People & Teams

Marketers often emphasize the enormous advantage of being first-to-market, but is being first really an advantage? Looking at some of the spectacular successes of products, brands, and technologies, you will see that, contrary to popular belief, so-called first-to-market products like Netscape Navigator, PalmPilot, and iPod were actually later arrivals that became more successful than the originals. Why did they succeed when their predecessors didn't, and why were they so widely perceived as revolutionary? Michael Bolton shows how general systems thinking can help us identify factors that govern the success or failure of an innovative product, service, or strategy. By taking a general systems view, you will understand that the notion of "first" depends on the features or attributes that we choose to observe or ignore.

ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is a flexible framework for implementing IT Service Management within an organization. Since its introduction in the 1990s, ITIL has mostly been applied within IT operations and excluded from software development; however, more and more IT departments are now asking development to join in. ITIL offers an extensive set of management procedures that are intended to support businesses in achieving higher value for their money and improving quality across the breadth of the IT infrastructure. Join Michael Giacometti to learn what ITIL is and why it is gaining in popularity. Find out how implementing ITIL processes can significantly improve both your time to market and the quality of your software. Michael explains what to do to gain better information about your development and new ways to control investments and quality.

The operational structure of many organizations fails to support their software development teams. Continuously creating and reforming teams, isolating development from the organization, lack of participation by customers, and rapid task switching cause huge amounts of waste in development. Although agile development practices have made great strides in the last ten years, they have largely ignored the issue of the structure of the organization. "Lean Thinking" is the shorthand phrase for the paradigm, thought processes, and principles that Toyota follows in producing high quality cars at low cost-with a faster development cycle than their competitors. Software development is not exactly like manufacturing, but the principles of Lean Thinking-optimizing the whole, eliminating waste, and respecting people-apply equally well to software development.

Today's organizations depend on software applications for their business success-and survival. When applications fail, businesses are severely damaged-revenue losses in the millions, key data stolen, brands and reputations damaged. Security vulnerabilities impact consumer trust and result in violations of customer privacy or customer lawsuits. Often the root cause of these dire consequences is an information and communication gap between development and corporate management. Simply stated, business executives often do not know the first thing about how software is built, tested, or maintained. They often refuse to approve the time and resources necessary to ship a product with acceptable quality and security. Likewise, development teams often do not know the first thing about business and cannot adequately justify their needs to business.