to deliver a complete feature.

Wikipedia described customer relationship management and, indirectly, customer analytics, along these lines:

Active: A centralized database for storing data, which can be used to automate business processes and common tasks.

The latest acquisition to affect the BI/business performance management market is Cognos's announcement that it is buying multidimensional database and performance management analytics vendor Applix, Inc. for approximately US $339 million.

Published after his death, Max Weber's famous essay titled The City first appeared in German in 1921. The essay represented a fundamental look at the history of the occidental city spanning from the establishment of craft guilds to the formation of a political system that involved early aspects of medieval democracy.

Agile software development attempts to enhance our ability to make changes during the product development process. This is valuable because the business world is becoming increasingly chaotic in the following ways:

Customers change their minds or use the product in unanticipated ways.

New competitors appear or existing ones introduce threatening products.

New product technologies arise or planned technologies don't work out as anticipated.

Over the years, I've had the pleasure of working in a range of IT organizations around the world, and I've often worked with, or at least reviewed, many of the enterprise architecture (EA) teams within those organizations. In all cases, the EA team is staffed with some of the best and brightest within IT, all of whom have the organization's best interests at heart.