A developing theme across agile project management discussions is the criticality of dealing with reality -- discovering the truth about code, customer, competition, control, or calendar, and acting on it quickly. The reasons are obvious and can be summed up as speed and relevance. This is the essence of agility.

Many businesses embrace the notion that the Internet can be a source of real competitive advantage, but it is the rare business indeed that can effectively handle the complexities the Internet has introduced. While the most forward-looking companies are able to manage these opportunities and threats in order to create flexible, scalable Web-enabled architectures, other companies are not.

I believe that productivity is very important. Productivity means doing more for less. Productivity means lower costs to consumers, which, in turn, frees consumers to spend the money they save on new products and services. That leads to economic growth.

Packaged analytic applications have generated considerable corporate interest for the past few years, because they offer an integrated approach to data warehousing and business intelligence (BI). Their appeal is that instead of starting a data warehousing or BI application from scratch, organizations can purchase a semi-built application and customize it.

Many people believe that metrics is a barrier that Agile has to solve before it will be widely adopted. Yet many teams using Agile processes collect metrics; XP is fanatic in its collection of and management to velocity. Individual organizations have devised numerous metrics to satisfy themselves and their management that they are under control.

[Excerpted from an article in the September 1992 Cutter IT Journal (formerly American Programmer.]

Successful organizations and software projects learn from their environment, adapt to it rapidly, and then predict accurately what is going to occur next. They are able to expand the environments in which they operate beyond those of "normal" organizations or projects. In fact, two characteristics of successful organizations and projects tend to dominate all others.

Lately, I've been paying attention to my memory or, perhaps, lack of it. I've noticed that, among other things, lapses are often related to the number of parallel tasks going on in my head. The more tasks I have to think about, the more I forget. So I try to focus on only a few things at a time; better to do a few things well than a lot of things poorly.

In the early 1990s, Drs. Robert Kaplan and David Norton developed the strategic management balanced scorecard concept to allow business to dissect its management and measurement system(s) into logical breakdowns of what matters and what doesn't. They deemed four areas important for such analyses:

Financial

I got into a discussion of component systems the other day, and afterwards reflected on how the conversation had been "so 1990s." In the mid-1990s, people debated EJB and COM components. Today, the focus is on service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and the latest XML standards.

As a consultant, one of the things I am often asked to do are project reviews: when things have not gone well, the stakeholders are looking for recommendations to get their project back on track. When projects get into trouble it is often for one (or more) of the following reasons: