This is my last Advisor during the summer vacation season here in California. Next week, most of my readers will be back in the office, thinking about enterprise architecture issues and other weighty business topics. Before summer is over entirely, however, I thought you might like to know about my birthday gift to myself: a Kyocera.

One step you might consider adding to your development process is brief project reviews. I like to imagine it takes skill and experience to recognize some of the more subtle problems early, but the fundamentals of a review are actually pretty straightforward. What follows is a quick checklist of questions you can use to assess the general health of your project and identify areas that might need some attention.

Say goodbye to those extension cords.

A sample product vision statement:

I had lunch not too long ago with a mid-level manager at a defense contractor. He was interested in how my e-commerce research might apply to his organizational issues.

Recently, I worked with a team lead to assist him in pulling together a project plan for completing some system enhancements. The project team that was to be involved had complained that previous releases had unrealistic schedules and commitments, required too much overtime, and lacked a clear work plan. This time, we were hoping to tackle some of these issues by conducting some additional up-front planning.

Whether implicitly or explicitly, portfolio management has always been a key function of IT management. Selecting which projects to undertake, allocating resource levels to projects, and monitoring results across projects are key portfolio management activities.

Anyone involved in developing component-based software is probably aware that a growing number of people are advocating "new" software methodologies. In the US, these new methodologies are typically called Extreme Programming (XP -- http://www.extremeprogramming.org).

There are two main requirements for the success of IT projects, particularly the critical, fast-moving projects associated with e-business: alignment with business needs and rapid, low-cost delivery. Both can be achieved through effective project management practices. On these e-projects, alignment means achieving effective and rapid-response requirements management.

Oracle recently ran into trouble with some of its packaged application customers when it announced it was planning to discontinue support for version 10.7 of Oracle Applications.

According to Cutter Consortium, the biggest problem facing project managers today is a lack of direction.

In my latest industry survey, "Survey of e-Business and IT Practices" (available now from Cutter Consortium), one question asks: What are the top limitations to getting more from IT in your company? Respondents' top three answers were funding, lack of business strategy, and, tied for third place, available IT staff and available business staff. IT staffing, in one form or another, is a perennial issue, but IT staffing's high ranking in these latest results shows that it is particularly pressing at this time.

I'm as cynical as most and the first to admit that a column entitled "Trust" is likely to offer platitudes. Like honesty and ethics, we all claim to believe in them. It's simply a matter of applying such a nice-sounding concept in everyday situations.

At the last Cutter Consortium Summit (April 2001, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; http://www.cutter.com/summit/), Cutter Consortium Senior Consultants Lou Russell and Tim Lister did an outstanding presentation on IT organizational transformation. During the panel discussion, I said that changing a culture takes about 9-18 months.

The term "personalization" is being thrown around so much by vendors and marketing folks that it's now used to describe almost any sort of customer interaction tool or application. As a result, there is some confusion as to what "personalization" actually entails.