The overall Technology Strategy for an organization should include an Infrastructure Strategy and a Software Strategy.  Both Strategies should work together to provide the business with a comprehensive End State environment, understanding the changing landscape of the business over the course of time.  I want to talk about Software Strategy in this post.

I have found that Software Strategy is more volatile than Infrastructure Strategy because of the changing landscape and prioritization of business initiatives.  For this reason, I typically maintain the Software Strategy in a couple of distinct tracking environments.  The tracking environment can be your choice (Excel, MS Project, PPM, etc.) but you should have consistency and agreement with the business on this tracking mechanism.  If you are keeping the strategy in a format that is not available to the business leaders, you could be making a mistake.  The overall objective of the strategy should be complete transparency to the business.

Software Strategy is maintained at different levels so exposure is accurate for the audience.  The highest level represents larger projects or projects where collaboration is required with other business partners or outside vendors.    These projects are typically budgeted to start in a particular financial timeframe.  For example, you might have a project that is scheduled to start in the 2nd quarter .  This level of the strategy can be represented with a Gantt chart where you would indicate the project name, business sponsor, project cost, outside vendor partner, sprint release dates, etc.  The project can be classified as well.  The classifications can be created with the business so there is alignment.  For example, you might have financial projects, operational projects, commercial projects or maintenance of business projects.  Your ‘buckets’ need to be aligned with your business properly.

Once your projects are defined at the highest level, you need to organize sprints around these projects.  I think of these as releases.  So, you might have a project that has a monthly sprint.  In this example, you would have a cadence for the project where the business sponsors would discuss and agree on a sprint scope with monthly releases that improve the functionality of the software over the course of time.  More to come on sprints in another post.  For now, just make sure you top level project definition is accurate for the high level transparency to the business.

Internal to IT (and transparent to the business), I have found that keeping ‘punch lists’ or Change Requests independent of the high level projects.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  First, the punch list is very volatile.  Inbound requests for change to functionality, software bugs, and enhancement requests come from all areas of the business.   These inbound requests are vetted by Subject Matter Experts and ultimately tracked by a variety of attributes.  Punch List Attributes are for another day.

Second, the punch list is the working document you can leverage in IT to ‘fill in’ as time permits based on bench time from the larger projects.   If you have a developer that is working a sprint efficiently, they could be complete while another developer is working to the end of the sprint.  The first developer can ‘work in’ small change requests based on risk to the business or software segregation from other projects.
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Finally, the punch list will sometimes override all other project work because of the urgency of the request.  If there is a software bug, the impact and risk need to be classified and known to the business and IT.  Based on this risk classification, the IT team might be required to patch the software immediately, reducing time for project work.

This list should change every day as you complete tasks and add new tasks.  Reviewing the list with the business is important on a regular cadence.  Based on the business sponsor, this review can be via email.  All of this is about quick response and user adoption.  Keep the software running and accurate to drive adoption and overall software maturity.

That’s all for now.  I will improve this article as time permits.   More coming soon on Financial Considerations, Sprints, Virtual Private Clouds (VPC’s), DB2 and project management techniques.

Just remember, when it comes to success in IT, it is always about the business.  IT is a set of tools that support the business.  Most of your time should be spent reaching into the organization – not hiding behind a screen.