change management

Raising the BarIT organizations are looking for new levels of productivity.  In an era of relative talent shortages, the ability to seize business opportunities depends on making dramatic increases in productivity.  At the same time, the government has raised the bar substantially with governance mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley.  Add to this globalization, outsourcing and distributed work forces that have the effect making even smaller companies manage teams over geographic and time zones.  However, the coming whammy is the dramatic loss of talent looming up as baby-boomers retire.

Version control (VC) has been around long before software. But it wasn't until the late 1960s and early 1970s that it emerged as a common software function. Today, version control is still necessary, but is a much smaller piece of the configuration management (CM) and product management (PM) pictures. While version control is a relatively simple application, configuration management is anything but. No wonder it is embraced with such reluctance. This doesn't have to be the case. The key to adopting a successful CM program is to select tools which help you to automate the complexity without taking short cuts that will lead to problems down the road.

What is agile CM? If you think it's doing the minimal amount of CM, think again. Instead, it's minimizing and streamlining the work to do all of the CM tasks that are necessary. It adapts to changing CM requirements fairly easily. Agile CM doesn't just happen - it's a combination of good CM process, good CM tools, and CM automation. If you fall short on any of these, your CM process will not be very agile.

What is "quality"? There are many competing definitions, but the one that makes the most sense, "Quality is in the eye of the beholder," is hard to make workable in a real business situation. Some would say it is impossible to use, but Agile methods beg to differ.