This is the second in a series of three Advisors on methodology design.

One of the many consequences of the September 11 terrorist attacks has been a reassessment of priorities and values.

The notion of a "postmortem" is familiar to most software developers and project managers: at the end of an application development project, a report is written to document the good, the bad, and the ugly experiences, so that future projects can learn and improve. In theory, it's a useful concept; in practice, it's largely ignored.

Agile developers recognize that documentation is an intrinsic part of any system, the creation and maintenance of which is a "necessary evil" to some and an enjoyable task for others -- an aspect of software development that can be made agile when you choose to do so.

Over the past 10 years, the word "methodology" has become associated with ponderous, heavyweight, rigorous, process-, and documentation- centric processes for delivering software. While this has become the perception, a methodology can -- and should -- be much simpler.

Many experts have applauded the concept of speed to market. The fastest team wins in the competitive arena. While this may be correct in many cases, we should be careful in applying it as a hard and fast rule for new information technologies.

Any risk analysis should be undertaken by assessing the likelihood and relevance of risks and threats, but it is difficult to know exactly the extent to which the information and technical infrastructure of any building in any country is exposed without knowing who was responsible for undertaking and funding the attack on the World Trade Center (WTC).

A reader recently asked me to comment on the application of data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) in business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce. Therefore, I've decided to make this the topic of this week's Advisor.

Too many projects? Not sure which projects are most important? Welcome to project portfolio management.

The Internet and advances in information and communication technology (ICT) offer many new opportunities, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to leverage their business. The hard reality is, however, that many SMEs across the world are not recognizing and realizing these opportunities, and are not aware of the threats they face in the new economy, which are listed here:

One of my favorite scenes from the old Star Wars movie was Obi-Wan Kenobi's sixth-sense recognition that one of the rebel planets has been completely obliterated by Darth Vader's sinister "death star." With profound sorrow and sadness,

A recent study from Cutter Consortium's e-Project Management Advisory Service looked at how much voluntary overtime developers were working. It found that companies that had developers working more than 10 hours per week in voluntary overtime suffered in a number of areas when compared to companies that did not have developers working more than 10 hours per week.