Purpose

This course helps you to align your IT organisation, projects, standards and architecture in an appropriately agile manner in order to achieve the right technology solutions that are cost effective and delivered on time. 

 

Overview

Technology is the basis for optimizing the value-adding capability of valuable human resources and capital assets.  Software development is a critical success factor. Project management, this most important of processes, is by definition difficult because it is about innovation and change.  This double challenge is heightened by the fact that project management has often been under-invested. Projects will continue to be over-promised and under-delivered until the most realistic of the current wave of emerging best practices are assimilated. Surfers spend their life waiting for the biggest wave.  The biggest wave might be now !

 

Participants

This course is for business and information technology strategists, technology managers, senior business analysts and senior software developers; and especially IT and IS managers, business development managers, computer service managers, network managers, operations managers, user support managers, program managers, IT project managers, IT innovation managers and IT application managers.

 

Objectives

• Enhance existing project management knowledge and prepare your organization’s ability to benefit from change and innovation.
• Obtain extra nuggets of insight on cutting edge project capabilities such as customer-centred development, risk-focused sourcing, component-based design and conflict-inspired change management.
• Develop the resolve and the momentum to initiate and to deliver the projects that can attain business goals.
• Recognize emerging opportunities, learn from peers and colleagues, and build on shared experience.

 

Instructor

The instructor has 28 years of experience in most industries, especially software consumer products, finance, pharmaceuticals, electronic, telecommunications, aerospace, automobile and petrochemical.  Qualified as a team facilitator, project practitioner of PMBoK and AgilePM he is president of the best practice community and lectures at various engineering and business schools in France. He has produced several publications on project management skill and techniques. 

 

Programme

Building an Organizational Platform for Business IT Convergence

Companies need people that understand both business and IT.  The convergence of the two defines breakthroughs: new business models, new products and new paths to the market. Methods such as agile development, user driven prototyping, open systems approaches and adaptive architectures create readiness for a constant conversation between the technology and the market.  This session will set the scene, reveal perceived priorities, cluster interest groups and develop a potential strategy for the seminar that takes account of the needs of all of the participants.

* Business IT Convergence           * IT strategic challenges

* Agile business approaches          * Value-adding priorities

Importance of Requirements Definition and Management (including Modelling, Mapping and Prototyping)

Overwhelming evidence highlights requirments definition as the source of most IT project failures. Developers must learn to speak the terminology of users.  Prototyping takes modelling into the user’s world.  The first prototype hits the most critical problems, such as functionality, performance, or user interface.  Prototypes must be only as detailed as is necessary to justify further investment.  Using real examples, this session will identify alternative solutions to defined problems and opt for a timely cost effective approach.

* Requirements definition              * Requirements management

* Life cycle governance                * Prototyping methods

Agile Governance, Organisation and Implementation

Change management is at the heart of projects and innovation.  Agile projects entail a constant dialogue between the technologies and the market. Decisions made in scrumming workshops and in product and process development teams have long-term business impact. Management must build an agile support structure to ensure that agile stories and energies sustain business priorities and that the project portfolio is managed in an agile manner.

* Building an agile business core         * Reporting along horizontal and vertical channels

* Know and show principles                  * Maximum viable feedback for minimum effort

User Focused Design and Change Tolerant Architecture

Good design opens up a world of opportunity for harnessing and integrating local and public business components.  Compatible and usable components are the building blocks of architecture that grows with the organization and fits to product or process.  This session explores the core principles and design patterns that can assemble business systems able to flex, expand and adjust to meet a diversity of different usage scenarios.

        * Good design practices                * Enterprise architecture

        * Open systems approach             * Component-based development

New Ways to Manage Sourcing, ‘Co-opetition’ and ‘Virtual Teamwork’

Sourcing and risk management are intertwined.  An astute choice of risks can position a business around strategic core competencies.  To manage the challenge of physical and structural ‘distance’ an organisation must adopt an appropriate set of practices for contract management, benchmarking, recruitment, communication, measurement and resource management.  The goal of this session is to admit a high degree of professionalism into these areas and to release some easy wins. 

        * Outsourcing and ‘In-Sourcing’     * Contracting for partnering

        * Key success indicators               * Managing distance and proximity

Total Quality Standards, Organizational Learning

Stringent auditing obligations and uncompromising financial standards have increased the pressure on quality management.  Modern organisations prosper when they appreciate the distinctions between quality of production and quality of service.  Good practices guarantee traceability, accountability and configuration integrity. Potential is developed through exploiting hard-earned experience.  As well as adding depth and breadth, this session on quality develops the idea that great testing is a critical success factor.  

        * Building a quality capability * Meeting or exceeding expectations     

        * Constant learning process          * World class ‘testmanship’

 

Learning Method

The course uses a work group approach based on participant examples and other case studies as well as activities and learning games. 

 

Duration

3-4 days, consecutive or 2 + 1, 2+2 or 3+1

 

Benefits

• Recognize and assess IT challenges that deliver results by aligning IT capabilities to business priorities.
• Build on the ability to design, prototype and develop IT solutions in a way that creates a constant interaction between the technology and the market. 
• Employ emerging proficiency in agile methodologies, open systems approaches and facilitative architectures to generate tractable organizational capabilities.
• Obtain new insights on coordinating suppliers and partners with competing and cooperating interests in order to manage business risks.  
• Sharpen the quality focus of the organization by identifying pragmatic approaches to ensure the organization is demonstrably effective and purposeful. 
• Be able to use the constructive dynamics of conflict to steer business change and to consolidate disparate interest groups and levels of experience.