A question that I'm often asked is: Why have so many different roles on a scrum team? If a developer on a scrum team has the experience to act as the Scrum Master as well, is there any harm in consolidating? Short answer: Yes!

Although having one team member covering multiple roles seems more efficient, it can cause more problems than its worth. Before putting a team member in multiple roles, it's important to consider the following challenges.

Context Switching

Statistics show that it takes an average of 25 minutes to resume a task after being interrupted. Jumping between tasks that require completely different mindsets and skills require a huge context shift. Having a developer who is switching between working on code and managing blockers for the team can actually reduce efficiency. It may be more effective to have a Scrum Master working as a Scrum Master for multiple teams. 

Skills & Training

The skills needed to be a successful Product Owner (PO) are different than those needed to be a Scrum Master, which are different than those that make a good developer! The Scrum Master should have a high level of emotional intelligence and act as a leader for the developers. Developers should be subject matter experts, familiar with the best practices and best ways to implement the PO's requirements.

Conflicts of Interest

The Scrum Team is designed to have certain checks and balances – each role is well defined so that they can focus on the subject matter they are there for. When you start consolidating roles, there's a high risk of conflicts of interests. This is very clear when organizations try to combine PO and Scrum Masters – after all, one of the major jobs of the Scrum Master is to protect the team from scope creep, represented by the PO. Additionally, the Scrum Master unblocks the development team if needed, and helps facilitate the scrum ceremonies – an important part of that requires allowing the team to work through issues before utilizing your authority to pull in outside stakeholders. 

It can be tempting to try and combine your Scrum roles, but we strongly recommend respecting the division of responsibility that has been established. 

If your teams are having trouble with their scrum roles, have any question or just want to chat, contact us, we'd love to help!

With Atlassian's upcoming release of Jira Data Lake for Jira Software Cloud, it's a good time to review the jargon we might stumble on in the reporting and business intelligence (BI) space. So let's jump into the (data) lake!

One word of caution: the BI industry has many players with varied opinions. Some terms get used and reused in multiple ways. One example is the emerging use of "lakehouse" - a combination of "data lake" and "data warehouse." Here we'll stick to as close to canonical as possible but expect to see terms used differently as you research.

Why does BI even matter? What are KPIs?

Your organization has systems (e.g. computer applications) which create and contain data. That data is extremely valuable for fact-based decision making in your organization. 

A CTO or CIO is able to more effectively allocate help desk head count with ready access to accurate metrics (also called Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs) like Mean Time To Acknowledge (MTTA) and Mean Time To Resolve (MTTR). (Note: MTTR is a tricky acronym. As Atlassian notes, there are at least four common incident management metrics that share this abbreviation! This stuff can be confusing...)

To provide these valuable, up-to-date KPIs to decision makers, we turn to BI. This industry is a dizzying array of technology components which take various approaches to achieving BI's primary objective: turning raw data into actionable insight. Often, we need to integrate multiple BI components to get from point A (data in the source system) to point B (reports used for decision making).

BI solutions often leverage a data lake or data warehouse to store business data.

What is a data lake?

A data lake is a central store of raw business data. The data lake is not typically used by the source systems whose data it contains.

The lake is designed to be accessed by tools like Tableau, PowerBI, and Qlik in order to analyze and produce insights from the data. We'll call these analysis and presentation applications "BI tools." To continue the lake analogy: if the BI tool is a fishing rod, then the data is the fish.

A data lake typically uses a file store technology but when it comes to Jira Data Lake, we don't really need to know much about the underlying tech because Atlassian Cloud takes care of choosing, configuring, hosting, and maintaining it for us. One less thing on our plate? Great!

All we need to do is connect our BI analysis and presentation tools (Tableau, PowerBI, Qlik, etc.) to Jira Data Lake. Boom! We're ready to start creating reports, graphs, dashboards, and whatever else we need to answer questions for our organization.

How is a lake different from data warehousing?

As mentioned earlier, some BI solutions use a data warehouse instead of a data lake. Some use both. While the line has blurred between the two, lakes are usually more unstructured than warehouses.

The initial data lake concept encouraged organizations to dump all of their raw data into the lake, including data from relational databases, flat files (e.g. CSV files), videos, and more. The promise that smart software and ever-increasing computing horsepower would eventually create solutions for accessing the overwhelming amount of data in the lake hasn't really come to fruition quickly enough. And many data lakes turned into data swamps. Lakes these days, like Jira Data Lake, are more purpose-built and have better designs for preventing a descent into swampland.

A data warehouse is more structured and normally designed with transformation processes on the front- and/or back-end that clean, normalize, and handle any other standardization before presenting it to our BI tools. These processes are represented by the "T" (Transform) in some more acronyms: ETL (Extract Transform Load) or ELT. The result is more predictable and accurate, but the cost and time to create these transformation processes is much higher.

Why use a data lake?

Why invest in this effort to centralize data in lakes or warehouses? Our BI tools can often connect directly to our application's database. Wouldn't it be easier to skip the lake/warehouse?

Eliminating the data lake or warehouse would simplify our solution design but experience has shown multiple issues with the direct-connect approach.

The most critical issue is often the potential load a BI tool can place on an application database. BI queries often require large swaths of data which can only be fulfilled through heavy workloads on the database. In addition, BI tools often don't optimize queries for performance. BI workloads can cause database contention and application stability should always be prioritized over BI needs. With today's easy-to-use BI tools accessible to a larger and less technical audience, this issue has only become more prevalent. Connecting our BI tools to a data lake prevents risking any application stability issues.

The next most common issue we see is needing to combine data from multiple systems. Since your organization doesn't just use one system, combining data across the organization is how so many powerful insights occur. For example, tying Jira KPIs to financial data is one way leaders can more easily understand technical metrics. But financial data is stored in the accounting system, not Jira. A direct connection to an application's databases only allows access to that system's data, preventing cross-system data analysis. While some BI tools allow you to perform "cross-database joins," performance is often unacceptable and some links are just not possible. Often the data from different systems needs to be cleaned and standardized before it can be linked for analysis. Doing this in a data lake/warehouse is far more efficient than attempting it "at runtime" in BI tools. When we first centralize our data we have the ability to combine data from as many systems as needed.

BI is all about trends over time. Some applications don't maintain much, if any, historical data. A direct connection to these systems doesn't allow for time-based analysis. The historical data simply doesn't exist. Lakes allow us to snapshot data at regular intervals in order to perform valuable time-based analysis.

Finally, with cloud apps like Jira Cloud, we don't have the option to connect directly to the application database. The only data access is often through APIs which can be slow for analysis and suffer from many of the same issues mentioned above. Jira Data Lake provides performant, safe data access.

Data lakes arose from the need for flexibility. No two organizations use the same systems or have the same data needs. Your organization's data needs will also change over time. The direct connection to an application database is too tightly coupled and doesn't provide enough agility to provide BI insights.

If you're wondering if this powerful new tool is a good fit for your organization, or have any questions about anything Atlassian, contact us, one of our experts would love to help!

The following content was taken from Atlassian.com  

In this the first of a three part blog series which focuses on migrating the Jira code base from Subversion to Git. We wanted to share Atlassian’s migrating experience to those of you who are contemplating moving a large project to Git – without sacrificing active development. In our first post we discuss why we decided to make the switch to Git. In our second post we dive in the technical details of switching from Subversion to Git. In our third, and final post we will discuss how we managed the “human” angle to migrating.

Atlassian has been extremely excited about DVCS for a number of years and has invested heavily in DVCS. Atlassian has acquired Bitbucket – a cloud DVCS repository host, developed Stash – a behind the firewall Git repository manager and added DVCS support to FishEye, Atlassian’s code browsing and search tool. They have also added a myriad of DVCS connectors to Jira.

Along with Atlassian we believe DVCS is a great leap forward in software development. As part of this, Atlassian migrated the codebases for their own products and libraries from centralized version control systems (generally SVN) to DVCS. Some of these have been big migrations!

In this three part blog series we will  focus on the biggest migration Atlassian has done – migrating the 11-year-old Jira codebase from SVN to Git. What obstacles did they encounter? What lessons did they learn? And most importantly, how did they do it without sacrificing active development on Jira? We hope that sharing this experience helps anyone approaching a similar migration.

We’ll focus on Git, because Jira moved to Git, but everything in this series applies equally to Mercurial. At Atlassian, they use both.

Why DVCS?

Migrating a big code base is not without cost. The first thing you will need to answer – both for yourself, your bosses, and the people who work for you – is what will DVCS bring us, and why is it worth the cost of migrating?

We have used SVN successfully on many projects.  So has Atlassian.  And I am sure many people reading this article have also used SVN successfully. Since there is always a cost to migration, you may be inclined to ask, “If Subversion has met my version control needs for many years, why should I change?” To me, that is the wrong question. The real question is, “How can DVCS make what we do today even better?”

Git is known for several things.  For a developer working with code, it’s faster.   It allows for advanced workflows like feature branching, forks and pull requests – in theory, these workflows are all possible with SVN, however the difficulty of merging in SVN compared to Git makes them untenable.  But for anyone moving from SVN, the main benefit of Git is that because of its lightweight branching and easy merging, Git allows you to do your default SVN workflow better than SVN.

What do we mean by this? Let’s talk about how we actually develop and release software. Most of us work in a world where we have at least one released version of our software in the wild, which we call a “stable” branch. We maintain and contribute bug fixes to a stable branch while developing new features on a “development” branch (which is called trunk/master/default depending on which VCS you use).

When we commit bug fixes to stable, we need to get them into master too. SVN merge is known to be a pain and works solely on revision history – not actual content.  As a result, a lot of people avoid it, or they do it infrequently and not as part of their day-to-day workflow. How many projects have you worked on where stable and development branches have started to diverge, or diverged so significantly that the effort to bring them back together is a real project cost? Many have certainly been in projects where this has happened, and when we speak to other developers it’s a frequent occurrence with SVN. There are some strategies to deal with it.  For example, with Atlassian’s issues and tracking software, Jira, they ignored merging and required developers to make each commit individually to each stable and development branch, relying on QA to make sure that it happened correctly.

Git allows you to remove this pain. Git makes merging so easy that merging the entire stable branch into the development branch on each commit is a reality; it’s now Atlassian’s default workflow. So even if you don’t want to use feature branches or forks or pull requests immediately, Git provides advantages from day one.

And when Atlassian was ready, they were in a position to take advantage of the advanced workflows that Git allows. Before the switch to DVCS, Atlassian’s major products targeted 90-day release cycles. These 90-day releases went to two platforms: downloadable products for clients to install on their own servers; and a release to Atlassian’s  hosted cloud platform (Atlassian OnDemand) for which clients pay a monthly fee. Using branches as a core part of development workflow has allowed Atlassian to shorten this to the point where they now release major products to the cloud every 2 weeks.

The Switch

Jira is a decent size code base to move – 11 year’s worth of history, 47,228 commits across approximately 21,000 files. Atlassian averages about 30 different committers over a two-week period. More than that, the VCS is a real work-horse for a project like Jira. Builds, code reviews, scripts for releasing both product distributions and source… all these things have a rich tapestry of dependencies on the source code management system.

Their main goal in the migration was to minimize interruption to developers. This is about more than just the ability to commit code; it is about the infrastructure surrounding software development.

Atlassian has 3.5 years of history in Jira’s code review system.

Jira has a lot of CI. Atlassian runs approximately 60 build plans over different configurations and branches.

They have some other dependencies too – Jira has a somewhat complex release process that involves pulling together code from multiple sources. Atlassian also releases their source code to customers, which involves a different set of build scripts.

There is a tradeoff here between how fast you can migrate and how stably you can do it – Atlassian’s guiding principle was to optimize for stability over speed. If you set a deadline for your migration and it slips, what’s the worst that happens? Developers have to commit code to SVN for another week or so. Not the end of the world. It’s far worse if the migration interrupts developers’ ability to work and meet their own deadlines.

In the end, the migration took 14 days in total, with only a total of two hours where developers were unable to commit code. Atlassian were nearing the end of the development cycle for their latest release, Jira 5, and at no point were they unable to cut a release candidate.

Preparation

When preparing the migration, there are a couple of things to be aware of.

First, it will take time. The actual git-svn clone, which takes all of the commits in the SVN repository and replicates them in Git, took three days for Atlassian.

Second, you should prepare and think of all the dependencies your infrastructure has on your VCS. And know that if your infrastructure is sufficiently complex (like Atlassian’s), there will be things you never dreamed of and only discover when they break. So don’t beat yourself up when you encounter a dragon. Just slay it, and continue on your quest.

A migration like this is not something you can do overnight, or even over a weekend. It needs to be managed for a sustained period of time.

Migration – The Technical Side

Stably migrating is daunting but it is not brain surgery; there is a process Atlassian has employed to make it manageable. In part 2 of Atlassian’s Switch to Git series we walk through, step-by-step, the technical details on migrating from Subversion to Git.

Our monthly webinars are designed to help you become proficient with the entire Atlassian product suite. Wether you want to convince your team to adopt Jira or are in search of some handy tips and tricks for End Users and Administrators, our webinars are designed for any skill level.

Praecipio Webinars

• Blog:
  Unflipping the Table with Portfolio for Jira
• Blog:
  DevOps: an interpersonal approach
• Blog:
  Automation with Jira Service Desk
• Blog:
  The Intranet is Dead
• Blog:
  The Ultimate Incident Management Solution: Jira Service Desk
• Blog:
  Your Greatest Asset During a Major IT Outage
• Blog:
  Reduce IT Alert Noise and Streamline Your Service Desk Solution
• Blog:
  Build A Better Service Desk and IT Alerting Solution
• Blog:
  New Year, New You with Jira Service Desk
• Blog:
  Portfolio for Jira: Best Practices
• Blog:
  Turbo Kit for Jira Webinar
• Blog:
  2017 Atlassian Summit Wrap Up
• Blog:
  Project Management with Atlassian & Tempo
• Blog:
  Achieving World-Class CI/CD
• Blog:
  DevOps with Atlassian

The following content was taken from Atlassian.com:

One of the turning points for communication in the workplace was the invention of email. Historically it’s been the easiest way to make contact in any business relationship – short, pointed conversations with the teammates you work closest with, or quick messages to people you’re communicating with for the very first time. You could say it changed the way we all work. Since its inception, however, the notion that email is also a good channel for team collaboration is what’s holding us all back.

Email is great for communication, but not collaboration…

Email is an effective means for communication, but when it comes to collaborating with your team on projects and getting work done, it’s a major hindrance to your team’s productivity.

• Group conversations grow unwieldy too quickly
• Keeping track of the most current version of an attached document is the modern-era’s needle in a haystack
• It’s nearly impossible to maintain clarity about what needs to get done, and by whom

At the end of the day, when it comes to collaborating with your team, email wastes A LOT of your time.

Don’t get us wrong, email is not all bad. It’s really effective at quickly and effortlessly communicating with others, but it just doesn’t scale. When it comes to productively working together with your team, it fails to help you get the job done. Here are three reasons why we feel email is killing your productivity.

1. Your email inbox is a lot like quicksand

You receive a ton of email each day (yeah, like you didn’t already know that!) – some of it’s important, some actionable, some is SPAM, and some is unavoidably pointless. As a result your mornings go wasted in your attempt to reach inbox-zero. It’s a losing battle. Each time you take a step forward, you take two back. You’ve likely tried all the organizational features your email client has to offer to control your inbox – labels, filters, multiple inboxes, smart inboxes – but at the end of the day, your morning consists of at least an hour of unavoidable email ground-and-pound. You also probably manage emails when you get home at night and even first thing in the morning when you wake up just to keep your head above water. I’m preaching to the choir here, right? The fact is that this is the norm these days and hardly leaves you anytime to get real work done.

Pro-Tip: Use the ‘Four D’s of Decision-Making’ model

According to a article published by Microsoft, of the email you receive:

• 50% can be deleted or filed
• 30% can be delegated of completed in less than two minutes
• 20% can be deferred to your Task List or Calendar to complete later

With this in mind it’s good practice to decide what to do with each and every email you receive – you have 4 choices:

• Delete it
• Do it
• Delegate it
• Defer it

2. Your email inbox silos your team’s tacit knowledge

Email is regularly used to share and discuss work, but that doesn’t mean its supposed to. Attaching files and documents or linking to them via shared network drives makes for a complete mess. Countless versions of shared files and relevant follow-up conversations are trapped in email inboxes everywhere. Your inbox is a graveyard for valuable tacit knowledge, knowledge that gets buried deeper and deeper every minute of every day. It’s truly criminal.

So, what’s the real problem? Email is a tool that best serves simple communication, not discussion, and certainly not collaboration either. When you send an email asking someone to review your work, the most valuable piece of information being transferred is not the file itself, but the ensuing conversation. Regardless of the fact that it’s incredibly difficult to find this email in your own inbox later, no one else outside of the email thread has the opportunity to benefit from this transfer of knowledge, keeping stakeholders in the dark.

3. Switching context between work and email wastes a lot of time

The rate at which most people check their email is astonishing – it’s practically become a nervous twitch. Just like Pavlov’s dog, your email has you trained incredibly well.

The problem with checking your email so much is that you rarely have a solid block of time to get any real work done. Take into consideration that if you’re actually checking your email 36 times an hour, and it takes 16 minutes to refocus after handling an incoming email, your workday is basically non-existent.

Switching contexts is distracting, if not annoying, and your email is the number one culprit – destroying the focus you need to get your job done well.

Pro-Tip: Practice Timeboxing to increase personal productivity

Thanks to email, staying on track at work is nearly impossible. Timeboxing is a time management technique that limits the time during which a task is accomplished. Start with 25 minute intervals. Work on a task for 25 minutes, take a 5 minute break, then commit to email for 25 minutes, and finally take another 5 minute break. Repeat. Focus. Flourish.

If 25 minutes sounds like a lot of email time, it sure beats checking your email 36 times in a single hour. At least with Timeboxing you can put all of your energy both into your work and email respectively.

Is there a solution?

We’ve outlined the major problems with using email to collaborate with your team, and even provided a few tips to help avoid the daily snags of collaborative emailing, but these are just simple workarounds. They don’t necessarily get at the core of your problems, which is that email is not the best solution for team collaboration.

OK, we are Atlassian Experts so we’re obviously biased, but we encourage ut clients to use Confluence and HipChat, Atlassian’s team collaboration and group chat tools, as means to reach decisions faster with less email and fewer meetings.

Dot ‘.’ and Comma ‘,’ shortcuts

Take your fingers off that mouse! These keyboard shortcuts will help you become a Jira speedster, and get your co-workers to ask “Whoa, how’d you do that?”

Dot Dialog

When your on the Issue Navigation screen or viewing an issue, pressing ‘.’Will bring up an operations dialog menu.

From here, start typing the first few characters of the operation you wish to use.  For example, if you are viewing an issue and want to close it, simply type ‘.’ then ‘close’.

Here is a list of operations you can access using the dot dialog:

• Start Progress — Set the issue’s Status to In Progress.
• Resolve issue — Set the issue’s Status to Resolved and select the appropriate Resolution.
• Close issue — Set the issue’s Status to Closed and if the issue has not already been Resolved, select the appropriate Resolution.
• Reopen issue — Set a Resolved or Closed issue’s Status to Reopened.
• Edit — Edit the issue’s details (Summary, Description, etc).
• Assign — Select an asignee for the issue.
• Assign To Me — Assign the issue to yourself.
• Comment — Add a comment to the issue.
• Log Work — Record the work done and time spent on the issue. This option is only available if Time Tracking has been activated on your Jira site.
• Attach Files — Select a file, upload it and attach it to the issue.
• Attach Screenshot — Select a file, upload it and attach it to the issue.
• Voters — Opens the Voters list of the issue, where you can manage your vote and see others who have voted on the issue too.
• Add Vote — Adds your vote to the issue. (This option is only available if you did not create the issue.)
• Watch Issue — Become a watcher of the issue.
• Stop Watching — Stop watching the issue. (This option is only available on issues you are currently watching.)
• Watchers — Opens the Watchers List, where you can manage watchers of the issue.
• Create Sub-Task — Create a new issue which is a sub-task of the issue.
• Convert to Issue — If the issue is a sub-task, convert it to a standalone issue.
• Convert to Sub-Task — If the issue is a standalone issue, convert it to a sub-task.
• Move — Move the issue to a different project.
• Link — Create a link between the issue and another issue. This option is only available if Issue Linking has been enabled on your Jira site.
• Clone — Create a new issue which is an identical copy of the issue.
• Labels — Edit the issue’s labels.
• Delete — Permanently remove the issue.

(Note that some options in the menu will only be available if the operation is relevant to the issue, if you have the necessary permissions, and if certain features have been enabled by your Jira administrator.)

Comma Dialog

Similarly, if you are viewing an issue, pressing ‘,’ (available in Jira 5.1 or greater) will bring up the Go To Field popup.

Use the popup to edit issue fields in-line, without leaving the page. The following fields are available for editing:

• Assignee
• Summary
• Issue Type
• Priority
• Component/s
• Affects Version/s
• Fix Version/s
• Reporter
• Description
• Labels

Tune in next month

We’ll be delivering you tips and tricks every month, so make sure to keep you eyes peeled next month for another handy Jira tip. If you found this helpful, please visit Atlassian University - interactive tutorials and videos with tons of tips just like this one.

Jira’s an issue tracking application, but its core flexibility and strengths mean it can become much more than a tool limited to a development group. Jira’s incredibly adept at helping teams track and accomplish tasks. Jira also has a masterful ability to manage life cycles - and it’s found great success in numerous use cases.

Use Cases

The following use case guides are meant to explain a bit of the details related to using Jira for a specific use case. The info you’ll find in here highlights much of what we’ve learned from working with clients in a variety of different industries, as well as our internal expertise and use of Jira.

For each of these use cases, we’ll attempt to highlight:

• Particular Jira functionality specific to the use
• Related plugins we’re aware of
• Customization and tweaks
• …and sometimes a sample file to help get you started

Agile Software Development

• Agile Development Solution Tour
• Using Jira for Agile Development

Project Management

• Using Jira for Project Management
• Jira for Project Management sample file

HelpDesk / Support / Trouble Ticketing

• How to setup Jira for support
• Use case and sample file: Jira for Helpdesk/Support Sample File

Test Case Management

This can be done by using either of the following approaches:

• Use case and sample file: Integrate Jira With A Test Case Management Tool

Requirements Management

• Use case: Using Jira for Requirements Management

Change Management

• Use case: Using Jira for Change Management

by Ashley Furness

CRM Market Analyst, Software Advice
June 27, 2012

During our last Atlassian User Group meeting a few attendees asked us for pointers on how to convince their managers to implement or expand upon the Atlassian product suite as a Business Process Management Tool. To us the task seemed easy, especially since Process Optimization and Management are some of our founding principles.

After doing a bit of research we were a bit surprised by what we found. According to a study conducted by the Journal of Information & Management, 71% of executives had negative feelings concerning IT as a source of competitive advantage.

This is especially shocking since exploiting current capabilities while simultaneously developing new ones is a common theme among organizations. This idea serves as a baseline for strategic management and is crucial for adapting to changing environments. It’s through this delicate balance of business activities that the notion of Business Process Management (BPM) was born.

As BPM continues to be considered an important way for organizations to achieve a competitive advantage, senior management should be aware of IT’s ability to facilitate these processes. However, as the study pointed out, this isn’t always the case. In many organizations senior management’s reluctant to promote the strategic role of IT and instead, consider it just an automating tool.

This notion’s not only outdated but it also negates the entire philosophy of BPM, and the idea of developing new organizational capabilities.

So how can you overcome these seemingly insurmountable sentiments, standing in the way of cost-cutting, Business Process Optimization? According to the study, executives were most likely to be convinced of the almighty powers of IT when provided with substantial evidence of the following outcomes:

• Assurance in the success of process re-engineering
• Greater simplification in business process
• Increased efficiency by at least 50%

So whether you are attempting to convince a coworker, boss, or yourself, being well armed with relevant examples of the above will come in handy.

Looking for relevant examples? Try the following case studies:

• Why did SAFMT go Jira?

The collection of features now available in Bamboo OnDemand is large enough to fill a book (regular readers know I’m not one for brevity!).  My strategy here today is to call out the biggest n’ bestest of ‘em, and point you to resources that’ll take you deeper in. So bookmark this page.  Reference it.  Love it. Repeat.

Better AMI Support

You’ll need to update custom any custom AMIs used by your build agents to make them compatible with today’s upgrade, but going forward this won’t be necessary.  In addition, BoD now offers a stock image for building on Windows as well as support for EC2 spot instances.

Read more about AMI & Agent Support here: Atlassian OnDemand Release Notes – July 2012

DVCS & External Repo Support

The people have clamoured for it, and so the people shall have it!  BoD can pull code from external Git and Mercurial repos hosted on Bitbucket, GitHub or on your own network.  That goes for SVN repos on your own network, too.  Using Git submodules?  No problem. Want to pull code from a hosted SVN repo and a Bitbucket Mercurial repo into the same build? Done.

Read more about DVCS & multiple repo support here: What’s New in Bamboo 3.3

Tasks

All your builders and post actions are belong to us Tasks.  Tasks are the granular steps that make up your Plan: checkout source code, call MSBuild, execute a script… etc.  Your existing builders were converted to Tasks as part of the BoD upgrade, and we think you’ll find it to be a great usability improvement.

Read more about Tasks here: Configuring Tasks

Manual Stages

Many users’ workflows require a set of requests and approvals for deploying code to an environment.  And many many users would like to compile, test and deploy to a QA env with each commit –but deploy to production much less frequently.  Manual stages let you construct a single pipeline, and add “gates” or “valves” to satisfy those use cases.  You’re welcome. 

Read more about Manual Stages (and other cool features) here: Bamboo 3.2 Release Notes

Plan Branches

For a couple of years, the developer community has been complaining that using short-lived branches to build new features simply doesn’t play nicely with continuous integration.  We’ve taken a big step toward proving them wrong.  As soon as Bamboo knows there’s a new branch in your repo, it will clone any associated Plans and point them at the new branch.  Branches are automatically discovered in Git & Mercurial repos, with auto-discovery for SVN coming soon. Très facile!

Automatic Merging

Because automatic branch discovery wasn’t enough.  We wanted more!  With each commit to a branch, BoD can now grab code from a second branch, merge the two, run your Plan against the merged code, and if successful, push the merged code to either branch.  Great for ensuring longer-lived branches don’t drift to far from the main line, or for two developers collaborating on a feature using their own feature branches.

Read more about Automatic Merging here: Using Automatic Merges

Test Quarantine

When I was a test engineer, I would’ve killed for this.  But you don’t have to!  No more commenting out tests or dorking around with your suite.xml file.  Just click a button to neutralize a busted test.  It’ll still get run so you can see when it’s fixed, and you’ll see your count of quarantined tests on each build result summary so you don’t loose track of them.

Read more about test quarantine here: Putting Tests in Quarantine with Bamboo 4 (Yes, the zombie apocalypse has indeed arrived.)

Jira Issues

BoD has issues.  And how!  Forget all that inefficient context switching, and create Jira issues from any build results page in Bamboo.

Read more about Jira Issues here: Top 5 Reasons Creating Jira Issues from Bamboo Makes Your Team Awesome-r

Broken Build Tracking

Team leads and scrum masters have better things to do than hound people to fix the build.  With broken build tracking you can assign one person to be the default owner of broken builds for each Plan, or have responsibility assigned to users who made changes since the last passing build.  Bamboo will nag them on your behalf until the build is green again.

Read more about Broken Build Tracking here: Bamboo 4.1 Announcement Blog

Failed Stage Do-Overs

Everyone needs a do-over sometimes.  Maybe a build config needed tweaking.  Maybe your QA environment down just as you were deploying to it.  Re-running only the Stage that failed can save you a whole lot of time.  And time is money, so… yeah.

Read more about Failed Stage Do-Overs here: Bamboo 3.2 Release Notes

Onward!

Bamboo OnDemand is now resting on a more stable platform than before, so expect fewer stability hiccups going forward.  We’ve also made custom AMIs for your build agents easier (even updated the templates, so you might not need to customize at all!), and made Windows images available by default.  Très facile (redux).

But it’s also the end of an era.  This is the last announcement I intend to write about BoD upgrades.  Why?  Because they simply won’t be a big deal anymore.  We’ve retro-fitted our upgrade process such that BoD will be upgraded with new versions of Bamboo at the same time, possibly even before, those versions are available for installation behind your firewall.  This is one “good bye” I think we’re all happy about!

About Dashboards and Gadgets

The Jira Dashboards is the first screen you see when you log in to Jira. It can be configured to display many different types of information, depending on your areas of interest.

If you are anywhere else in Jira, you can access your Jira Dashboards view by clicking the ‘Dashboards‘ link in the top left corner of the Jira interface.

The information boxes on the dashboard are called Gadgets: 

If your user account has only one dashboard, the tabs on the left of the browser window will not be available and the dashboard will occupy the full window width.

 

You can easily customise your dashboard by choosing a different layout, adding more gadgets, dragging the gadgets into different positions, and changing the look of individual gadgets.

You can also create more pages for your dashboard, share your pages with other people and choose your favorites pages, as described in Managing Multiple Dashboard Pages. Each page can be configured independently, as per the instructions below.

 See the big list of all Atlassian gadgets for more ideas.

* This gadget will only be available if it has been installed by your Jira administrator.

 

The Firebug add-on for Firefox can significantly degrade the performance of web pages. If Jira is running too slowly (the Jira dashboard, in particular) then we recommend that you disable Firebug. Read this FAQ for instructions.

 

Creating a Dashboard

The dashboard that you see when you first start using Jira is a “default” dashboard that has been configured by your Jira administrator. You cannot edit the default dashboard; but you can easily create your own dashboard, which you can then customize as you wish.

To create your own dashboard:

1. At the top right of the Dashboard, click the ‘Tools‘ menu.
2. Select either ‘Create Dashboard‘ to create a blank dashboard, or ‘Copy Dashboard‘ to create a copy of the dashboard you are currently viewing.

You can now customize your dashboard as follows:

 

If you are using multiple dashboard pages, you can only configure dashboard pages that you own.

 

Choosing a Dashboard Layout

To choose a different layout for your dashboard page (e.g. three columns instead of two):

1. At the top right of the Dashboard, click the ‘Edit Layout‘ link. A selection of layouts will be displayed:
   
2. Click your preferred layout.

Adding a Gadget

1. At the top right of the Dashboard, click the ‘Add Gadget‘ link.
2. A selection of gadgets will be displayed:
   
    Select a category on the left to restrict the list of gadgets on the right to that category.
3. Click the ‘Add it now‘ button beneath your chosen gadget.
4. Click the ‘Finished‘ button to return to your Dashboard.
5. If the gadget you have selected requires configuration, you will be presented with the gadget’s configuration page. Configure appropriately and click ‘Save‘.

Moving a Gadget

To move a gadget to a different position on your dashboard:

• Click the gadget and drag it into its new position.

Removing a Gadget

To remove a gadget from your dashboard:

1. Hold your mouse over the top right corner of the gadget, until a down-arrow appears.
2. Click the down-arrow to display the following menu:       
   
3. Click ‘Delete‘.

We’re excited to announce the availability of Jira 5.1!

Jira 5.1 introduces a number of new capabilities for new and existing customers:

Inline Edit for Jira Issues

In Jira 5.0 Atlassian took the first step in making Jira easier and easier for end users – with new, fast Create and Edit dialogs.  In Jira 5.1, field edits, transitions, comments, and all your Jira actions can happen faster than ever.  With inline edit, any Jira field can be edited from the View Issue Page. The speed at which users work in Jira is dramatically changing on a daily basis.

Performance enhancements for large Jira instances

We know this is a big one for many of our largest clients. In Jira 5.1 two teams have been dedicated to performance: a Jira performance improvements team and a company wide Atlassian Performance Engineering team, specifically focused on Jira performance for large instances above 200,000 issues. Atlassian’s repealed the 200,000 issue limit as a result of the improvements, including a 40% improvement in throughput.

Issue Collector

The Jira Issue Collector lets you embed pre-configured or custom feedback forms into any web application or web site, so you can collect feedback, and use Jira to assign feedback items, or put them through workflow.  If you’re looking for a great demo for Jira, the Issue Collector is a great one: how to expose the power of Jira in a simple manner to people both inside and outside of an organization.

Lots More

And 5.1 comes with a whole lot of other enhancements: Disabling users, automatic time zone detection, improved search for Jira to Jira Remote Issue Links, and more than 42 new feature requests implemented and over 840 votes fulfilled.

When it comes to IT, why do most organizations focus more on the T in technology than the I in information? The purpose of a good IT infrastructure’s to prevent information asymmetry and the implications that come with it. By properly managing your company’s information network you can create value through better decision-making.

Information asymmetry occurs when one party has more or less information than another. This can result in bad decision-making, and at times, unethical decisions. Regardless of the industry you operate in, treating information as an economic resource allows your business to yield higher than expected payoffs, resulting in a competitive edge.

The need for better collaboration both within and across business processes is a problem our clients come across often. Luckily the solution’s one we pride ourselves on offering.

Atlassian’s Confluence serves as an organizational wiki, connecting employees to information and each other. Confluence allows users to create, share, discuss, and discover documents, ideas, Jira issues, specs, mockups, projects – anything. By connecting your entire business in one place, Confluence allows for better integration. We love it and so do our clients!

Seven weeks ago the world met Stash – a centralized solution to manage Git repositories behind the firewall. Stash 1.0 was a huge launch! Atlassian’s been deluged with great feedback and already have small agile teams and large enterprises adopting Stash for their Git development.

Atlassian’s just getting started, and today Stash’s future begins! Stash 1.1 is here with more features focused on making your behind the firewall Git development simple, secure and fast.

SSH Support

Developed from the ground up with enterprise level security as a #1 priority, Stash now supports SSH in addition to HTTPS. Use standard HTTPS authentication or set up your public keys and connect to Stash via SSH, it’s your choice. This resolves Stash’s #1 feature request focused on adding security options to support SSH.

For those of you who chose to go the SSH route there can be some benefits for your team (depending on your setup):

• Increased security
• Ease of configuring automated systems, such as build and deployment servers (e.g. Bamboo)
• Restricted access to pushing and pulling from Stash without compromising passwords

Developers are able to manage their own SSH keys. For those using multiple machines to work with their Git repositories or several automated systems pushing and pulling from Stash they can add as many keys as they see fit. And, have no fear Stash admins, you still have full control over SSH keys with the ability to grant or revoke the SSH keys of any user.

Do you understand your Git error messages? No matter what flavor of authentication you choose, Stash makes sure you know what’s going on when things go wrong. Unlike standard Git error messages, which can be confusing and contribute to the steep learning curve, Stash will provide you with user-friendly messages.

Lean thinking allows organizations to determine value, and organize their value creation processes in a specific sequence. This fundamental understanding of the value stream allows organizations to dived their work processes into:

• Value-adding activities
• Required non-value-adding activities
• Non-value-adding activities

It’s important to note that while organizations can specify an associated value with a process; value’s inherently determined by the consumer – your organization had better have a clear understanding of what that is.

Lean thinking also affects the flow of your production processes by emphasizing a continuous product flow, pulled through by customer demand – ensuring that nothing’s built until it’s needed, and what’s built is in fact needed by its end-user. As Lean thinking’s applied to your specific business model you’ll  inherently perfect your product through the constant process of identifying and removing waste.

Lean + Agile = Better Business Practices

We prefer to look at Agile as more than just a methodology, but also as a way businesses can reduce process – generated waste and non-value-adding activities.

Think of a value system instead of a process. Software development’s too difficult to waste time pouring over things that don’t matter, and it’s extremely inefficient for the organization at hand. From this viewpoint we can apply lean thinking to Agile development.

To effectively understand the meaningful roles these approaches can have, we must first examine their application. From this point of view, Lean represents a set of principles that help guide our ideas and insights about Agile. Lean thinking should be viewed as a set of value-maximizing principles that don’t change over time, and Agile development as an application of principles to a particular situation. Agile principles are specific to each environment and should change to fit the task at hand. Here it’s easy to see how Lean thinking concepts expand upon and improve the framework of Agile methodology.

The Agile school of software development’s currently one of the most accepted methodologies for improving productivity. Targeted mainly towards IT managers and CIOs, Agile methods promote an interactive approach which have the ability to help flatten your organization’s cost of change curve.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development was first introduced in 2001, and outlines the foundation of Agile in twelve principles:

1. Customer satisfaction by rapid delivery of useful software
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development
3. Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
4. Working software is the principal measure of progress
5. Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace
6. Close, daily co-operation between business people and developers
7. Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)
8. Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
10. Simplicity- the art of maximizing the amount of work not done- is essential
11. Self-organizing teams
12. Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

Cost of Change Curve

First introduced by Barry Bohem in 1981, the cost of change curve represents the exponential increase in cost as it relates to making a change during the normal development phase of a product. This means that as your product moves farther down the developmental pipeline it becomes more costly to make changes and remedy errors.

That’s a good argument for Agile since it ensures you leave the current production phase with a product that’s as close to perfect as you can make it – particularly because Agile methodology calls for testing and up-front integration which translates to rapid production and minimal initial design. Since the test code’s written before functional code and automated test suites are built around the evolving code, developers are allowed to make rapid and aggressive changes.

The ability to make these changes is one of Agile’s key features and the result is a reduction in the amount of product errors late in the development phase, reducing the cost of change. Even if your organization enjoys a rather flat cost of change curve, Agile ideals can be applied to reduce the cost of change throughout the software life cycle.

Scrum

Scrum’s another widely accepted approach to implementing the Agile philosophy, which includes both managerial and development processes. This approach relies on a self-organizing, cross-functional team supported by a scrummaster and a product owner. Scrum makes your organization Agile by ensuring quick progress, continuously creating value, and by keeping projects on track. The most important concepts of Scrum are:

• Product backlog - A complete list of requirements that are not currently in the product release. Typical backlog items include bugs and usability/performance improvements.
• CI - Also known as continuous integration; allows for scrum teams to continuously integrate their work. This will often happen on a daily basis.
• User story – Describes problems that should be solved by the system being built.
• Scrummaster - The manager of the Scrum project.
• Burndown chart - The amount of work remaining within a sprint, i’s updated daily, and also tracks progress.
• Sprint backlog - A list of backlog items assigned to a sprint, but not yet completed

Kanban

Kanban means visual board – and that’s just what it is, a development process that revolves around a board to manage works in progress (WIP). A Kanban board includes “lanes,” each denoting different phases a project might take. It moves WIPs across the board and deploys them into production when they reach the done column. Since Kanban development practice revolves around WIP management each state of progress is limited to a set number of projects. Organizations able to leverage this high frequency of delivery typically enjoy a large financial benefit.  The most important concepts of Kanban are:

• Swim lanes - The horizontal lanes of a Kanban board represent the different states in which a WIP or task can exist.
• Backlog - A list of backlog items awaiting deployment, but not yet completed.
• Stories – A particular user need assigned to a development team.
  
  

Jira 5 is a brilliant platform for collaboration, connecting the people, activity and applications you work with every day.

Software development involves your entire organization, and good software becomes great when you bring everyone into your development process. Atlassian Jira 5′s here, connecting the dots between the development process and the rest of your business.

Your Platform for Collaboration

Software’s the center of much of our world today: it’s in your car, on the phone in your pocket, and it shapes how you work with teams, projects, and organizations.

Jira sits at the center of your software development, from initial feature planning and assigning work, to tracking development work and testing, to managing project status and the final release. Jira 5 takes collaboration to new levels by connecting people, activity, and applications around software development.

People & Teams

Jira 5 has two powerful new ways to bring people into the conversation: ‘@mentions’ and sharing.

While Jira’s email notifications are great for keeping everyone up-to-date with the issues they’re working on, sometimes you need to bring others into the conversation who might not be actively participating in an issue already.

With Jira 5, simply @mention any user in a comment or description and they’ll receive an email indicating they have been mentioned. Autocomplete lets you select usernames on the fly and Jira makes it easy to track who is involved in the comment stream.

The Share button lets you quickly send out a broadcast-style ‘FYI’ to people and teams you are working with.

Similar to sharing in Confluence 4, you can now share issues and saved searches by simply adding a user’s name or email address and typing a quick note with some details.

Activity & Applications

With new improvements to activity streams and issue linking, Jira 5 is the central place to stay up-to-date with what’s happening on your projects.

Remote issue links allow you to connect Jira issues to any website URL or application. This is great for connecting Jira issues to pages in Confluence or issues in other instances of Jira. External applications can also link to Jira issues directly to any Jira issue using the new Jira REST API.

Activity streams now show remote activity as well. In addition to real-time updates from Jira, all other Atlassian products connected via Application Links will automatically show up in your feeds. This includes changes to Confluence pages, Bamboo build status, and source activity from FishEye, and more.

Remote applications and plugins can also add events their own to Jira activity streams.

Connecting the Dots

Atlassian tools aren’t the only applications you use alongside Jira… so Atlassian’s excited to share some killer integrations to connect the tools and teams you work with every day. Here are a few examples of how development teams are connecting with the teams around them.

Development to QA

QA teams spend their time writing tests, planning execution cycles, running manual tests, kicking off automation scripts, and providing status updates in a test management tool like Zephyr. Developers spend time in Jira, managing and tracking their own daily work, or planning work with their team.

Jira 5 Activity Streams bridge the gap between tools like these, providing real-time updates between Zephyr and Jira whenever major activity happens, such as:

• beginning testing on a particular project or version/sprint/iteration
• a particular test execution cycle starting
• a brand new bug being filed or modified

Developers and anyone working in Jira get a running feed on testing activities in Zephyr, as they occur, without having to reach out to those team members to chase up status updates.

Development to Product Management

Confluence is a great tool for product managers to work on unstructured content, like requirements or specification docs. These are often directly related to one or more issues in Jira.

With Jira 5, it is easy to create a two-way link between Jira issues and Confluence pages. Simply paste the URL to an issue into any Confluence page and the Jira issue will automatically be updated with a link that page.

Development to Customer Support

It doesn’t stop with Confluence. Remote issue links in Jira 5 connects Jira issues to other items the teams you work with use:

• a document in Box
• a customer record from Salesforce
• a support ticket in Zendesk
• a discussion topic from Get Satisfaction
• and more..

Your Platform for Integration

Jira 5 makes it easier for everyone to consume and develop plugins with two huge announcements around APIs: a stable Java API and a brand new REST API.

The stable Java API means every Jira customer can rest assured that all Jira 5.0 compatible plugins will be forwards compatible with Jira 5.x releases. Atlassian wants the best possible experience for all Jira users, so Atlassian is committed to investing in this set of stable APIs to support developers integrating with our tools. You won’t need to wait on a plugin when the next Jira 5.x release comes out – you can upgrade right away, knowing all plugins built using this new stable API will be forwards compatible!

The Jira 5 REST API gives you a new way to work with issues remotely – including the ability to search, create and link issues, and add remote events into the Jira activity stream.

Get Connected with Jira 5

Jira 5 integrates with the tools developers and other teams use to help software development stay connected to the rest of the organization. Sharing and mentions make it easy to bring others into the conversation. Remote issue links keep dynamic, relevant information in a central place. Activity streams keep you updated on what’s happening in and outside of Jira in real-time.

Jira 5 is the center of software development, connecting people, activity and applications you work with every day, helping you make great software.

Bamboo 3.4‘s ready for download and ready to spread a little joy for the holidays. This release provides some gifts for Atlassian’s Git users, and will bring joy to those expanding their continuous integration process into the cloud.

What’s New in Bamboo?

Improved Git Support & Compatibility

Git users can get more out of Bamboo during their holiday break. Satisfying many votes from our Git users, Bamboo’s integration with Git’s now compatible with Git submodules. Git submodules are simply a reference to another repository at a particular snapshot in time.

• Ruby, Python, and Javascript software projects often have dependencies on third-party libraries
• Java developers need specific versions of a library in java that have not been released

The new support for Git submodules allows Atlassian users to structure your projects the way you want, and makes it easy to build multi-module projects. The full capabilities of your Git client are now at your disposal for Git-based development. Simple and powerful, just like Git!

Note: Building with Git submodules requires that you have a native Git client and add it as an agent capability in Bamboo. If you’ve not configured your agent capabilities to use your native Git client Bamboo will use the embedded Git client (which doesn’t support submodules).

Curious about Git submodules and how you can use them? Learn about Git submodules here.

Share Repositories

The holidays are all about sharing, so Atlassian thought repositories in Bamboo should join the fun. In Atlassian’s previous Bamboo release, Atlassian introduced the ability to monitor and check out code from multiple repositories. Multiple repositories in Bamboo are great for both small projects that wish to build and include externally developed open source software as part of their project, and large projects that consist of multiple modules located in different repositories. Whether you are working on a small or large project, you may be using the same repositories across multiple build plans in Bamboo. Following the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle, you can now share your repositories across these plans. Bulk manage repositories across multiple plans with a single configuration change. For admins, that means you don’t have to edit each plan/job to change a repository. All you have to do is go into the Shared Source Repositories, and make your changes there.

• Changing working branches: post release, you may want to change the working branch. Now you don’t have to go into each job and update the Source URL manually.
• Changing servers: if you are moving servers and changing base URLs, simply change the base URL in one place.
• Changing passwords: admins update SCM passwords (every month) as per company policy; now you don’t have to edit each plan/job to reflect those changes.

A huge time saver for those trying to keep repositories in sync across multiple plans.

Grow in the Cloud – Elastic Agents with Windows Support

Give your team the ultimate gift, more build power. For those of you taking advantage of elastic agents in the Amazon EC2 cloud, Atlassian now has Windows and .NET support.

Growing capacity
Considering growing your Windows instances without having to install Windows? It all comes within an Amazon EC2 image. After the image is spun up, you can be easily connect to your instance with a Windows Remote Desktop application from any operating system.

Windows application testing
Windows instances from Amazon are great for any Windows installer testing. Like a typical VMware image, an EC2 image can easily be discarded after use, which is important because some Windows applications leave too much left over in the registry. If you need to test Internet Explorer for your web front end tests or Microsoft SQL Server for your database backend, it’s all possible on Amazon EC2.

Saving installed applications
Just like Linux AMIs, you can install any packages, add software, and make system configurations. Easily save these changes to your new AMI image, which can be added to your Bamboo EC2 Image configuration.

Windows EC2 with Amazon and Bamboo allows for elastic growth to meet your demands.  Don’t have enough VMWare hardware to go around? Expand your build system into the Amazon cloud, along with Bamboo’s elastic agents.

We were reminded of Phil Gilbert’s 2010 keynote, “The Democratization of Process,” earlier today while fine-tuning an integration of business process management (BPM) methodology and cloud technology. If you’re pondering the clash of governance vs crowd-sourced content, Gilbert’s keynote (below) offers some helpful perspective.

BPM 2010 Keynote: Phil Gilbert – The Next Decade of BPM from Michael zur Muehlenon Vimeo.

Bamboo 3.2 Now Available

Automate your complete release process down to one-click, add manual Stages to your deployment process, and re-run failed Stages with the newest version of Atlassian’s continuous integration server, Bamboo 3.2.

What’s New in Bamboo 3.2

1. Release Management
The dream scenario with any release process is to automate all of your release activities down to the click of a single button. Bamboo 3.2 and the new Release Management plugin for the Jira bug tracker aims to do just that – one-click release management.

• Prevent mistakes from being made as part of a long, manual release process
• Remove the barrier to release
• Speed up the release – the more often you do it, the faster you will make it
• Manage all your releases from a centralized and controlled location
• Use the same streamlined, automated process every time you release

Release in Jira, build in Bamboo! Create a release pipeline in Bamboo to automate your release process: use Stages, Jobs and Tasks to build, run tests, generate release artifacts, publish and deploy your release. Then initiate your release activity or event with one-click directly from Jira when you’re ready.

Run a release build in Bamboo from the Jira Versions tab without leaving Jira. 

When releasing a version in Jira you will have the option to run Bamboo builds.

If the build is successful the version will be released in Jira.

Automate the steps that traditionally are performed to release an application:

• Building and testing
• Tag the releases, assign a version
• Create and populate the release branch
• Deploy the release to a a deployment server or production environment
• Release the new version in Jira, move the unresolved issues to the next release
• Release or activate the new version in Production

Bamboo ships with a number of Tasks to build and deploy including Tasks to tag or branch a repository.

For Jira-Bamboo users the latest release of the Bamboo-Jira plugin is now compatible with Jira 4.3 and provides this release management functionality.

2. Manual Stages
Manual Stages allow you to interrupt/halt/suspend automatic build execution at a specific Stage in the build plan. For Plan execution to continue a user must manually trigger the Stage.

• The default behavior of any Build Plan in Bamboo is to go to the next Stage upon successful completion of the current stage. Depending on your needs you may need to introduce a manual checkpoint into your build plan before going on to the next Stage:
• Use a manual stage for deployment to give your QA team a chance to perform a few manual tests before your software goes into production
• In a release pipeline, you may want to separate your ‘publish’ step from your ‘install’ step and install only after backups or clean shutdowns have been confirmed
• Introduce a ‘quality’ gate, between build and deploy stages, to allow members of your team to approve and promote a particular build
• Any other step that’s difficult to automate or that requires special attention

3. Re-run Failed Stages
It’s not always the code that is broken. Infrastructure problems and other issues can cause a Job, and therefore the Plan, to fail. In these scenarios Bamboo can re-run failed Jobs without having to re-run the entire Plan once you’ve resolved the problems. This can save heaps of time and build resources.

4. Filter Bamboo Dashboard by Labels
Bamboo now allows you to label your build Plans. The Bamboo Dashboard can be filtered to only show plans with labels that you are interested in. Filter out the noise on your Bamboo Dashboard.

Hint: When viewing a Plan use the keyboard shortcut “l” to bring up the label dialog for the Plan. When viewing the Bamboo Dashboard press “l” to filter the dashboard by label.

And More…

• Improved Jira integration – delegate user management to Jira, easier application linking
• EC2 improvements

This release has over 50 new features and improvements implemented. Check out the full release notes for more details.

Also make sure to check out the new agile testing tool for Jira, Atlassian Bonfire.

Ready to download?

Download Bamboo 3.2 now to get started with a 30-day FREE trial or upgrade your current instance.

Atlassian Jira's a remarkably flexible tool. For most who hear “Jira,” things like issue tracking, project management, and software development come to mind. Very rarely do people think of ITIL in relation to Jira. But then again, many don’t know what ITIL is.

If you’re a developer or in IT and don’t know what ITIL is, you should. It’s a set of processes for managing lifecycles with relationships to one another. It’s the most widely-accepted approach to IT service management in the world – a set of best practices drawn from public and private sectors around the world. ITIL doesn’t just apply to IT service management (ITSM), though – it’s a reliable methodology for managing any type of complex technological process.

Jira’s an Atlassian tool that’s phenomenal at lifecycle management (workflows, custom fields, etc). It’s designed to be issue-centric, built around managing issues or bugs that pop up within a product or service’s lifecycle. This functionality extends far and wide when you expand how you define an “issue.” On the surface, an issue is more like a problem – but considering an issue’s attributes, it can easily qualify as a task or milestone. With that in mind, Jira can facilitate far more than simple issue tracking. It can support complex process lifecycles.

Every process is a web of highly dependent relationships between regular and conditional tasks – including ITIL processes like Incident Management and Problem Management. The huge breakthrough here is making Jira projects and workflows represent (and support) ITIL processes. Let’s take an incident for example. An incident goes through several states:

(1) detection and recording
(2) classification and initial support
(3) investigation and diagnosis
(4) incident closure

A good Incident Management process within a good technology helps reduce meantime to recovery – i.e. recover from an incident. We all know how well Jira facilitates transitions and workflow. Let’s take it a step further…in ITIL-based Incident Management, we are supposed to designate incident ownership, actively monitor, track and communicate. BINGO! This what Jira does.

Let’s take this another step further. Problem Management is a process used to identify root cause to reduce the number of incidents – thereby increasing the meantime between failures. Using Jira, we can manage root cause analysis and associate the individual incidents (manifestations) back to the Problem Management record we’re analyzing. This ability to link records and collaborate makes Jira a great Problem Management solution. Add Confluence to the mix and the effectiveness is improved further.

Going another step further – having ITIL-based ITSM processes running in Jira alongside your organizations SDLC further helps IT align its capabilities to deliver the highest, best quality software and service delivery.

We’ve helped clients implement Jira to manage Incident Management, Change Management, Problem Management, Asset Management, Software Development, Testing… we love the Altassian products and so do our clients.

Another “what we do in a nutshell.” We love this stuff.

Christopher Pepe, head of our Atlassian practice, will travel to Chattanooga this weekend to present at DevChatt – a tech-focused conference for software developers and technology enthusiasts. His presentation – “Jira and Greenhopper for Agile Development” – will focus on how plugins are greats ideas but not the only ideas, how there aren’t any silver bullets, and how to use Greenhopper more effectively for Agile. Be sure to check it out – Christopher will knock your socks (or flip-flops) off.

Jira and Greenhopper are customizable Atlassian tools used for a variety of things. They excel at issue tracking and task/project management. If you’ve never heard of Atlassian, you should know they recently received a $60 million investment from Accel Partners, the same folks who invested in the likes of Facebook and Etsy – meaning it’s likely Atlassian will become a household name in the technology scene in the next five years.

DevChatt’s Chattanooga location is quite relevant in light of the city’s recent achievement: the fastest internet in the US. In 2010 the Electric Power Board (EPB) of Chattanooga released one of the nation’s first fiber-optic SmartGrids, giving commercial and residential customers 1GB-per-second internet speeds. Because of this, there’s a wealth of opportunity and entrepreneurial spirit in the up-and-coming Tennessee city – making it the perfect place for a collaborative conference like DevChatt.

Follow Christopher on Twitter, or meet him in person this weekend. Hope you enjoy DevChatt!

SmartGrid technology is the effective future of the electric power industry. Just consider the numbers: the US SmartGrid market is expected to double in size between 2009 and 2014, from $21.4 billion to $42.8 billion, with global SmartGrid spending exceeding $200 billion in 2015. With significant aid from federal stimulus funding, SmartGrid development and implementation has already begun across the US. Experts expect SmartGrid technology to become the electric industry standard within 20 years.

You’re probably familiar with what SmartGrids can do. If you’re not, think improved energy consumption information + customer empowerment. SmartGrids leverage automated power systems that monitor and control grid activities, ensuring a constant two-way flow of electricity and information between plants, consumers, and points in between. That information will originate from millions of data points scattered among system devices, enabling utilities to adapt electricity delivery to usage patterns. Demand-response software will enable utilities and consumers to turn high-demand appliances on and off during peak demand periods, improving efficiency. Technology can allow consumers to monitor their home’s energy consumption at the appliance-level (dishwasher, refrigerator, etc), and adjust their thermostats and other power-consuming devices via computers and mobile phones. Basically, SmartGrids will allow consumers and grid operators to understand what’s going on demand-side and make grid management more intelligent.

Information technology (IT) is the driver of SmartGrid technology. Custom software, data management, systems integration, and data security are critical to SmartGrid operations. We bring these solutions to utilities en route to SmartGrid deployment. If you’re making the move, talk to us. We prepare companies for the switch.

This is the second installment of a 10-week series. Each Thursday we (a) pinpoint a hotspot, (b) offer context and possible solutions, and (c) ask for answers from the crowd. So, enjoy – and contribute!

There are indeed many ways to miscommunicate. Today’s hotspot is centered around over and under-communication within organizations, located in the business’ main information artery: email.

Over-communication. You all know that person: the one who compulsively “replies all” for the sake of nerve-twitching clarity. Or the companies who send five or 10 or 20 mass emails per day to make sure everyone’s on the same page. Truth is, over-communication puts everyone on too many pages, and can generate a remarkable amount of waste.

It takes time to look at an email. It takes a little more time to measure its relevance to you and determine a course of action in response (reply, archive, delete, etc). A flooded inbox bogs down productivity by generating time waste – so if a message is even marginally irrelevant to someone, it’s probably worth considering whether they should receive it.

Perhaps the biggest problem with over-communication, though, is that it can involve more people in an issue than necessary. Problems are solved most easily when only a few people are working together to fix them – so if a bunch of folks are roped in, the solving process can become complicated. Only pull necessary people into a conversation. A key part of this is having clearly-defined roles within your organization, as well as exact pathsproblems should take as they escalate – or a well-designed, automated issue tracking system.

Under-communication. Here’s the flip-side: an organization that lacks communication paths and therefore communication in general. If employees don’t have clearly-defined roles, methodical issue escalation, or a general perspective of how communication should occur within their organization, problems pop up.

These problems stem from missed details and a lack of clarity, and often generate problems in work production that have to be fixed later (waste). While it’s important not to over-communicate, under-communicating can provoke just as many problems.

YOUR STORIES: When have you seen over- or under-communication in your organization? What problems did it cause, and how were they fixed? Comment below or tweet @praecipio.

This is the first installment of a 10-week series. Each Thursday we’ll (a) pinpoint a hotspot, (b) offer context and possible solutions, and (c) ask for answers from the crowd. So, enjoy – and contribute!

This one’s easy. Problems that aren’t confronted aren’t fixed. But you’d be surprised how often problems actually go unfixed.

Why? In general, it takes time to fix things. In many instances where this is the case, people recognize there’s a problem but are too busy to devote time to fixing it and prioritize other tasks.

The problem festers. Problems that are noticed have impacted productivity and well-being negatively to some extent, or else they wouldn’t be problems – i.e. employee time (and therefore money) is being wasted. On a small scale – say, in a group of five people – this could cost the company a hundred bucks a month. On a large scale, the loss could fly off the chart. In the larger scenario, we’re talking about a problem that could just be a minor inconvenience for a handful of folks becoming a budget boon for Finance, which will presumably have no knowledge of a problem.

It’s cheaper to fix problems when they come up – even if they take hours to get right.

YOUR STORIES: When have you seen this in your organization? How (and when) did you end up fixing it? Comment below or tweet @praecipio.

We do SharePoint. So do other companies. We develop custom software and web parts. So do other companies. If you walk outside, you may hear to the cacophony emitting from the rooftops: “Need SharePoint? Custom this? Custom that? Talk to us. Talk to US. TALK TO US!”

We participate in this because we have to. That’s how messages get heard. And now for a cliché marketing statement: we’re different from our competitors. But get past the cliché and consider our competitive advantage:

As a small firm, we’re able to execute our projects with more care and intentionality than most large firms. You’ll be acquainted with most of our team, including our Founder, throughout the course of the project effort – which creates a better sense of commitment and accountability in our relationship with you. Our small team has broad capabilities: whether you need SharePoint hosting, ITIL consulting, custom development, process improvement, …you’ll be working with the same group of people.

As social entrepreneurs, we leverage a unique type of capital in business. Market capitalism is built on such tangibles as land, labor, and financial capital, while social capitalism is built on creative, intellectual, and social capital – and a strong sense of community and involvement in the surrounding community. We strive to be engaged in what’s going on around us, using our resources to respond to the needs of our customers, community, and industry. As both businesses and individuals, we’re responsible for the collective well-being of our communities.

Praecipio Consulting is improving the community by enabling businesses to reduce their process-generated waste – making our environment more sustainable while reducing our clients’ costs. With competitive pricing, diverse capabilities, and a commitment to our services that isn’t based on numbers alone, we offer an experience that’s literally different than what you’ll find out there.

So, need SharePoint? Need custom development? Talk to us. We [also] want to help you.

Businesses run off process. They succeed with good process; they flop with bad process. Process is everything. Process is what renders a company efficient, maintainable, or a huge godawful mess.

We’ve said before that the profit’s in the process. It’s true. As a company you may sell the coolest product in the world, with sales topping 1 million per day, and flop due to poorly-built internal processes.

The fact is, processes can generate expensive waste within an organization – waste more costly than what most of us consider our greatest expenses (hardware, space, etc). Take this for example – and note that this is stripped down intentionally and doesn’t account for much of what’s taken into account when improving process. If one process isn’t well-defined, and causes 50 employees to spend 1 hour completing a processes that could take 1 minute, that’s 50 employees x 59 min x (average employee salary ÷ 2080 hrs/yr). Assuming the salary divides to $20/hr, that’s nearly $1,000.00 of waste every time the process is performed. If the process happens daily, that’s 246 days x $1,000.00 ($246,000.00) of waste annually from just one business process. You get the idea.

The key to profitability isn’t just sales or reputation. It’s sustainability inside your business doors – the ability to provide long-term economic well-being to your company. That’s why a part of our mission is to “leverage technology to help businesses do more with less – promoting sustainability by reducing process-generated waste.” It’s the same idea as reduce, reuse, recycle – instead of reducing physical waste to promote a more sustainable environment, reducing process-generated waste (time, money, misc business resources) promotes a more lean, efficient, sustainable business environment.

To summarize: Businesses are made up of thousands of processes. Each process is intimately linked with other processes. If one process is completely inefficient, it impacts other processes negatively – and the costs of inefficiency add up in a sort of domino effect that can be invisible to the business. Ideally, every process should be predictable and repeatable, doing the most with as little resources (time, money, people) as possible. Technology is often how that’s executed successfully – and the more business processes a technology supports, the more valuable it is.

It’s natural for us to neglect maintenance. It works like this:

• You have a problem that needs to be fixed.
• You neglect the need for awhile because it’s not “bad enough” for you to spend money on it.
• The problem worsens; the need intensifies. Extra work is done to keep things running.
• The need is prioritized. But the solution is too expensive.
• The problem worsens even more. Tons of extra work is done to keep things running.
• The money spent on temporary solutions nears the total cost of a solution.
• You purchase a solution to the problem.

Now, after all that trouble, money, and wasted time, the last thing we want to do when we procure a solution is devote work to maintaining it. It’s true with any solution. When you buy a new car, you don’t want to deal with changing brake pads during your first month of ownership. When you fix a problem, you are physically and emotionally pre-disposed to exalt the solution as ultimate redemption and not think about the problem. The problem is fixed. There are no more problems.

But you can’t do this with software, even though every ounce of yourself inclines you to. Even if your business spends $1 million implementing a new do-it-all software solution. No matter how much you paid, the cost doesn’t mean your maintenance / future planning responsibilities don’t have to exist. If you don’t actively ensure your software is:

• integrating effectively with your business processes,
• integrating effectively with other software / systems,
• adapting to future needs,
• responsibly maintained,
• used properly by employees,
• compliant with industry trends and best practices,
• and kept cost-effective,

…you effectively (and unintentionally) make your software fail. Indeed, in most cases, new software that becomes obsolete to the business within a year of its implementation is often the result of:

• Misuse / lack of proper training. Employees who lack a knowledge of what the software can do, how it works, and how it improves their work, they won’t be able to see the advantage of using it – and more importantly, they won’t be able to use it right. Document management software, for example, can quickly become messy and disorganized if employees don’t understand how it’s supposed to be used. That’s a major setback to progress – and could create a problem worse than the original one.
• Poor adoption rates / internal advocacy. Closely relating to misuse, if the solution isn’t “marketed” internally, employee buy-in could flounder. Preparing employees for a solution is a key part of the implementation process. Few people love change, and businesses can’t expect employees to react well if change is spontaneously legislated from their point of view.
• Lack of integration with business processes. If a software solution doesn’t integrate with business processes, it doesn’t improve an organization. Period. And the more business processes it integrates with, the more valuable it becomes. Great software improves process, and improved process makes the business more profitable by trimming costs.
• Lack of integration with other software / systems. A single software rarely solves every business problem. Multiple softwares are usually leveraged for different purposes. Since business processes throughout an organization impact one another much like those of a living organism, processes are interdependent. They interact with one another across departmental lines. Process management software will therefore interact with other systems – making integration a must for success.
• Lack of compliance with industry trends and best practices. Keeping up with software trends is crucial in this day and age. While it’s costly, it keeps your company marketable and ensures access to support services. Adopting a software that was last updated in 2002, for example, will render you irrelevant to the times, which speaks about your organization. Best practices such as ITIL are derived from industry-leading successes. They pave paths of success for others to follow. Staying on the cutting edge and doing it right are required to remain healthy and progressive. Not doing so can leave you in the dust.

Don’t let your software dictate its own life. Planning is as important the day after “go live” as it is the day before. A software that’s prepared for, well-maintained, well-integrated, and supported with forward-thinking will yield the highest long-term ROI to the business.

From the Praecipio Consulting team, Merry Christmas! We hope you have an enjoyable Christmas holiday.

We’ll be taking a break from our blog over the next week while we celebrate the holiday, so this is our last post of 2010. Thanks again to all of you who gave us feedback on our posts; we’re glad to hear our blog has offered valuable perspective on IT, BPM, project management, and a host of other enterprise matters. We enjoy helping others, and look forward to blogging more in 2011.

Until next year,
Christian, Joseph, Chris, and Brian…who escaped this photo.

Atlassian’s Confluence is a key supplement to its Jira product. Confluence acts as a powerful project management component, breaking down information barriers within the development environment and keeping everyone on the same page. With an extensive list of plugins and Microsoft Office integration, Confluence can improve information sharing extensively – especially when working in tandem with Jira.

This post assumes the reader has a reasonable understanding of Confluence (if it’s unfamiliar to you, check out Altassian’s intro video). The post highlights how Confluence – as a component of Atlassian’s Agile approach – can streamline game development. Check it out:

Idea central. Confluence can easily serve as a repository for group ideas – and more importantly, offers more structured brainstorming. This is very important in pre-production environments.

Project central. Configuring Confluence to serve as a central portal for project information makes it easy for team members to get current project news from one place. In a hectic production environment, having a page that pulls in the data you need is great.

Personal homepages. Each Confluence user has their own homepage, and can easily write about what’s happening on their team, in their project, etc. This is much easier than navigating a wiki, and also allows developers to find team members with specific expertise.

Permissions. It’s important for all companies to have a mature permission scheme when it comes to file access. Confluence offers thorough permissioning options, so developers can feel confident in the integrity of their work.

Flexibility. Confluence and Jira are each flexible enough to be used differently by different project teams. One team, for example, may use Confluence to track milestones while another might use it to schedule individual tasks by the hour. Tom-ay-to tom-ah-to, it’s improving each team’s productivity by fitting their unique needs.

Documentation. Documenting applications is of course a critical part of the development process. Confluence makes documentation effective by making it searchable, ensuring users have access to up-to-date information on the fly. That’s extremely valuable since game developers need quick access to tech specs about game branding/design scheme/etc.

That’s how game developers are leveraging Atlassian Confluence to streamline project management in the development environment. And once again, it’s worth noting that much of what’s covered above applies to business of all types – not just those in the gaming industry. Check out our Confluence blogs to learn more about how Confluence (and other Atlassian tools)  can boost your operations.

Special note: We mentioned this in a recent post, but if you’ll be attending South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin in March 2011, stop by our booth at the SXSWi Trade Show. We’ll have a Confluence (and Jira) demo live, and have our developers behind the table.

Humans have been coming up with new ways to organize their information for years. The need to find the information you need quickly has perpetuated for centuries. When information began to be digitized, that need transitioned into the digital world – and soon we found ourselves with a pile of virtual files wondering how to manage them responsibly.

Since the 1990s, the most common way to sort through this file pile – or at least the best way to arrange them coherently – was to put the files into a “folder tree.” Folder trees are complex hierarchies of file folders that, if you mapped them out on a whiteboard, would look like your typical Christmas tree – with the high-level folders at the top, slowing segmenting downward to reveal subfolders, and the subfolders of those subfolders, and the subfolder’s subfolder’s subfolder. Say that three times fast.

The problem with folder trees is that as a company grows, their folder tree can easily turn into folder sprawl. As the tree grows, files can be buried deeper and deeper – meaning the search for a particular file takes longer in most cases – not to mention the time it takes to save a new file in the right location. And the more time it takes to find something, the more company time is wasted. That’s inefficient.

“But what about the Search function?” you say. “Can’t you just search for the file?” Youcan, actually. But in order to find the correct file, you need to know all or part of the file name – which you can’t guarantee. In order for Search to be affective, you’d need to be able to search for the things about the file you DO know – like, for instance, when it was written, who wrote it, what it was for, etc.

That being said, a better way to organize information is to forget the folder tree altogether – or at least in theory. It sounds crazy, but if done right, it can make your information architecture far more efficient than you think.

The better way involves assigning relevant attributes to every file in your system – where each file has a set of attributes that describe it, telling us what it is, what type of file it is, when it was last modified, and who modified it. Consider a hypothetical worker’s compensation form, for example, stored in a content management system. If I didn’t know what the worker’s comp form was called, but knew it had to do with insurance, I could type “insurance” as a search query – and if “insurance” was a keyword or attribute of the form, presto. I’ve got it.

                                    Document Library in SharePoint

Attributes should be unique to every folder, library, or department, users associate with documents differently depending on what they are. For example, this HR request list in Microsoft SharePoint looks a lot different from the Employee Agreements document library. For one, it stores requests – not actual documents. It’s meant to track requests made to Human Resources, so each request’s attributes tell who requested it, what type of thing was requested, some details, and its approval status.

By assigning attributes to every file in your system, you’re guaranteeing faster search times and implementing a more intelligent information architecture for your organization – avoiding the messy, high-maintenance folder sprawl we mentioned earlier. By making the search process more efficient and repeatable, you’re making your company more profitable long-term.

Good technology, good process, good profit. To more learn about that or tell us how YOU organize your stuff, visit our blog.

Electric Power Board (EPB) is an electric and telecommunications company owned by the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. EPB provides electricity, cable, and as of this month, the fastest internet in the US to greater Chattanooga.

EPB has showed itself as one of the most progressive public utilities in the US by, in addition to providing 1GB internet, actively building a 100 percent fiber-optic Smart Grid. EPB had already begun their Smart Grid program before the Obama administration included billions of dollars in grands for Smart Grid projects in the 2009 economic stimulus program. EPB’s internet offering piggy-backed off the fibers laid in place for their Smart Grid.

EPB’s Smart Grid has created a platform of innovation for the city of Chattanooga as a whole. In addition to offering an array of R&D opportunities, the Smart Grid has essentially invited companies from across the US to use the grid and 1GB internet streaming to work on complex projects and develop next-generation applications – a huge stimulus for the regional economy.

We’ve been proud to be involved with EPB’s innovative efforts since 2007. We share EPB’s passion for innovation, efficiency, and sustainability; sustainable energy practices and technology are critically important for our future. During our time in Chattanooga, we’ve:

• provided Project Management for the development of EPB’s two new websites, EPB.net and EPBFI.com
• implemented robust Microsoft SharePoint process frameworks for managing and facilitating legal matters, RFPs, and a host of other business processes
• developed Process Lifecycle Management methodologies that have improved EPB’s operations
• implemented ITIL-based methodologies and best practices, making EPB’s IT processes more consistent and repeatable

…and a whole lot more. Good technology supports good processes; good processes make for good profit and reducing expenses. It’s been great to help EPB reduce expenses during a critically important (and exciting) time.

Read more about EPB on their website – and check out the cool 1GB-powered things happening in Chattanooga at ChattanoogaGig.com.

Since we’re a consulting firm with a funky (we prefer “unique!”) name, we’re always armed with answers to the questions that follow “we’re Praecipio Consulting.” It would be a little silly to have an FAQ page on our website for such questions – so we’ve set out to answer the popular ones here. Ahem.

What does “Praecipio” mean?

For starters, it’s not a food or spice. Praecipio is Latin for the English words anticipate, advise, and instruct. We chose the name because its meaning matches our meaning. Praecipio, by definition, is what we do. You can read the full scoop on our name in Praecipio: It's What We Do.

So you do process management and bunch of software stuff – doesn’t that mean you’re just IT consultants?

No. Our partners are experienced in consulting in numerous areas – process lifecycle management, project management, custom software development, etc…and, of course, IT. All ends of a company, though, impact one another. One department’s initiative may impact another department just like the motion of a foot can impact the balance of the body.

When we say we work in all of these different areas, we mean to stress that we have to understand how the body works if we’re going to operate on the foot, so to speak.

I heard you host Microsoft Exchange, but couldn’t find much information about that on your website. Is that rumor true?

Yes. We offer Exchange migration, hosting, and support for businesses large and small, available upon request. We don’t advertise this heavily because it’s not our primary offering; we currently host Exchange for a handful of small businesses and have the solution ready and available for our clients’ benefit. Hosting has become a truly affordable and secure way to manage corporate email and content management systems.

We also host Microsoft SharePoint, offer cloud backup solutions, and re-sell / offer migration to Google Apps. If you’re considering any of these hosting solutions, talk to us now. We’d be happy to offer you advice and perspective.

You mention Microsoft technologies extensively. I run a Google Apps-based business – are you relevant to me?

Of course. Again, we re-sell Google Apps – and offer migration and configuration guidance to businesses who choose to “go Google.” Microsoft solutions aren’t best for everyone just like Google solutions aren’t best for everyone. We suggest the solutions that are best for our clients – not those with a particular brand name.

We do, however, have extensive experience with Microsoft SharePoint in particular. We have implemented SharePoint-powered solutions that have greatly lowered our clients’ operations expenses. Due to the success, we want to market that kind of solution to people we may be able to help, offering the proven track record as assurance. It’s rewarding to see our clients reduce their costs and grow using our solutions. Our SharePoint solutions have done just that, and if you think you can reduce your costs with a similar solution, we’d love to talk to you to learn more.

I’m a small business that doesn’t have an IT department or anything like that. Can you help me? Or do you just cater to the enterprise?

Yes, we can help you too! Partnering with smaller businesses (even one-man shops) offers us the chance to help you grow over time – which is essentially what we’re after with any work we do. Small businesses can take advantage of our free two-hour consulting sessions (we offer this to any first-time customer) for guidance and perspective. They can then have us as a point of reference as they grow.

Our hosting opportunities (Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, cloud backups, Google Apps) are most appealing to small businesses, since very few small businesses (and large ones, for that matter) want to own a server of their own. We take care of hosting and support for businesses who want to take advantage of those tools without all the overhead.

You mention “process automation” on your website. Are you taking away people’s jobs?

Certainly not. We’re not deploying robots, either. Read the full scoop in 4 Misconceptions of Process Automation.

I noticed you didn’t cover [this] on your blog. Do you plan to tackle that topic in the future?

Sure. If you have a topic you’d like us to discuss on our blog, just throw us the idea – we’ll have our quills ready. Call us, email us, tweet us…or just post a comment on the blog.

We’d love to meet you. Talk to us here.

We recently heard a traffic analyst from the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) speak about traffic analytics. Living in a city with the fourth-worst automobile traffic in the US, the topic was particularly engaging.

The analyst spoke about the need for data management in traffic analytics. Using traffic-counting devices placed strategically along Austin’s freeways, TxDOT collects data at fixed intervals each day. These data points can be programmed to collect relevant data – in this case, average vehicle speed and highway capacity – allowing the business to know more about their problems and facilitating more appropriate solutions. TxDOT’s data points help them analyze Austin traffic patterns and identify consistent problem spots. They can then, with clarity, allocate funding toward the most effective solutions.

On a smaller scale, we spoke with an insurance agent last week who mentioned the wealth of documents he stores online for his firm’s clients. The firm stores every piece of client information in a digital content management suite – which in the insurance practice equals a lot of documents. While the initial process of digitizing client forms and documents might have been tedious, the firm can now intelligently access (or allow their clients to securely access) client information almost instantly. Moreover, the digitization process was designed and tested at the beginning, making the regular digitization tasks repeatable, predictable, and fast – thereby making the business more intelligent.

Businesses have always found ways to make their processes more efficient to improve their bottom line. These examples show us how businesses are doing so with technology – and how footing the bill for it now can earn a healthy ROI later. Whether you’re a large enterprise (like TxDOT) or a small one-shop business (like the insurance agency), technology can help you save cash by saving you work. In the same way organizing your desk may help you be more productive, saving your employer money, organizing your business information may help your business be more productive, saving the business money. And in the same way TxDOT uses data points to identify problem spots, you can use data points to analyze problem spots in your own business.

Process management applies to the business at all ends. And the profit’s in the process. Good technology can improve process; good process can improve profit; good profit is just plain great. For the transportation firm, custom technology prevents them from having to mine through data every time a particular piece of traffic data is needed. For the insurance agency, a well-built content management system (CMS), or a software that holds and manages your business information, saves employees a wealth of time and money by merely making their information easier to find on the fly – in addition to making it available anywhere and reducing overhead.

Good technology, good process. Good process, good profit. We love improving business process – and since it’s relevant anywhere, it’s a little hard to keep our minds off it sometimes…

Want more? Contact us here.

Image courtesy of Patrick Lane Photography.

Rule.fm is one of the latest start-up business productivity suites to appear on the map. “Making productivity accessible, affordable, reliable, and fun,” Rule.fm’s capabilities include people, project, document, and time management. More are on the way.

Before we assess Rule.fm, let’s look at business productivity suites in the bigger picture. Every business – or at least every business that’s reading this – probably has a software platform upon which they run their business. Every business is looking for the easiest, simplest, cheapest software to manage it. The key here is integration. While older, more established IT environments may require costly integration between existing systems (Sales vs. HR), companies small enough to use Rule.fm could benefit greatly since it integrates high-level business processes and information. The more a business becomes technologically segmented, the harder it is to manage business information collectively.

A winning software is therefore one that can benefit every part of an organization – putting everyone on the same playing field, but also catering to unique departmental needs. Rule.fm seems to have this in mind. The folks who started Rule.fm emigrated from 37 Signals, which powers Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire, and Backpack – so it’s no surprise they’re developing an application that covers each of the 37 Signals niches…and more.

Rule.fm recently began accepting requests for invites. Their full product launch should occur in the next few months. The capabilities set will be small at first – but Rule.fm will eventually offer a complete sales cycle management tool, ticket requests, Google Docs integration, Google Calendar/iCal integration, a mobile browser, wikis, and more – as seen in their tour.

Rule.fm’s capabilities reflect business productivity software’s need for integration and scalability. When someone says “scalable software” in business, they usually end up discussing Microsoft SharePoint in some capacity – and while Rule.fm doesn’t appear to be scalable or flexible in terms of custom framework development, as SharePoint is, its intuitive interface and capabilities could be valuable to the business looking for a subscription-based solution. It seems like Rule.fm will offer businesses an out-of-the-box solution that doesn’t require additional out-of-the-box solutions.

There are many browser-based business productivity apps to choose from. Some help you manage projects. Some are accounting tools. Others enable you to share and edit documents. Few applications, however, allow you to do all of the above.

Microsoft SharePoint is one of those tools. And SharePoint doesn’t only do “all of the above” – it handles anything from serving as an address book to automatically finding, logging, and articulating key performance measurements from every area of an enterprise. It’s fully customizable, and lets users build in unique operations that fit their business needs. You can make SharePoint fit you.

Think of SharePoint as a concrete foundation. While other web tools that serve one business need are like pre-built homes, SharePoint is an empty lot upon which you can build whatever is best for you. Why buy seven houses you have to adjust your needs to fit when you could buy one that’s designed to fit you? In this scenario, you can start out with the basic bedroom, bathroom, living room, and kitchen, and build out as your business grows. As your business starts offering more services and acquiring more employees, you can add on metaphorical bedrooms and garages as the needs arise. You can even build a storage shed in the backyard.

SharePoint is a foundation for business that consolidates the things that make your business run – data, documents, processes, collaboration – into one software. It puts every part of your organization on common ground. While an employee in a company’s legal department may use SharePoint to store documents, a developer in IT may use it to create workflow that automatically documents sales transactions in a custom database. The software benefits BPM, CRM, ITSM, and every other kind of “M” by saving employees time.

The take-away here is that SharePoint is a highly-scalable tool that all employees can benefit from by using it for every-day business operations. The more you invest in the software, the more you get out of it – likewise, the more a business invests in SharePoint, the more money it saves over time from using SharePoint to promote efficiency. 

Microsoft Office 2010 vs. Google Docs conversations aren’t just happening in the break room. Microsoft and Google themselves have taken some careful shots at one another over the last few months – the most explicit of which include Google’s claim that Google Docs makes Office 2003 and 2007 better (don’t adopt Office 2010) and Microsoft’s counter blog claiming “that’s not true.”

If Google Docs and Microsoft Office 2010 were as similar as tom-ay-toe and tom-ah-toe, we could simply lean back in our chairs and laugh at this whole thing. Problem is, they’re not. There are still differences between the two’s capabilities. Here’s the skinny:

Google Docs. An innovative, free way to create, edit, and share documents online. The browser-based office suite includes slimmed-down comparisons to Microsoft’s Word, Excel, and PowerPoint – which allow you to do almost every basic operation you need.

The advantages:

• Collaborative editing in real-time (though SharePoint 2010 now has real-time editing also)
• Easy document sharing
• Gradually maturing security platform and enterprise capabilities
• Google Docs is free; Google Apps for Business is just $50 annually per user

The disadvantages:

• Lacks formatting and template abilities compared to Office 2010
• Lacks ability to open/save a wide variety of file types
• Lacks integration with most enterprise IT platforms
• Still depends heavily on an internet connection

Office 2010. Microsoft’s freshest batch of office tools – Office’s power set (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) plus OneNote, Publisher, Visio, etc. – accompanied by the debut of the online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Similar to Google Docs, these browser-based versions offer higher quality tools with lower quality collaboration. Their web apps marketing video indicates they’re meant for on-the-fly editing.

The advantages:

• Scalability of the software – i.e. the ability to perform high-level operations
• Broad formatting and template ability
• Integration with Microsoft SharePoint; online 2010 version a la Google Docs
• Established enterprise reputation

The disadvantages:

• Software and licensing costs, plain and simple
• Alleged “forced integration” with other Microsoft products – a claim Microsoft has reversed and applied to Google

Who Wins? That depends. As you can see, Google and Microsoft’s business suites have pros and cons over one another – the most notable of which is Google’s outright victory from a cost perspective. Businesses who don’t need extensive document formatting options may benefit from Google Docs while businesses who use their office suite for high-level operations may not.

One of the more “on the fence” issues here is security. The security of Google’s business suite has been questioned consistently in recent months. Those questions, however, are beginning to taper off as more large public agencies adopt Google Apps for Business as their office platform. Notable recent adoptions include Boise State University, the District of Columbia, the City of Orlando (FL), Kansas, and New Mexico.

The biggest news here occurred this Tuesday, when Google announced Google Apps for Government – an Apps Premier edition that meets the US’ federal security requirements. The new edition received an FISMA-Moderate rating from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) – meaning it’s authorized to host sensitive (but unclassified) data if stored on servers within the United States.

While Google Docs doesn’t yet have an excellent reputation in terms of security, these recent adoptions indicate they’re gaining ground. The fact that most federal and public agencies are strapped for cash and looking to cheapen technology costs, however, doesn’t allow us to let go of our questions just yet.

That being said, the gap between Google Docs and Microsoft Office still remains – though it’s narrowing by the day.

The relationship between ITSM and cloud computing is still a hot topic. Companies are still asking questions regarding what the cloud is, IT versus business roles in adopting cloud infrastructure, and whether the shift toward cloud computing is optional or inevitable. Ambiguity abounds.

We all know the business wants results, and requires IT to offer swift responses to business demands. The business ultimately wants to remain agile and flexible – able to adjust quickly to changing needs. IT can’t always deliver solutions as quickly as the business wants. The cloud can.

It’s easy and logical, then, for the business to leap toward cloud providers to meet their needs. In the cloud, the business can be in control of their relationship with providers – though if one doesn’t suit their fancy, switching isn’t always easy or possible.

There are hundreds of questions that pop up here – most about the risks and rewards of leveraging cloud platforming. Before we delve any further, consider this list:

Risks

1. Security. Where’s your data – with your provider, or with a third, fourth, or fifth party? Is it safe? Does your cloud provider explicitly state rights to outsource your data? You should clearly understand your provider’s security-related responsibilities and guarantees described in its service level agreement.
2. Re: Security – SAS70 and PCI compliance. SAS70 (a set of auditing standards designed to measure handling of sensitive data) and PCI (a worldwide information security standard) assure companies that their storage vendors are handling their data properly – so they don’t have to audit vendors themselves. SAS70 and PCI compliance policies may uncover details that aren’t specified in service agreements. Since server outsourcing can put your data anywhere in the world without the end user noticing a change, SAS70 and PCI are standards for cloud peace of mind. Google realized this early when they announced their SAS70 Type II certification in 2008.
3. Re: Security - Data Protection. If your data isn’t stored within your in-house network, it’s stored in someone else’s. It’s therefore subject to someone else’s protection framework. Be sure to ask for specifics from your cloud provider regarding the intrusion detection system (IDS), intrusion prevention system (IPS), firewall, and other security technologies they’ve deployed to clarify their integrity. These security appliances are required by PCI.
4. Integration with existing systems. Will cloud-based applications integrate well with your internal network configuration, security infrastructure, and software?
5. Governance. Who’s in charge of your data – you or your provider? Who’s in charge of application adoption and making decisions based on performance – the business or IT?
6. Internet connectivity. Since the cloud operates through the internet, it’s completely bound to connectivity. No internet, no work.

Rewards

1. Lower IT infrastructure costs. IT can supplement or replace internal computing resources; no need to purchase equipment to handle peak needs.
2. Lower software costs. IT won’t be burdened with the costs of installing and maintaining programs on every desktop in the business.
3. Unlimited, pay-as-you-need-to storage capacity. As much as you need, whenever you need it. Most providers allow you to pay for more space as you need it so you don’t have to commit to a large sum of space.
4. Operating system compatibility. The cloud is built on browser-based applications, meaning OS’s just don’t matter.
5. Easy group collaboration. Sharing documents? Anyone anywhere can collaborate in real-time.
6. You’re no longer bound to specific devices. Change computers and your applications and documents follow you wherever you go.
7. Low systems cost. You don’t need a high-powered system to run cloud applications, so the computer doesn’t need the processing power or hard disk space demanded by traditional software.

It’s clear why the momentum toward the cloud is so strong – the rewards appear to outweigh the risks. Notice, though, that the risks are coming from IT while the rewards make up most of what the business side is drooling over. It’s no wonder we’re concerned with IT and business alignment in this context. That alignment may determine the success or nightmare of cloud migration.

A recent CIO survey reported that among companies not leveraging the cloud, many aren’t confident the cloud will reduce their IT costs. Half of IT decision makers, the report said, expect little reduction in IT spending after cloud adoption. Another 42 percent weren’t sure they’d save any money.

Among companies who had adopted cloud applications, however, cost savings topped scalability and flexibility as the top reason for adopting cloud computing. 83 percent of those respondents were using SaaS models.

CIO’s results indicate a lingering apprehension about cloud services, but also a prevailing wind toward the cost savings the cloud offers. Pew Research’s study on the future of cloud computing blew in the same direction: 71 percent of respondents said most people won’t be working with conventional PC software by 2020, leveraging internet-based applications instead; 27 percent said most people would still use superior PC-based applications.

We’re going to see more companies begin implementing cloud services in the next few years. This is clear. The IT-business strategy alliance is critical to the success of cloud implementations. Since more pressure lies on IT to adjust their infrastructure and methodology to accommodate cloud services, IT faces a greater challenge: grow toward an intimate partnership with the business, or grow in irrelevance to the business.

The question has one right answer – and with that answer come a host of more questions for another post.

For a more thorough look at cloud security, check out our upcoming security post.

Want to get in touch? Contact us here.

Image courtesy of Patrick Lane Photography.

In our last Cloud post (Cloud Computing Risks and Rewards) we discussed a number of Cloud risks related to security:

• Data location (Do You Know What Your Data Is Doing When You’re Not Looking?)
• SAS70 and PCI Compliance
• Data protection (IDS, IPS, firewall, etc)

These risks don’t “demonize” the cloud – but rather raise some critical questions regarding the protection of company data that’s migrated to cloud servers. The security of the cloud is still a bit (forgive the pun) cloudy to most – and may integrate well with existing security policies, protocols, and infrastructure.

Christofer Hoff – who offers excellent cloud perspective in his blog Rational Survivability-
claims it’s not the nature of cloud computing businesses should be worried about, but rather how companies implement and manage cloud computing.

“We’re struggling less with security technology solutions (as there really are few) but rather with the operational, organizational, and compliance issues that come with this new unchartered (or pooly chartered) territory,” Hoff wrote in his post Security and the Cloud – What Does That Even Mean?

Hoff’s quote pinpoints the simple source of our worries: we’ve developed a standard for IT security and compliance that’s being disrupted by something new. The question now is not whether companies should migrate to the cloud. The question is how our existing security methodologies will translate and apply to cloud computing. Since no industry standard for cloud security compliance has been adopted, organizations must steer their own ships as they sail toward cloud solutions.

Four ways organizations can retain appropriate data security as they implement elements of the cloud:

1. Policy reviewing. A few thorough reads of your cloud provider’s policy will likely explain the rights they reserve to store and protect your data.
2. SAS70 and PCI Compliance. As we said in our last post, SAS70 and PCI compliance policies may uncover details that aren’t specified in service agreements. They’re standards for cloud peace of mind.
3. Choosing a public, private, or virtual private cloud. Public clouds allow secure employee access to company data from any system anywhere. Private clouds are more costly, granting access from company systems or systems within the company’s LAN network, providing greater control over data resources and security. Virtual private clouds use a public cloud infrastructure in a private /semi-private manner, providing more balance between cost efficiency and security.
4. Leveraging ITIL methodology. ITIL offers a one-size-fits-all starting point for IT methodology. As more business adopt cloud applications, businesses will have opportunities to apply ITIL methodology to a new generation of computing.

ROIs matter most in high-effort, high-impact business decisions. Today, we put SharePoint ROI to the test.

Typically, the ROI from SharePoint depends on how it’s used. As Robert McDowell said in his book In Search of Business Value: “Technology provides no benefits of its own; it is the application of technology to business opportunities that produces ROI.”

There’s always buzz in the BPM world about how great information architecture/content management can drive organizational efficiency. Google’s “Return on Information” (ROI) Whitepaper explains why. Vendors have cited Google’s study to justify out-of-the-box document storage systems, relaying Google’s claim that an average employee spends 16 percent of their week searching for information (compared to Microsoft’s 30% estimate) – and that only one in five searches yields desired results. Companies have flocked to content management solutions to increase efficiency and provide for better project management with version-controlled documents and more organized collaboration. PM solutions like Basecamp have sprouted from this.

SharePoint has shown up as a project management and content management solution. Companies have leveraged SharePoint’s ability to:

• Manage projects individually using customizable project pages
• Develop project-specific document libraries with version control
• Manage tasks/consolidate team collaboration
• Improve employee productivity
• Aggregate critical enterprise information
• Provide fast, easy access to content

While these are legitimate SharePoint benefits, they account for only a fraction of what SharePoint was designed to offer. SharePoint is an enterprise platform. While it can be leveraged as a PM platform, using SharePoint solely for PM isn’t likely to yield the satisfying, long-term ROIs the business is looking for.

The highest SharePoint ROI occurs when the organization realizes SharePoint’s purpose and gradually adopts it as a platform that supports:

• Content management
• Process automation
• Systems integration
• Custom application development
• Specific solutions (ex: RFP/Lead Management system for Sales, employee time log system for Accounting)

SharePoint’s options are limitless. The organization can integrate a SharePoint workflow, library, or collaboration portal for just about anything they want.

Today, however, the SharePoint ROI question may not center around how much/how little it will be used. The question is whether to adopt SharePoint or a combination of web-based applications for specific needs – something addressed in Forrester’s assessment of SharePoint 2010 adoption. Quick-fix 2.0 apps are the make-or-break factor here. While SharePoint has evolved over the last decade, it failed to keep up with the enterprise’s leveraging of social computing.

This issue, however, comes back to the original question: why are you using SharePoint? If you’re in the market for an out-of-the-box, quick-fix project management system, then a web-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) that integrates well with collaborative software is a great solution. If you’re looking for something that integrates well with existing systems and provides for better performance measurement over time, you’re clearly batting in a different ballpark. The ways you measure ROI for these two options are different.

We usually expect out-of-the-box, SaaS solutions to have better adoption rates (they look pretty), and therefore a faster ROI. We can measure its success by how much it improves productivity. SharePoint, however, is not a quick fix. In this way, adopting SaaS is like renting an apartment – you get what you need on a monthly basis, but you can’t knock down any walls or add that new patio you’ve been wanting. Adopting SharePoint is like building a custom home – you start off with an empty lot, and design and build the house to fit your wants and needs. And if you get tired of the linoleum floors you put in the kitchen, no problem. It’s your house. Rip ‘em up!

The ROI of SharePoint is up to you.

If you search for “ROI of BPM” in Google, you’ll find a host of ROI calculators and links that will “MAXIMIZE” your BPM ROI. The query results are no surprise. ROI matters most in BPM – it’s the bottom line.

There’s little doubt that most BPM initiatives generate a positive ROI. A recent Gartner study found that 80 percent of enterprises conducting BPM projects will experience an internal rate of return (IRR) better than 15 percent. The study took responses from 20 companies that had completed 154 BPM projects, and 95 percent of the companies experienced more than a 90 percent success rate among their BPM projects.

Successful BPM projects use process automation to make the business more efficient – allowing it to quickly respond to changing market conditions. That efficiency yields savings. The more savings there are, the higher the ROI – and the higher the ROI, the happier the stakeholders.

The problem with ROI, however, is that it doesn’t benefit the entire enterprise at once. Most successful BPM projects involve multiple tangents of the enterprise: IT, Sales, Legal Matters, Marketing. Each department has their own processes, and therefore their own BPM solutions. While the BPM automation software being leveraged by Legal Matters may improve efficiency by 30 percent in its first week, Sales may not see improvement until the beginning of the next sales cycle. BPM success occurs on a case-by-case basis.

The truth is, large-scale investments are sensitive projects. If you’re putting a large sum of cash into a solution, you expect success – and may feel anxious or sensitive until you have tangible results to ease your nerves. If another department experiences immediate results after deployment, it will be difficult to maintain your confidence in your own solution. The discomfort is only natural.

That discomfort, however, shouldn’t distract anyone from the facts of the matter. The facts remain that BPM impacts individual processes differently. The variables are these:

• Complexity of the process. Some processes have two steps, some have 20.
• Complexity of the solution. Tailoring a solution to fit perfectly takes time.
• Employee buy-in. A solution only works if people use it…
• Training/understanding and adoption rates. Most people are creatures of habit, and naturally opposed to change. Teaching people how to use new software eases nerves and builds confidence, increasing adoption rates.
• Technological integration. Ensuring that multiple systems agree with one another can be a tedious process.
• Sales climate. The less business, the less active processes. Success rates and savings figures may correlate with overall revenue in a fast-changing market.
• The process itself. Some processes are done hourly, some monthly. You can guess which one will produce results and savings more quickly.

Additionally, it’s sometimes difficult to see ROI in the shadows of the BPM project’s cost. The business will be searching for financial fruit as soon as solutions have been planted, but the savings may not offset the cost for a year or more in some cases. A $200,000 project that yields $100,000 in savings annually won’t hit the black for two years – but will yield $300,000 in five years’ time.

The ROI of BPM, therefore, is very subjective. In the end, a successful BPM implementation will yield savings to the entire organization, department by department, year by year – offering more agile solutions than simply maximizing productivity.

Patience, perseverance, and perspective ensure success…

IT Service Management (ITSM) and cloud computing don’t always appear in the same discussion – even though one can’t be done well without the other. Integrating the two is especially important as we move further into (what could be) the fundamental shift toward cloud computing.

First – since the phrase “cloud computing” has taken on ambiguity as a buzzword – a quick clarification is necessary. Cloud computing doesn’t change what’s being delivered to end users. It changes how services are delivered. End users should receive the same services from you whether your data’s stored on a server you manage yourself in-house or on a server that’s managed by a provider in Timbuktu.

That being said, IT needs to understand the services they deliver to end users – whether the end user is the employee or the customer. This is the core of ITSM.

Some primary benefits of the cloud include:

• Pay-as-you-go server costs; planned capacity
• Annual savings in hardware and man power
• Instant “green” IT options without long-term transformation costs
• Higher rate of connectivity that extends anywhere

Those perks are the driving forces behind the cloud’s popularity – and have already borne fruit in organizations who’ve incorporated the cloud as a platform for daily operations. Some, however, raise concern over the difficulty to align the cloud with ITSM, which regularly involves:

• A slow rate of delivery of tangible business benefits
• An inability to relate the consumption of IT resources to customer activities
• A lack of stakeholder support
• Trouble integrating facilities management, security, and business continuity
• Scarce resources

These difficulties won’t surprise anyone in ITSM. They’re simply the nature of the beast. Every ITSM team has to deal with a lack of stakeholder support, pressure to produce tangible benefits in short amounts of time, etc. When news of a new business decision reaches IT’s desk after it’s already been decided on, however, these difficulties become even more difficult – and the alignment of IT investments and business continuity is disrupted. The business has moved along without IT, and IT is left to run after it.

The same is true for the alignment between ITSM and cloud computing. Companies may rightfully lust after cloud services and decide to begin moving toward a cloud platform. While the results for end users (employees and in turn customers) may be clear, how to deliver them may not be. If the ITSM team isn’t intimately involved, the business risks ambiguity on both sides.

Ideally, the business should work to ensure inter-operability between IT assets and cloud applications. That (like everything else) requires the business to understand IT’s responsibilities, and IT to understand cloud concepts. The software market’s shifting toward ease-of-access software/SaaS; ITSM software vendors are having to market their simplicity and cloud-usability to stay competitive. Because of this, inter-operability is becoming more of an issue since businesses may be tempted to consider ease of use and cloud integration more important than ITSM.

The alignment is essential. With business strategy and IT well-aligned, leveraging the cloud can expand your ability to be flexible in doing business and save you overhead costs while preserving what’s delivered to end users.

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Richard Veryard’s thought-provoking powerpoint “Technologies for Organizational Intelligence” claims that intelligent organizations:

• recognize that business opportunities are complex
• respond to them coherently
• pay attention to weak and strong signs of inefficiencies for the purpose of collective learning and innovation

Veryard stresses later that intelligence is vital to a business’ survival. That idea should not sound revolutionary, but provokes one to question if businesses frequently consider how well they’re working to understand themselves and improve their knowledge and efficiency in order to grow.

This is highly relevant in the context of IT Service Management (ITSM) – an introspective, process-focused approach to managing IT systems. IT professionals who care about ITSM try to stay informed about technology advances, ways to improve customer experience, and align IT with business needs. It’s the duty of those in ITSM to maintain and promote a healthy, innovative IT environment that fuels the innovative capabilities of the business as a whole.

Those ambitions correlate closely with the actions Veryard attributes to intelligent organizations. He exalts a sort of “collective learning and innovation,” in which those in the business continually collaborate in order to learn more about how they do things. Fixing problems and developing innovative ideas are both natural products of this introspection. Each, in turn, impact the end product offered to customers.

While it may be difficult at times to devote attention to efficiency, it’s vital to the continued growth of a business. After all, those who fail to fix their problems and innovate aren’t the ones we talk about ten years down the road.

So, how does a business make sure they’re “intelligent”? Veryard lists quite a few ways, including:

• Understanding that business environments are complex
• Approaching problems with rational, collective solutions
• Employing people and technology that works well together

The third remedy is the primary concern of ITSM. IT can build a foundation for organizational intelligence by implementing an enterprise-level platforming technology that can facilitate collaboration within the organization – especially if the platform is adopted across the entire enterprise.

Without an effective, efficient technology that integrates well with a business’ existing software, the collective effort toward ITSM growth is kept on the ground. Frequently gathering information that paints an accurate picture of performance requires predictable, repeatable processes that can be technologically executed. Such a technology drives consistent progress toward efficiency and innovation – and serves as part of the backbone of an intelligent organization.

As Veryard said in his presentation, intelligence is vital to survival. As introspective folks with technological literacy, those in ITSM can have a profound impact on the progress of their organization by leveraging technology to build an intelligent business.

Thirsty for more? Contact us here.

If you’re a large enterprise, you may be using different applications and processes to support local, national, and global initiatives. On those different levels, separate applications may be needed to manage unique sales, marketing, or IT processes.

The difference in processes, methodologies, and application tools may lead to inefficiencies in management, such as:

1. Higher cost of managing multiple applications
2. Lack of consistent governing structure
3. Inconsistent or incomplete performance measurements

A typical enterprise cannot usually leverage one application for sales, marketing, and IT purposes. Using multiple applications to manage different internal and customer-related processes is in most cases necessary to ensure efficiency and quality customer service. The problem, therefore, is not that the enterprise has too many applications to manage – but that the enterprise cannot effectively manage all of them without some sort of centralized documentation of each application’s attributes and processes.

Without a central location for application-based data, data gets stored at seemingly random locations throughout the enterprise’s storage and resource structure. While process and metric information about an enterprise’s European sales resides on one server, information about their European customer support system may reside somewhere else. This stratification and distance between processes can cause a number of problems in terms of efficiency:

• Difficult to apply Change Management to all enterprise applications
• Difficult to access application information at any given point
• Difficult to measure the efficiency of each application to ensure quality performance
• Difficult to identify and diagnose problems in a timely manner
• Difficult to understand how different business processes affect one another

This explains the need for a Centralized Process Repository. As we noted in our previous post, a Centralized Process Repository (CPR) is critical to the success of the enterprise’s process strategy. It stores the following information about each of the enterprise’s applications at the process level:

1. Resources required (software, equipment, personnel)
2. Cost (direct and indirect)
3. Owners and stakeholders
4. Applications enabled by the process
5. Separate processes effected or supported by the process
6. Data points that measure the process’ value to the organization
7. Frequency of execution
8. Details regarding how the processes is carried out

The enterprise may not be able to consolidate their applications into one larger application. They may also be unable to devote time to improving each one individually. Adopting a CPR, however, establishes a consistent framework for governing each application by consolidating all process data into one accessible location – requiring any change to a process to be documented by a governing entity. This ensures the accurate measurement of process performance, since performance data points and change updates are stored in one reliable location.

The CPR improves an enterprise’s process performance by maintaining the information needed to measure, improve, and control business processes. We emphasize this to our clients to ensure their success as an efficient enterprise. In addition, the CPR promotes an understanding of the cross-functional nature of the enterprise’s processes – encouraging cross-departmental collaboration by focusing on the relationships between internal processes, end-to-end.

Thirsty for more? Contact us here.

Image courtesy of Patrick Lane Photography.

Our team’s project management and Microsoft SharePoint services have facilitated the release of the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga (EPB)’s EPBFI.com. EPB is actively building a 100 percent fiber-optic Smart Grid. EPBFI.com will serve as an innovative communication platform for their 160,000+ customers.

Our skills and leverage of SharePoint as a project management tool ensured accurate communication and scheduling during the EPBFI.com project. The site, designed and developed by Chattanooga-based Medium, precedes the February 2010 release of Medium’s EPB.net; each new site has been designed to engage EPB customers with the company’s upcoming fiber optic service packages. EPBFI.com features a handful of new customer-focused tools, including MyFi– a portal allowing customers to access their EPB services account while learning about new fiber optic services.

We understand how enterprise-level environments operate and the critical nature of their services. Our team’s knowledge of how to effectively navigate the corporate setting guided Medium and EPB toward organized progress, and made sure EPB’s goals were accomplished on EPBFI.com. Our active leadership facilitated EPB’s success by ensuring all parties involved in the project had what they needed to succeed.

Our team enjoyed helping EPB Vice President of Corporate Communications Danna Bailey bring the powerful EPBFI.com to her customers.

“Their project management has greatly improved the efficiency of our project,” Bailey said.

Many thanks to the teams at EPB, Medium, and every other vendor who helped make EPBFI.com a successful tool for EPB’s customers. We’re proud to do our part by enabling EPB to accomplish their goal of a sustainable, energy-efficient Smart Grid for the greater Chattanooga area. The Smart Grid project is expected to have a positive economic impact on the region.

Would you like more from us? Contact us here.

In a business world clouded with buzzwords, it’s easy to lose track of the actual meanings of terms relevant to the IT industry.

Take cloud computing, for example – one of the tech industry’s biggest buzzwords at present. A number of software vendors have been using the phrase “cloud computing” to market their Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products. Are the two terms different from one another, or the same? Or is cloud computing truly a meaningless buzzword?

In truth, the two terms are different. SaaS refers to software that’s owned, delivered, and managed remotely by a one or more providers. The provider handles all the “heavy-lifting” associated with the service: server maintenance, support, etc. SaaS products are usually out-of-the-box tools that don’t require extensive setup. They’re accessible by web, and usually paid for on a subscription or pay-per-use basis.

Cloud computing refers to the broader concept of allowing people to access scalable, technology-enabled services via the internet. The term has become virally fashionable in the tech industry – much like the word “organic” in the food industry. Cloud computing – more commonly referred to as “the cloud” – is an on-demand way of providing services. It’s usually touted as an intelligent approach to computing in today’s fragile economy.

SaaS is essentially a subservice of cloud computing. Not all cloud applications are SaaS applications, but nearly all SaaS applications are in the cloud, which provides the computing power to run those applications. SaaS applications, therefore, are offered on the cloud platform. The folks at Common Craft do a good job explaining these differences in their video “Cloud Computing Plain and Simple.”

Cloud computing and SaaS refer to different things. While SaaS refers to out-of-the-box applications offered on the cloud platform, cloud computing refers to the bigger picture of how software can be provided more efficiently through the internet.

That bigger picture includes the transition of the software industry toward a Software-as-a-Service model, where customers make decisions based on the value of the service. Daryl Plummer – Chief Fellow at Gartner, a US-based IT research and advisory firm – said in a 2008 podcast that this economical change in the software market is the power of cloud computing: “The way we actually charge for cloud-based SaaS services won’t be based on how many servers we’re running, how much maintenance costs we’re taking on, or which software products we bought,” Plummer said. “It’s going to be based on the value of the service to the customer, and when you start getting into that consumer-provider relationship, the customer ends up setting the value.”

Two years later, Plummer was right.

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Image courtesy of Patrick Lane Photography.

As we’ve noted in previous posts, BPM enables businesses to map, analyze, and test business processes in order to make them more predictable, repeatable, and efficient. An enterprise can assume they’ll accomplish those goals by leveraging BPM software from EMC, Lombardi, or Savvion…but with Microsoft SharePoint? Isn’t that for enterprise collaboration and document management?

A recent Forrester report found that 47 percent of 220 IT decision-makers said SharePoint serves as their organization’s “business process management platform” – ahead of competitive products from EMC, Lombardi, Savvion, IBM, and Oracle. That number comes as a surprise to BPM vendors, since Microsoft touts SharePoint as a collaboration tool, not a BPM product.

SharePoint has proven itself as a successful Microsoft product, bringing in $1.3 billion in revenue in 2008 alone. Forrester’s report said that number has grown 25 percent annually. Though their poll indicated that SharePoint is faring decently as a BPM suite, Forrester said SharePoint is better fitted for BPM if augmented with other BPM tools.

That’s not to say SharePoint can’t be leveraged as a BPM tool. Though SharePoint isn’t an out-of-the-box BPM suite, customers may take advantage of SharePoint’s robust, flexible platform by building in a custom BPM suite of their own.

However, most companies don’t have the time or capability to carry out such a project. In this case, they opt for a solution from BPM leaders that’s ready to roll.

The fact that 47 percent of IT leaders are confident in SharePoint as a BPM platform validates the speculation that some have built upon SharePoint’s foundation to make a powerful BPM tool. To be sure, SharePoint can streamline business processes by facilitating process automation with decision-based workflows – and can capture and monitor process metrics from data points placed intentionally throughout business processes. Those capabilities ensure long-term process efficiency, if properly nurtured over time.

We’ve leveraged SharePoint for ourselves and for our clients as both a collaboration tool and BPM suite. Using SharePoint for both is entirely possible – and remarkably powerful. Pulling such a feat off in-house, however, is challenging and sometimes impossible.

Nevertheless, leveraging SharePoint for collaboration and BPM can lead to more consistent decision making across the entire business long-term. It can also promote more accurate and organized data in each department of the enterprise that buys in to the tool.

When it comes to out-of-the-box software vs. foundation software, the software that serves as a concrete slab for a custom home usually wins out long-term due to its flexibility and customizable nature. That makes SharePoint a legitimate contender in the BPM market.

Thirsty for more? Contact us here.

Image courtesy of Patrick Lane Photography.

By nature, process automation involves taking away human tasks and executing them with technology. Naturally, people can be sensitive to automated processes. They may become insecure about their job if they think tasks will be taken away from them.

These sensitivities and insecurities, however, aren’t always legitimate. They can be lessened if everyone involved in adopting process automation understood its purpose and benefit to the business.

Here are 4 misconceptions of process automation:

1. Process automation will replace me with a machine.
In truth, very rarely do workflows replace an entire human position within an organization. As we also say in Workflows 101, workflows execute non-value-adding steps that don’t involve highly-complex decisions, which require human effort.

Non-value-adding steps usually include tasks like organizing, filing, labeling, etc. Value-adding steps include content generation, customer interaction, and service development.

Ideally, each person within an organization will use their skills to add value to company services, or deliver value to customers. The business needs to be productive and efficient to maintain profit, and wants to ensure that employee time is being used efficiently – toward value-adding steps.

2. Process automation will increase mistakes.
Surely a computer can’t make better decisions than a human, right?

Actually, the decisions a computer makes are determined by humans. Workflow decision criteria is developed by folks who’ve studied how the organization operates in detail and determined which business processes could be automated – in part or in whole. Any mistake a workflow makes results from a flaw in decision logic – or something the logic couldn’t account for.

To make sure workflows remain useful over time, they should be observed regularly to ensure their logic and performance are effective. Workflows usually require tweaking as processes change to maintain success.

3. Process automation can’t do this as well as I can.
Again, that’s not the point. Workflows don’t perform tasks that you could do “well” as opposed to others. They weed out tasks that can be executed electronically to make employee productivity more efficient – saving the business money.

4. The implementation of a process automation system is too expensive to consider.
Yes, the implementation may be expensive – and may require you to purchase a software platform that can facilitate workflow technology.

But the worry here isn’t about the up-front cost. It’s about the ROI. The goal of process automation is to save a business time and money as months go by. A successful workflow implementation can make profit soar over time due to the time and energy saved by workflows.

We hope this gives you a clear take on what process automation means for business. Take a look at Workflows 101 more information.

In order to remain competitive, a firm’s IT environment must be aligned with the firm’s business strategy – meaning IT should share responsibility in delivering value to the customer.

This is why Change Management is so important: changes to the IT environment must not disrupt the value delivered to the customer. IT must maintain stability even during change. ITIL’s Change Management methodology provides a clear framework (with defined roles, responsibilities, and processes) that can facilitate success.

Change Management should be considered a major undertaking. Determining where your firm stands in terms of ITIL maturity and developing a realistic project plan will improve your ITIL effectiveness.

Here are 5 Change Management tips to consider:

1. What’s a change, exactly?
Reality check: changes happen all the time. Nearly everything in IT involves some sort of frequent change. That being said, it’s important to figure out just what you consider to be a change. You can then determine when to apply ITIL Change Management principles.

Every change (even small installations and deletions) should be handled in terms of Change Management. The smallest of changes could cause major disruptions if no one knows about them.

2. What, specifically, will Change Management accomplish for my organization?
It’s no surprise that some firms have trouble defining ITIL in general. Since ITIL methodology isn’t something you can learn on a coffee break, most IT and non-IT folks alike don’t have the time to study ITIL for days.

Even if someone understands ITIL, they may not understand how it applies to efficiency. Someone might think implementing Change Management will fix issues related to Release or Incident Management. Pinpointing what Change Management will accomplish for your organization is therefore vital to understanding what it’s actually doing – managing the oversight and approval aspects of the change process in a unique organization-specific environment.

3. Articulate the benefits of Change Management to each level of the organization.
This goes right along with our last tip. Once you pinpoint the applicative benefits Change Management will have for your organization, advertise them. Getting buy-in at every level of the organization is critical to the success of your ITIL implementation.

There are multiple stakeholder groups within every organization – that is, folks personally and organizationally affected by the change. They’ll want to know “what’s in it for me?” in order to judge whether they’re on board with the change. Presenting accurate change information tailored for each stakeholder fosters better accountability from stakeholder groups – and improves buy-in.

4. Don’t Buy a Tool Until You’ve Determined What You Need.
While it may make sense to buy software to guide your Change Management implementation, doing so before laying out your process framework is counter-productive.

A more productive approach includes determining your needs before adopting a tool, so you can better evaluate which tools fit your needs instead of adjusting your needs to your tool.

5. Use Change Management Success to Promote Other ITIL Initiatives.
Folks are usually familiar with the Change Management component of ITIL – and oblivious of its other processes. If you track your Change Management successes and gather supportive data from Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), you can use success stories to promote the benefits of other ITIL processes like Release Management, Incident Management, etc.

One final tip: It’s worth noting the incredible value and need for leadership/executive support in the Change Management process. It’s important for company leadership to sell and support the change despite resistance in the company to organizational and cultural change. Often times, Change Management implementations are resisted since they uncover underlying issues that some within the company don’t want to uncover. Ultimately, though, Change Management helps make everyone proactive and out of the reactive, fire-fighting mode.

Thirsty for more? Contact us here.

Image courtesy of Patrick Lane Photography.

At Praecipio Consulting, we love our name. Its meaning explains what we do. Most people, of course, have trouble orienting themselves with the name “Praecipio,” asking questions like:

• “wait, how do you say it?”
• “so, I’m curious – how do you spell that?”
• “is it…Spanish?”

For starters, Praecipio is pronounced “Prey-sip-io.” The letters a and e are special in Praecipio. Together, the letters make up æ, a fundamental unit of the Latin and Old English alphabets. This integration of letters is significant, since the solutions we offer are an integration of knowledge and technology.

Praecipio is Latin for the English words anticipate, advise, and instruct. We chose the name because its meaning matches our meaning. Praecipio, by definition, is what we do.

We build and implement custom technology for our clients. With time, our solutions make processes run well, and capture valuable data points that explain the health of the business in terms of efficiency and profit.

These data points help clients anticipate and identify business processes with issues – execution issues or training gaps – enabling them to pinpoint spots for proactive improvement.

Our solutions, therefore, advise our clients on how to become efficient and sustainable – a long-term ROI from our services.

We instruct our clients by helping them develop, implement, and monitor their business processes. While some consulting firms implement a solution and quickly get out the door, stay committed to our clients by monitoring the performance of our solution and making tweaks to ensure the highest rate of success. We believe our clients should get the most out of their investment. Additionally, our solutions facilitate continuous improvement – and can be changed easily in the long-term as the business and economy fluctuate.

Our goal is to make our clients’ businesses run like well-oiled machines, whose productivity can be turned up and down without adversly affecting the firm’s budget. We develop our clients into consistent, sustainable businesses.

Praecipio’s meaning – both as a word and as a firm – is to help others…even if we’re just helping others spell our name.

At the center of every business are the employees who support a company’s success by performing necessary daily processes. In order to succeed, however, employees need to work together in an organized, effective manner, with a sophisticated understanding of how their processes operate and relate to one another. Without it, business process may be rendered inefficient.

To improve your business from a business process management (BPM) perspective, you must first document how processes are carried out within your company through process mapping. Mapping out your processes creates an organized understanding of how work is carried out in your company—the first step toward business efficiency.

The next step is implementing a software tool to capture and store these processes for you. Process management software—specifically software like Microsoft SharePoint— allows you to capture this process data from key data points and store it in a common database for employee access.

Once your processes are mapped, defined, and digitally documented with process management software, you can then build workflows into those processes that allow selected steps within them to be executed automatically. Process automation, or workflow automation, has an incredible impact on business efficiency by speeding up a process in an organized, methodical way.

For example:

• Your business receives an order
• Order is automatically sent to a processing clerk and stored on server
• Order validation is handled automatically according to predetermined decision criteria (yes, no, pend)
• Order travels down different paths according to decision criteria

Workflow-based processes also allow process management software to collect real-time information on employee performance. By embedding data collection points in workflows, employers can view dynamic data that makes it possible to gain a high-level perspective on company performance.

This describes our process management consulting capabilities in a nutshell: we help companies transition toward refined processes that can be repeated and monitored, making businesses more efficient and profitable long-term.

Thirsty for more? Contact us here.

Image courtesy of Patrick Lane Photography.

With the help of our project management, Microsoft SharePoint, and Business Process Management services, the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga (EPB) debuts its new site: EPB.net. EPB is actively building a 100 percent fiber-optic Smart Grid. Their new site will serve as an innovative communication platform for their 160,000+ customers.

EPB.net, designed and developed by Chattanooga-based Medium, follows the August 2009 release of EPBFI.com– designed to engage EPB customers with the company’s upcoming fiber optic service packages. EPB.net features a handful of new customer-focused tools, including a real-time power outage map developed by Medium—an outstanding partner in the project.

We helped because we understand Enterprise-level environments and the way they operate as well as the critical nature of their services.  We helped vendors and the client because we know how to navigate the corporate setting.

We were able exercise our flexibility by marrying our project management methodologies with the Medium Information Architecture methodology. That flexibility, in addition to our leverage of SharePoint as a project management tool, ensured accurate communication and scheduling between Medium and EPB during the EPB.net project. We understand how enterprise-level environments operate and the critical nature of their services. Our team’s knowledge of how to effectively navigate the corporate setting guided Medium and EPB toward organized progress, and made sure EPB’s goals were accomplished on the new site.

“The Praecipio Consulting team served as an advocate to vendors for what I saw this project being,” EPB Vice President of Corporate Communications Danna Bailey said. “They greatly improved the efficiency of the project; we couldn’t have done it without them.”

We facilitated EPB’s success by ensuring all parties involved in the project had what they needed to succeed. We’re happy to announce the launch of another Praecipio Consulting project management success: EPB.net.

Would you like more from us? Contact us here.

It's About Adding Value

If you’re in business, you’ve probably heard the phrase “LifeCycle Management” used to describe different types of process management. There’s Information LifeCycle Management, Product LifeCycle Management, Incident LifeCycle Management, and on and on and on. What makes Process LifeCycle Management so important?

All too often when working with our clients, we’ve identified a lack of management perspective over the organization’s collective set of business processes. In general, we’ve noticed a lack of awareness of the relationship different processes have with one another, and how a change in one process may impact another. As a result, changes that occur from process to process are unorganized, uncoordinated, and mismanaged– causing a handful of issues from employee morale problems to opportunity costs/missed revenues.

Process LifeCycle Management provides a coordinated, controlled method for managing processes– a process, if you will, for managing processes. It encompasses process management from the process’ inception to its design, acceptance, implementation, and retirement.

At a rudimentary level, businesses are in the business of executing process for the purpose of adding value. Take a head of lettuce, for example– one you’d buy in bulk at the grocery store. Let’s say the head of lettuce costs 75 cents (its value). How is this value figured? What attributes of the lettuce make it worth 75 cents to me?

The answers are in its process lifecycle:

• The lettuce probably began as a seed that was sold to a farmer for 1 cent.
• The farmer then added water, soil, and other overhead to grow the lettuce– raising its value to, let’s say, 20 cents.
• The lettuce might then have been sold to a packaging company, which used their resources and energy to package the lettuce, raising its value to 30 cents.
• The packaged lettuce might then have been sold to a distributor for 40 cents, who might have sold and transported the lettuce to the grocery store for 60 cents.
• The grocery store then raised the price by another 15 cents to ensure its profit at the point of sale.

Each step of this process lifecycle added value to the service– in this case, the lettuce. Similarly, each step in any business cycle should add value to its final product, whether the product is an internal report, a type of customer service, or a head of lettuce. The more efficient and effective each process step is, the more value is added to the end product and when executed efficiently, the more profit.

Processes are how businesses operate; a business’ efficiency is determined by the efficiency of its processes. The more coordinated process management is, the better the business runs, and the more value is added to the end product. Money is made and lost at the process level. A primary focus of the enterprise, therefore, should be on process management to ensure the efficiency and profitability of the business.

Thirsty for more? Contact us here.

Image courtesy of Patrick Lane Photography.

According to Forrester’s latest research, IT spending is expected to grow 6.6 percent in 2010 to $568 billion. In order to realize the value of these investments, organizations may adopt industry-consistent frameworks like ITIL to improve IT process and establish reliable data points to measure success.

Here are 5 useful ITIL implementation tips:

1. ITIL is an IT-Wide Strategy
Any ITIL process implementation has IT-wide impacts. Because of this, the implementation must be aligned with other IT initiatives within the organization, focusing on accomplishing ITIL success while preserving the overall benefit to the organization. ITIL should guide all strategic initiatives.

2. Consider Post-ITIL Organization Before Jumping Into Implementation
Introducing ITIL processes creates new tasks and roles that could impact an organization’s current IT service management structure. Foreseeing this possibility helps guide management toward supporting a new IT organization.

3. Prioritize Process Selection
Implementing every ITIL process at the same time isn’t necessary. ITIL processes should be selected based on areas where the organization needs improvement, and areas that will drive the most business value/greatest ROI.

4. Set Your Baseline Early; Have Realistic Expectations
The acceptance of change, of course, takes time. ITIL’s implementation is a significant change to an organization’s IT environment, and its processes will have to mature before subsequent ROIs are recognized. The delay of ROI-producing data points will delay the qualified legitimacy of the ITIL venture—making the change harder for employees to swallow.

Establishing an early baseline of key performance indicators (KPIs) from which to monitor ITIL success helps employees be more open to and engaged with the change. Chosen KPIs should be business-focused and clearly understood, so employees don’t waste time measuring unnecessary data points.

5. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate Success
Let’s face it: implementing ITIL isn’t a quick job. The longer a project takes, the harder it is for employees to see its worth.

This is why communicating success to everyone involved in the implementation is essential—so employees are reminded they’re working toward something that will make them more efficient and profitable, and prepared for change. Success not only boosts morale. It qualifies and legitimizes the project. Failure to communicate success may double employee resistance to change over time.

Thirsty for more? Contact us here.

Image courtesy of Patrick Lane Photography.

[important note, as of 4 Sept 2010: Google Wave will not be available as an end-user application after 31 December 2010.]

People have the tendency to judge a software by its user interface (UI).

Think about it. Most users probably don’t care about your network protocols or what your server topology is. Those users will, however, think it’s awesome to drag and drop documents and pictures from location to location. Most folks are used to this since most of them interact with Facebook, Twitter, and all the like. They’ll probably think it’s cool.

Since we use SharePoint to execute most of our services, it has been brought to our attention many times that the current version of SharePoint lags heavily in UI from this perspective, unless you do a load of custom development work for the sole purpose of aesthetic improvement. SharePoint 2010 is promising a well-crafted UI improvement, in addition to a handful of Outlook revisions– but for now, SharePoint users may still gripe about the lack of 2.0 usability. They may venture to ask “how will SharePoint fare once Google Wave is released?”

Google Wave is not a competitor of SharePoint. It is not comparable to enterprise collaboration software. Wave will, as an open source development platform, bring great innovations that may be integrated into the SharePoint– but doesn’t have the scope of capabilities (process automation, workflow execution, data repository) SharePoint has to improve enterprise collaboration. Perhaps the employees griping about SharePoint’s “Windows 98-like interface” need to learn a bit more about what their software actually does.

If Wave should be compared to anything, it should be compared to Microsoft Outlook. It’s a collaborative space to exchange messages and files, and functions chiefly as an evolution of what we know as email.

Some of Wave’s key promises:

• Open source: Wave code will be open source, to, in Google’s words, “foster innovation and adoption amongst developers.”
• Wiki functionality: Anything written in a wave can be edited by an authorized person. You can correct information or add your own commentary within a developing conversation.
• “Embeddability:” Waves can be embedded into any blog or website.
• Applications and Extensions: Just like a Facebook application, developers can build their own apps within “waves.”
• “On-the-fly” translation: Google Wave can translate sentences into other languages as you type them. It can also correct your spelling as you write.
• Drag-and-drop file sharing: No attachments; just drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access.

Wave’s integration of feeds and UI capabilities are without a doubt impressive. Their innovative HTML 5 capabilities may very well be integrated into software like SharePoint down the road. But the purpose of Wave is not to compete in the enterprise collaboration market. Their purpose is to revolutionize the way people collaborate online through real-time, open-source technology.

But what about Basecamp? It’s an undeniably effective project management tool that we endorse for pure project management purposes. But how does it fare against Wave and SharePoint?

It doesn’t. At least not in the way most think it does. All three of these tools can facilitate project management. All three, however, are ultimately very different.

• Basecamp is a superb project management tool if you’re looking for an easy-to-use tool that integrates well with social networking and mobile phones, offers online storage of documents for collaboration, and connects those working on a project in an organized way. These capabilities are remarkably value for project efficiency; Basecamp’s built a great tool. If you’re looking for anything outside of these capabilities, though, you’re looking in the wrong place.
• Wave, as we’ve said, is an evolution of email. It’s open-source nature and real-time abilities offer superb capabilities that can be used inside Wave or dropped into other sites. Wave isn’t as project management-focused as Basecamp, however, and doesn’t compare to SharePoint either.
• SharePoint, borrowing Microsoft’s words, “helps improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight.” SharePoint is a content management server that allows for the custom development of workflows for process automation. It’s an enterprise collaboration and IT platform. It’s not Basecamp or Google Wave.

So: Wave, Basecamp, or SharePoint? Our answer is… yes.

Thirsty for more? Contact us here.

Photo by Brian Nunnery, Praecipio Consulting.

Documenting performance tactics, improvements, and process methodology is considered a standard practice in business. The information documents ways a firm has improved its business processes over time, and how those processes can be applied to the daily execution of tasks. Spreadsheets, docs, and presentations should populate the collection. If updated regularly, the information serves as a reference when it’s needed—but is only successful if the information is timely and easily accessible.

The information described above should be considered a core asset to the firm. As a core asset, the information should be used daily to explain how and why the processes we use today work. If a firm’s operations are remarkably efficient, that efficiency should be explained with conceptual and metric information. The information should be an instant reference for employees.

Since instant access is the only way to achieve efficiency in the digital age, bookshelf-binder documentation won’t ensure success. A centralized process repository (CPR) will.

A CPR stores this information electronically, and should be active in reporting, monitoring, and managing business processes. They should constantly collect knowledge from employees, creating a reference system by merely holding the documents employees use daily to execute their projects. Ideally, the CPR provides information about:

• The definition of each process
• How the process is applied
• Who is responsible for executing it
• Inputs and outputs

…and information about how to measure their success and improve their steps.

Making the repository accessible at any time, with only a few clicks ensures efficiency. We believe centralizing information can lead to less complication and clearer information flow. It’s instantly profitable. Process-driven workspaces with document storage and automation abilities give firms the ability to centralize their data and use a central location to collaborate on projects and daily tasks. The CPR accomplishes this in any industry.

We emphasize to clients that well-defined processes identify conceptual or metric information worth capturing. When captured, this information can yield valuable decision-making information—a lifeline for success. Not to be cheesy, but this is where the acronym CPR gets its meaning. The centralized information repository literally keeps a business’ efficiency alive, without the mouth-to-mouth.

Would you like more from us? Contact us here.

Who ultimately determines the success of a technology consulting project? The consultant? The client’s primary contact? The client’s employees? One might say the consultant is ultimately responsible for their improvement’s success or failure, since he or she designed it. Another could contest this, saying the primary contact is equally responsible since they usually approve or disapprove of the design and ensures the adoption of the technology in their firm. But what about the employees? They’re usually the ones using the technology, so don’t they determine whether the consulting venture bears fruit for the client?

This illustration proves that all three parties determine the success or failure of a consulting project.

• The consultant provides a successful set of solutions, best practices, and frameworks to the firm
• The primary contact acts as a liaison between the consultant and the firm
• The employees, after training, apply and execute the solution and make it successful

Consulting should involve a positive, collaborative relationship between these three parties. Within this relationship, success is won or lost by how effective and organized the three parties communicate with each other. We believe communication in this context should be clear, concise, and supportive. Since the client’s employees are the ones who make our solutions worthwhile to our client, their engagement and well-being are important to us.

Here are some ways we promote effective communication in our service:

Marketing our service or product to our client’s employees early
As soon as the consultant and primary contact agree to begin working together, employees should know. Let them know change is coming early so they won’t be surprised when it does come—without making any promises you can’t keep. Telling employees when and why the change is needed, and how the change will happen early will ideally squash any false rumors and make employees valuable.

It may be useful in this early phase to gather feedback from employees on the desired change, to better engage employees in the consulting process and make them feel like they had a hand in deciding what the solution would look like, since they’re the ones who will use it. As consultants, we’re pleased when our client’s employees are engaged in our process.

We engage our client’s employees in our 5-step integrated delivery methodology, guiding our client through the Discovery, Design, Development, Activation, and Transfer of their solution. For example, during the Discovery step, we work with employees to map out our client’s business processes. Employees often help us pinpoint process problem areas like bottlenecks, capacity issues, delays, or waste. We then work with employees to create a solid base for developing process solutions. In the Design and Development steps, we work with employees to identify a process’ input and output sources (data points), allowing us to tailor our solution to fit our client’s processes.

Let employees get their hands on it
This too helps employees engage in the consulting process. Playing with the technology a firm is preparing to implement will help them learn to use it ahead of time, and will theoretically speed up their performance once they officially start using the solution in their business processes.

Spend time educating employees
While the employees can play with the technology ahead of time, they probably won’t have the time or ambition to “read the manual.” A training session(s) not only teaches employees how to use the technology, but helps reinforce the purpose of the change and answer any questions employees may have about the technology. Ensuring employees know how and why to use new solution to improve business process is essential to its success, no matter the cost of company time.

Celebrate and communicate success before, during, and after the project
A consultancy is a major business venture. A firm hires a consultant to give them a solution that will improve their performance and financial efficiency so much that it will not only offset the cost of the consultancy, but will yield a significant return long-term. Client management and employees each understand the risks and returns involved in such a venture; success is the only outcome that ensures the client’s are met by the consultant.

Project ROI’s aren’t always visible right away. Even if they are, not all employees involved in the consulting process will encounter them. There’s usually a lot of sensitivity around consulting projects, since the firm is paying a third party to implement an important solution for them. During and after the project, everyone involved will be carrying around binoculars looking for a sign that validates the money they’re spending.

With this in mind, communicating success to everyone involved in the project is essential. The client rightfully wants to know they’re getting what they’re paying for—something that will make them more efficient and profitable. Success not only boosts morale. It qualifies and legitimizes the project, and solidifies the client’s expectation of success.

Pay attention to how employees use the service or product
Remember, a client’s employees ultimately determine the success of a consultant’s solution. The amount of energy they put into adopting a solution, learning how it works, and integrating it into their daily operations determines whether the solution will improve a client’s business processes—and in turn their profitability.

We value our relationships with our clients. Practicing these values ensures our clients’ success and ability to accomplish their business goals on the shoulders of their employees.

Thirsty for more? Contact us here.

Image courtesy of Patrick Lane Photography.

Atlassian’s Jira has proven itself a leader in the issue tracking market in the last five years.

With 12,000 customers in over 100 countries, Jira allows enterprises to record and monitor every issue a user identifies until the issue is resolved from an innovative, customizable interface. It allows users to track issues through a wide variety of contextual filters. It makes issue tracking easy and efficient.

But considering Jira a collaborative software? Surely you can’t be serious.

Consider Jira’s project management capabilities. The Jira user can browse projects and measure progress by viewing:

• Recent changes to issue status
• Charts and reports articulating recently changed statuses, recently viewed issues, etc
• Planning/task boards for project management via GreenHopper.

GreenHopper allows the Jira user to keep up with tasks (issues, requirements, user stories, and virtually anything you want) by representing each task as a color-coded on-screen index card. Each card estimates and describes the effort required to complete each task, and can be dragged around the screen for customized organization.

Jira’s GreenHopper also offers users the Sprint Planning Board and Charting Progress to keep employees on the same page.

Employees using Jira can constantly update the progress of a variety of tasks. That kind of clarity– always having a go-to, updated project status– is worth its weight in gold in the scope of Business Process Management (BPM) due to its efficiency. It’s accomplished with collaboration through Jira software.

Jira’s collaborative abilities only raise the appeal it’s built on its issue tracking capabilities. While it’s not a SharePoint/document sharing-type tool, we consider it a valuable tool for enterprise collaboration in issue tracking.

Would you like more from us? Contact us here.

Ever heard of an ITIL implementation that was anything less than huge and complex? Well, we haven’t either. That’s why implementations require outstanding project management. This blog will share some of our perspective.

Implementing ITIL for starters: believe it or not, the technology is NOT the solution. The processes and people who carry them out are. A huge part of implementation is making sure you’re accurately communicating the purpose of ITIL to your employees, empowering them to understand exactly how to implement the framework comfortably, fitting your business model.

Also, never begin the implementation with unrealistic, lofty expectations. Such a strong desire for quick value may overwhelm the implementation process, which is certainly more of a journey than a sprint.

Bringing ITIL into a business first requires a foundation. The foundation is built on an initial assessment of needs. This typically involves a thorough gap analysis, which determines how much change will need to happen by the business to meet new ITIL standards. By establishing this early on, you’ll know exactly where to start building— and exactly what progress to expect. This, in turn, will narrow your scope to align with your intended business value from ITIL.

We have a passion to implement ITIL for businesses effectively and accurately. We believe we can help you through the process and build a solid foundation for your new ITIL framework—business value guaranteed.

Would you like more from us? Contact us here.

Processes are what make or break businesses. Process management is therefore a very big deal. In this blog, we’ll explain the very basic nature of collaborative software and how it can aid in process management—specifically task management.

Each process, of course, is made up of tasks that add value to inputs and ultimately impact the output (the product). As we’ve always said: if you put garbage into a process, you can expect to get garbage out of it. Garbage in, garbage out. If you put quality in up front…you get the point.

Keeping track of tasks is very much important. Whose task is this? Which tasks should I be working on? Too often process breakdowns occur when these questions come up and there’s not a one-stop-shop for clarity. That’s why collaboration software is so important.

Skipping irrelevant attributes, collaboration software can help employees communicate about a project or process almost instantly. The key advantage? Employees can collaborate without having to be in the same place. Using an integrated interface of email, chat, and file sharing, collaboration software consolidates communication into a single location for clarity and efficiency—accessible online. That’s an increase to business value.

Without using collaboration software, information gets scattered into different locations: a chat thread, an email conversation, a Post-It note. Process status updates are also scattered among these mediums, and truly knowing what the status is on an iteration of a process is significantly more time-consuming.

Collaborative software provides an instantly accessible home for project to-do lists. A key detail: customization. You can assign tasks to specific people, and easily rig the software up to notify an employee if they’re selected for a task. You can also group tasks according to projects and processes, and give selective access to employees. If you’re assigned a task, you can update the progress of your task so anyone checking the task list will be able to know where you are—keeping everyone on the same page. That is the basic idea of collaborative software.

Would you like more from us? Contact us here.

Businesses are already taking advantage of Google Wave’s wide-open door of innovative opportunities. This blog highlights Wave’s ability to support client needs and solve real customer service issues.

Wave is capable of allowing customers to interact with automated support robots produced by their service providers to help guide customers to answers to their issues. Billed as the next generation of collaborative software, Wave is—in this instance—allowing customers with problems to collaborate with support teams instantly.

When a customer contacts their provider’s support tool via Wave, an instance may be automatically generated in the provider’s issue tracking system. Human-to-human interaction is not necessary at first, since an automated support robot may be designed to reply to the customer’s Wave with relevant support articles based on the customer’s input. If the customer is not led to information needed to solve the issue, they may (at any time) choose to engage in a dialogue with a company representative. These operations are executed behind the scenes by the robot, thanks to appropriate coding.

When an issue is solved, a company may easily extract Wave’s support dialogue and embed it into the issue’s archive in their issue tracking software. It’s almost to good to be true. For example, Issue 92A is listed in a company’s issue tracking server—complete with its submission time, status reports, etc. In addition to this key data, the entire dialogue with the customer can be embedded into the records.

Mashable recently featured a post highlighting Salesforce’s use of Wave to save clients money on customer service support while actively tracking issues.

The technology and coding methods necessary to execute something like this are being shared more publicly. After all, Google wanted Wave to run off user-generated content. They’ve already generated a Wave developer’s guide to walk you through what it takes to use Wave for…well, whatever you want to. There may even be a way for Wave to make you coffee.

The team at Praecipio Consulting is ready to tailor Wave to fit any process, project management, issue tracking, or collaborative model you need to make your business more efficient and innovative. Wave’s just emerging into enterprise collaboration. Now is the perfect time to gain an innovative edge over competitors with Wave technology.

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Atlassian claims Jira and Confluence were “designed to complement each other.” What some don’t realize, however, is how easy and convenient this integration really is.

Confluence has proven itself as an effective project management tool, flexing its muscles as an innovative wiki allowing users to create and share rich content. Jira manages workflows and tracks issues in a well-designed, coherent user interface (UI).

For IT professionals using Jira to track issues, Confluence provides a fertile ground to collect a team’s knowledge. In Confluence, the team may collaborate by embedding Jira content (including graphics) into a collaboration space—and easily link Confluence and Jira pages. They may also embed Confluence pages into Jira. The 3-minute explanation shows you everything you need to know.

The embedding process is remarkably easy. We believe teams using Jira and Confluence can bank on this integration, from a project management perspective.

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The conceptually adventurous software Google Wave has been a hot topic lately. Talk of its arrival is almost as popular as talk of health care reform. Seems that Google Wave– which has only granted 100,000 invitations to its beta version– is being touted as a solution not only for enterprise collaboration, but also for project management. Unofficial Wave rumors also claim the software could cure the common cold.

There are still many folks asking “what is Wave?”

Google claims to have “re-thought” the concept of email when creating Wave. This is significant to our understanding of what Wave actually is. To unpack that a bit, imagine you send an email to your boss about a new project you’re working on—say, a marketing campaign for the new vehicle you’re manufacturing. You propose ideas for the campaign, and your boss replies with his ideas. You then reply with an attached PDF, but later realize a co-worker should be in on the conversation too. You forward her the thread and CC your boss, but your boss replies to your original reply, and you have to forward this message to your co-worker and CC your video-maker too.

This is exactly why Google wanted to re-think the concept of email—this hypothetical email conversation mutated into an unorganized, haphazard muck of messages. Wave centralizes each conversation into one “wave,” allowing you to rope in whoever needs to be involved in the wave by a drag-and-drop of the mouse. If a new person is invited to the wave later on, they can use Google’s “playback” tool to walk them through the conversation that’s already taken place and get up to speed. Documents may also be attached at any time by dragging and dropping.

Clearly, Google Wave is an evolution of standard email. It’s a more advanced model for collaboration.
Wave is also open-sourced. Google was pleased to announce this at their Wave demo a few months back. A number of Wave widgets are already in the works, including a widget allowing you to click on a Wave and immediately initiate a conference call with everyone in the Wave.

Now, all of this leads us to ask: “what can Wave do for my business?”

First, we don’t know yet. Nobody does. Like many other innovations (Twitter, for example), we won’t truly know how Wave may best be used until we actually try using it. With this said, we do have some great applications in mind to extend the functionality of the products and processes we work with.

Second, we’ve preliminarily concluded that Wave could have a profound impact on time efficiency within an organization—specifically in regard to internal collaboration and project management. Wave is presenting a solution to the seconds we waste getting lost in email messes like the one we mentioned earlier. You can probably think of a few similar examples yourself. Wave’s consolidation of shared information is worthy of praise, but is Wave’s solution advantageous enough for a company to implement it? That’s debatable.

Thankfully, Wave offers additional time-saving solutions, and has potential to change the face of business process management (BPM). Most current BPM tools have been known to lack easy-to-use features, centralized collaboration (intimately rooted in email clients), and real-time collaboration. Wave will make internal (employee to employee) and external (business to customer/client) collaboration a breeze, consolidating shared information inside an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand UI.

Will Wave benefit your business? Praecipio Consulting’s stance: we’re going to invest in Google Wave. We think it will revolutionize collaboration and communications. With Google’s embracing of federation and open source we can use it to extend the capabilities of current BPM and collaborative systems/software like SharePoint, JIRA, etc.

Would you like more from us? Contact us here.

Australian-based Atlassian debuts Jira 4 today, October 6.

Atlassian first debuted Jira in 2003 as an innovative issue tracking and project management software. As we mentioned in our previous blog Jira - Complexity Made Simple, Jira is a huge asset in enterprise collaboration. It’s completely permission/Java/web-based, highly customizable, and amazingly simple to use.

The key news about Jira 4? Atlassian has worked hard on integrating Web 2.0 capabilities into its latest version– and appears to be most proud of its new, “dynamic” user interface (UI).

• Jira 4′s home page will feature “click-and-drag” windows showing content the user chooses. It also includes widgets from other websites like Google. For example, a Jira home page may feature five boxes in three adjustable columns: current issues, priority issues, resolved issues, project folders, and local weather (via Google). These five boxes may now be dragged around to any location on the home screen, and color-coded for organization.
• Jira 4′s search function has been  ”2.0-ified,” so to speak. Now search results pop up below the search bar after each character you type, much like in the “to” box in most email interfaces. This will likely make the search for a particular issue simpler and more efficient.
• Jira 4′s Greenhopper plugin adds a broad collection of project management capabilities to Jira– great for development teams. GreenHopper represents issues as color-coded “cards,” sorted with what Atlassian calls “drag-and-drop simplicity”– which we consider a powerful organizational capability.

  We highly recommend Jira for your business’ issue tracking and project management processes. Our team is experienced in implementing and using Jira to its maximum potential. Jira 4′s 2.0 capabilities should make using the software more simpler and efficient than it’s ever been before.

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ITIL’s Release Management process bears a striking resemblance to ITIL Change Management—in fact, one could fairly consider Release Management to be a directly supportive process to Change Management. Release Management focuses on the practical need for organized coordination in the change process. It’s meant to ensure that changes are implemented in accordance to business needs and concurrent IT Service Management processes.

Release Management more specifically applies to changes to a “live” environment—that is, a working software or hardware environment (a word processor, email interface, software application, etc) that’s active, being used internally or externally. Release management protects these live environments by regulating the release of new configuration items; it uses the ITIL framework to control and monitor the flow of upgrades into live environments, where each upgrade is considered a “release.”

To more clearly illustrate this concept, consider these three levels of releases to a live environment—using the fictional email service “Mockingbird Version 1.0″ as an example:

• Major Releases introduce completely new functions to a service, drastically improving the service’s capabilities. Major Releases advance the version number by a full numerical increment—for example, Mockingbird Version 1.0 advances to Mockingbird Version 2.0.
• Minor Releases introduce fixes for known problems into the baseline technology of a service. Such changes would reflect themselves numerically by advancing the version number of a service by the first decimal place—for example, Mockingbird Version 2.0 advances to Mockingbird Version 2.1.
• Emergency Releases introduce quick (and at least temporary) fixes to repair unexpected problems that interrupt critical services. These changes advance a version number by the second decimal place—for example, Mockingbird Version 2.1 advances to Mockingbird Version 2.1.1.

It’s best to consider each release as a separately-deployed part of the service, the progression of which should look like this:

• Planning
• Building
• Testing
• Deploying

ITIL clearly describes two “levels” of Release Management in its book:

• Service Design (higher level)
• Release and Deployment Management (lower level)

The Service Design level should handle the framing and building of the release solution, while ITIL suggests the release project stages listed above should be handled by the lower level and should involve a project team, scope, design, and plan of its own. The Release and Deployment Management level literally drives the solution’s release, but only because of the sound development and planning by the higher level—meaning it is almost impossible to achieve lower level success without a solid understanding of the higher level.

We hope this blog provides you with a basic overview of Release Management. It’s sometimes difficult to explain ITIL concepts without using laymen’s terms– from our experience consulting companies on their use of ITIL, a basic overview is an essential foundation for understanding the application of ITIL principles into your business.

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The Cost of Quality (COQ) business model describes a method of increasing profits without increasing revenues.

Here’s how it works: COQ increases profit by shrinking business costs. If your business has a 5% profit margin, for example – and you decrease costs by 5% – you’ve doubled your profits. That’s simple enough, but how do you decrease costs?

COQ identifies the importance of shrinking costs without taking the usual cost-cutting measures like not buying everyone’s favorite pens or not stocking refreshments in the break room — the “let’s avoid morale buzz-kills to save a few bucks” approach to increasing profit. Instead, COQ promotes lessening mistakes and increasing business process efficiency.

Companies adopt and tweak COQ to reflect their business goals and in turn their profitability. The model applies to not-for-profit businesses too: budgets are tight; grants, revenues, or contributions may not increase, but the same valuable services need to be delivered with less and less money, right?

COQ is made up of three elements: conformance costs, non-conformance costs, and opportunity costs. We’ll explain these before we explain the rest of what the graphic illustrates:

Conformance Costs

Non-Conformance Costs

Opportunity Costs

Notice these three cost categories are not associated with the cost of producing the output. Materials needed to assemble a product (labor, supplies, etc) are not included. The three elements merely reflect the costs associated with the business process. As we always say, “the profit’s in the process.” The efficiency of your business processes determines your efficiency as a business. If you’re going to maximize your efficiency and profitability, you need a sound understanding of the cost of quality.

Think about it: process is where value is added and where profit is made. Consumers don’t squeeze oranges to make juice anymore. Okay, maybe on rare occasion, but who cuts down trees and processes timber as a raw material to make paper?

The cost of quality is associated with the cost incurred to ensure process outputs (products and services) meet customer requirements. For example, let’s say Company A manufactures pens, a process that takes ten steps to complete. About half of the time, the process works effectively, and high-quality pens are made. The other half of the time, however, is plagued by faulty manufacturing— lackluster execution in the assembly process. As a result, Company A has to keep half of its pens in its shop for a bit longer for fixing/repairing, incurring non-conformance costs. This leads to a lack of consistency. Ultimately, this waste is passed onto the customer with an increased price per unit and/or inferior product— making it more and more difficult to compete.

That’s why COQ’s biggest cost adjustment occurs in reducing non-conformance costs— tightening the process and ensuring customer requirements are met. This may require spending extra money to do some work over again.

Now, to run through the graphic:

• Conformance costs are important and help ensure a business’ success and stability. when optimizing your business, conformance costs should stay the same or in many cases increase.
• Non-conformance costs, as we’ve mentioned, need to drop significantly— though you can never expect to be without them, strive to get rid of them.
• Opportunity cost is the value of the next best choice. It’s the “what could have been.” If a business is suffering from non-conformance costs, the “what could have been,” is higher in the left portion of the graphic, where non-conformance costs are much higher. If a business is succeeding financially, there is little “what could have been,” therefore reducing the opportunity cost.
• Operating costs are constant. They’re the costs of a business’ building, utilities, licenses, etc— which fluctuate, but not enough to factor into this model.
• Profit looks like this: $$$. Reducing non-conformance generates more $$$.

So, how do you reduce non-conformance? Remember: the $$$’s are in the process.

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Monitoring, analyzing, and planning ahead are key principles of Business Process Management (BPM), and logically so. Businesses are responsible for their success, and every step of every process they conduct should ideally provide value to both the business and its customers. To assess this, a business must be concerned with Process Value Analysis—a qualitative analysis procedure allowing a business to apply questions to specific process steps to measure their success.

It is best to consider the term “value” in this context as referring to the value a customer expects and is willing to pay for. That value originates from the steps and processes a business performs to create the value—what some call a value chain, meaning every step within a process adds some amount of value to the final product or service.

Again, each step of a process should ideally provide value to both the business and its customers—this is what Process Value Analysis is meant to measure. Obviously this is not always clear-cut, since some steps don’t directly add value to a service but rather facilitate the adding of value. Those steps, though, are considered value-enabling steps—and still, though indirectly, give value to the final product. Non-value-adding steps are steps that have been incorporated into a process for some reason or another, but no longer add any value to the final product by any means. It is these non-value-adding (and money-eating) steps that should be eliminated.

Process Value Analysis is all about asking questions—after all, tough questions typically reveal the most accurate answers. These three categories and accompanying questions are useful for describing the types of value a specific process step may have:

Value added to customers: steps that directly impact customer satisfaction

• Do customers recognize the value of the process step?
• Does the step specifically impact the service requirements of its customers?
• Is the step necessary to meet the timelines and expectations of those served?
• Are customers willing to pay for this step?

Value added to operations: steps that support the ability to deliver services to the people served

• Does the step meet legal, health, safety, or environmental regulatory criteria?
• Is this process step being performed efficiently, or can it be refined?
• Could this process step be eliminated if a preceding step were performed differently?
• Could a technology application eliminate or automate this step?
• Does this process step fulfill an external regulatory requirement?
• Most importantly, would eliminating this step impact the quality of the service positively or negatively?

Non-value-added: steps that could be eliminated or changed without harming service levels or the organization

• What specific direct or indirect value does this step have for customers or operations?

Praecipio Consulting collaboratively assesses clients’ needs, priorities, and budget to improve clients’ processes and business operations. A huge part of our service is analyzing our clients’ process value and developing consistent, efficient task-flows to monitor the success of specific process steps. We believe Process Value Analysis is essential for maintaining a competitive advantage in business and dedicate our expertise to enabling our clients to get the greatest value out of their operations.

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Business Process Management (BPM) does not merely refer to managing a process, but rather refers to the entire lifecycle (Process LifeCycle Management: discovery, documentation, execution, monitoring, retirement) of business processes. Each aspect of this lifecycle is important in the development of a sound methodology for process management. This blog focuses on the discovery phase of the BPM lifecycle, and will explore and explain how “process mapping” aids in identifying process automation opportunities to save a company time and money.

Since process mapping can sometimes be a tedious, time-consuming task, is it always necessary when making changes in operations? Yes—making system changes without truly understanding how and why the process is operating can lead to costly mistakes, and can also create conditions that make it difficult for employees to work effectively and even damage employee morale. Process mapping also allows people, teams and departments to get down to a common ground and common language when discussing their business and challenges they are working to overcome.

When considering the impacts a process has on the success of your business, it is also important to analyze the impacts the process has within your business and consider the effects of downstream impacts. Processes typically have one or more outputs, and changing a process should logically account for a change in its output. Also, one process’ output are typically another process’ input—which could help or hamper productivity depending on how well each process is defined and managed.

According to a survey of 150 Information Technology (IT) directors conducted by Computer World UK, 15 to 20 percent reported low productivity and customer dissatisfaction as a result of process issues. The survey also reported 45 percent of companies said they had no BPM system in place—though they were planning on implementing one.

Process mapping enables a business to clearly define their current processes in chart form—listing each task within a process in detail and sequential order, creating a well-constructed visual that gives an easy-to-comprehend view of the process from beginning to end (process maps typically feature symbols that represent different types of tasks, and appear in a flowchart-like manner with arrows indicating how the process flows from task to task). Our process mapping methodology at Praecipio Consulting begins with mapping out process steps and details on a whiteboard and proceeding to transfer what is learned and developed on the whiteboard to Microsoft Visio for refining with the team. Basic steps to mapping a business process generally look like these:

• Gather and review all relevant and existing documentation of current business process
• Identify boundaries of current process
• Identify weaknesses of current process
• Identify inputs and outputs of the process
• Generate a flowchart of the above information, clearly describing each task and describing feedback loops
• Identifying measurable data points and the key attributes that direct a process through it’s life cycle

The mapping process prepares a business to:

• Generate a draft procedure for developing solutions/review
• Develop an implementation plan/review

Process mapping often reveals problem areas like bottlenecks, capacity issues, delays, or waste. Once identified, this knowledge provides a solid base for developing process solutions.

Praecipio Consulting emphasizes the importance of process mapping in our efforts to help businesses improve their operations. We’ve clearly defined the boundaries of our clients’ unique business operations; since some business processes overlap with others, clearly defining the scope and boundaries of a process is essential to mapping out its steps precisely. Our clients’ end product will facilitate effective management of business processes with the intelligent integration of appropriate technologies.

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As with any aspect of business, great processes and infrastructure do not always stay great—new technologies and customer needs arise all the time, and usually require changes to business procedures. The same is true in the context of IT Service Management, as new IT needs and technologies inevitably arise as time goes by—creating the need for the ITIL discipline of “Change Management.”

ITIL defines the goal of Change Management in the context of IT Service Management as “to ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes, in order to minimize the impact of change-related incidents upon service quality, and consequently improve the day-to-day operations of the organization.” If the ITIL language sounds a bit daunting to you, the definition more basically means Change Management is meant to ensure standardized methods and processes are used to implement all changes in a timely manner, and to achieve and maintain a healthy balance between the need for change and the potential impacts changes might have on the business processes they affect—ie predictability. Every change to IT infrastructure must of course be managed and controlled systematically, minimizing the impact of IT services delivered to the customer.

The need to change IT infrastructure may result from problems observed in a business process or from external legislation—or merely from the desire to make a business process more efficient and productive. Once a need is identified and proven, a change may be developed. ITIL’s discipline becomes valuable at this point as a change becomes drafted, documented, and implemented.

ITIL V3 prescribes these seven questions to ask when proposing the implementation of a change—titled the Seven “R’s:”

• Who raised the change?
• What is the reason for the change?
• What is the return required from the change?
• What are the risks involved in the change?
• What resources are required to deliver the change?
• Who is responsible for the build, test and implementation of the change?
• What is the relationship between this change and other changes?

Other relevant questions to ask when proposing a change may be:

• What is the cost of the change?
• What is the timeline for implementing the change?

The leadership team at Praecipio Consulting consists of experts whose job is to implement change for companies based on ITIL. We have helped our clients implement valuable changes to their IT infrastructure, and have a great deal of familiarity with defining good and bad processes by leveraging ITIL best practices. Change Management provides a way of managing and controlling the way changes are initiated, assessed, planned for, scheduled and implemented—Praecipio Consulting offers you the intelligence and support you need to not only guide you through implementing IT Service Management Changes, but also to provide you with a proven model and valuable business direction for a future of changes.

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Incident Management is debatably the most important area of IT Service Management because of its direct impact to the Services customers rely on. One of the ITIL disciplines, the focus of Incident Management is to restore services following an incident as quickly as possible—be it a business operations issue or merely an internal or external lack of technical understanding. Incident Management activities, often executed by a Service Desk, include:

• Discovering details of an incident
• Matching incidents against known problems
• Resolving incidents quickly
• Prioritizing incidents according to their impact and urgency
• Escalating incidents to other teams when needed to ensure timely resolution

Incident Management is one of the most difficult ITIL disciplines to maintain—operating a Service Desk for anyone struggling with technology can be a daunting task given the consistent learning curves existing as businesses adopt new technologies and optimize old ones. This is why Incident Management should be a big deal to businesses.

ITIL Incident Management aims to minimize disruption to the business by restoring service operation to agreed levels as quickly as possible. The total Incident Life Cycle is described as follows:

• Occurrence
• Detection
• Diagnosis
• Repair
• Recovery / Restoration

The above steps of the Incident Life Cycle serve as key data points that, when measured, provide a great deal of value. The intelligence that is derived from these data points helps IT organizations focus and invest their time in those projects and activities that will shrink the Meantime to Recovery (aka Mean Time to Repair). In the event the time it takes to detect an outage is long (Detection Time Stamp minus Occurrence Time Stamp), an IT organization can focus on automating outage detection or increase the ease of reporting issues by clients to the Service Desk. In the event the Diagnosis time (Diagnosis Time Stamp minus Detection Time Stamp) is long, the IT Organization should focus on training, escalation path definition/automation and/or tool sets to ensure IT staff has the adequate means to make an accurate assessment. Without going into more detail, it is clear that a well-defined process like Incident Management can help streamline and shorten the Incident Life Cycle thereby minimizing the Meantime to Recovery.

Incident Management is often the first process instigated when introducing the ITIL-quality framework to a Service Desk, and offers the most immediate and highly visible cost reduction and quality gains. Some brief reasons why you should consider implementing ITIL-based Incident Management:

• Achieve and maintain impressive levels of customer service
• Provide outstanding service availability
• Achieve overall staff efficiency and productivity
• Significantly improve customer satisfaction

Praecipio Consulting has a proven track record of excellent Incident Management/Service Desk support for its clients, and intentionally aims to minimize disruption to their clients’ business by restoring and applying ITIL framework to incident recording, tracking, and resolution.

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Just what is a Configuration Management Database (CMDB)?

For starters, it’s not a database—or, rather, not merely a database. A CMDB is a virtual warehouse holding information from every nook and cranny of an information system. CMDBs show which system components are needed to create efficient business processes. It can be seen as both an encyclopedia of IT services and a DNA map of a business’ IT environment. It’s a decision support tool.

ITIL v2 defined a CMDB as “a database that contains all relevant details of each CI (configuration item) and details of the important relationships between CIs.” ITIL v3 now defines a CMDB as “a database used to store Configuration Records throughout their lifecycle. The Configuration Management System maintains one or more CMDBs, and each CMDB stores attributes of CIs, and relationships with other CIs.”

A product of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), CMDBs are important because they align technology with business process. An example of this? It’s common sense that without timely information, bad decisions can be made by the business unintentionally. ITIL-based CMDBs control workflows, and use a workflow to manage and collect process metrics and present them logically and accurately.

While there are many variations of CMDB workflows, five common high-level steps include:

• Identification: To put it simply, “identifying” IT components and their inclusion in the CMDB.
• Status: Recording of the status of all CIs in the CMDB, and keeping them updated.
• Control: The management of CIs, indicating who is authorized to ‘change’ each one.
• Status: Recording of the status of all CIs in the CMDB, and keeping them updated.
• Verification: Reviewing data to make sure the CMDB is accurate and timely.

A properly implemented CMDB system can save an enterprise quite a bit of cash. There are, however, some direct overhead costs associated with the data capture process itself. The CMDB’s ROI will depend on the quality and reusability of the data it monitors, company size, and business strategy.

The CMDB bottom line: the more automated and consistent asset management methodologies become, the higher the ROI will climb. CMDBs allow businesses to become more efficient internally and more effective in their market.

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It is awe-inspiring to consider the vast number of software applications that attempt to make business organization simple and efficient. In issue tracking and business process management, organizational, process-driven technology is crucial to successfully processing information and facilitating progress. Atlassian, an Australian-headquartered software company specializing in collaboration software, has produced a widely-used software that makes the issue tracking process work more simply than ever before.

The software, Jira, currently serves over 12,000 customers in over 100 countries. An issue-tracking system (ITS), Jira allows enterprises to record and monitor every issue a user identifies until the issue is resolved—issues ranging from simple customer questions to detailed technical reports of errors or bugs.

We have acquired sound and valuable knowledge of Jira’s user and process benefits from our own experience amassed through client implementations of the product—highlighted here:

• Highly customizable to unique business processes
• Amazingly simple to use and easy to train employees
• Completely permission-based (people may view statuses of issues without the capability to change them)
• Completely web-based
• Java-based (runs in Tomcat, and is compatible with most Operating Systems)
• Flexible database (supports Oracle, Postgres, etc)
• Task change email notifications

These perks boil down to a centralized view of a business’ entire team. Jira makes it easy to view and track all tasks assigned to a person, group, or project with very few clicks—allowing non-technical users to benefit from it. Businesses can tailor Jira to make it useful for nearly every imaginable business process, from marketing tasks to help desk requests.

Adopting appropriate software for our clients’ business processes is what we do at Praecipio Consulting. Atlassian, our business partner, has developed and produced a magnificent product in Jira that we recommend highly for streamlining our clients’ BPM and ITIL implementations. Our implementations of Jira have a lasting, positive impact because of our focus on business processes.

Would you like more from us? Contact us here.

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a comprehensive documentation of best practices in IT Service Management; the library consists of a compilation of texts providing guidance for the successful delivery of IT services. ITIL was developed due to business organization’s growing dependency on IT.

This dependency comes as organizations are implementing the use of innovative information technologies to simplify and speed-up business processes ultimately lowering costs—dramatically increasing the need for high-quality IT services. We provide a well-designed implementation framework for the delivery of operations improvements and initiatives based on ITIL best practices. We’ll help you go from ITIL theory to the practice of implementing an IT Service Management Solution.

Our steps:

• Assessment – Define and prioritize
• IT Management Strategy – Determine current and future needs
• Service portfolio definition – Catalog and understand services
• Solution design – Ensure integrated approach solves problems
• Solution deployment – Deliver, transfer and transition

Your results:

• IT-Business Alignment
• Cost savings
• Operational Excellence and Maturity
• Maximized ROI on Business’ Investments in IT
• Predictability

We love helping others—especially with IT.

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Business process management (BPM) promotes effectiveness and efficiency within a business. BPM applies to any practical process within a business.

An important BPM principle: good processes bring efficient workflow and increased revenue; bad processes bring inefficient and decreased revenue. If you put garbage into a process, you can expect to get garbage out of it. Garbage in, garbage out. If you put quality in, however…you get the idea. So, how do you ensure your processes are successful? Predictability and repeatability are great qualities to shoot for. We’ll explain them in a bit.

Monitoring the effectiveness of your business processes regularly is important. It improves your business value and reduces costs. Identifying potential or actual bottlenecks in a process’ human-to-human, human-to-system, or system-to-system workflows can save your business money by keeping costs down!

A huge contributing factor to good BPM is a process’ integration with technology—a tactic the team at Praecipio Consulting is well-versed in developing and implementing. We are capable and experienced in adopting appropriate software as well as developing new, custom software that enables our clients’ business processes to be directly executed in an efficient, organized manner.

Software can improve business process. That’s not a new fact to anyone. We develop intuitive software that uses services in connected applications to consolidate and perform business operations including issue tracking (e.g. tracking orders/deliveries, pending invoices, service requests, etc.) with ease—streamlining our clients’ BPM and improving their connections with their customers.

When working with our clients, Praecipio Consulting takes into strong consideration two important factors in BPM technology:  repeatability and predictability.

• Predictability. The business environment is rarely predictable, so it is important to make sure the processes your business does have control over are as predictable and reliable as possible. Now, market conditions can vary widely, so it is also important to ensure these processes are flexible enough to adjust to inevitable market variables.

• Repeatability. Business processes generally include tasks in production, collaboration, administration, and miscellaneous activities. Production and administration are very valuable to a business, and also very repeatable. Collaboration is also very valuable, but is not always repeatable. Miscellaneous activities are usually not valuable to a business, and are rarely consistent enough to be repeatable.

We consider ourselves successful only when we develop a BPM system capable of managing both repeatable and non-repeatable processes—an organized, financially feasible system to manage both high-value and low-value processes. Such innovation puts us and our clients on the cutting-edge of success in business process.

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Microsoft SharePoint is debatably the best business information and document management platform on the market—that is, if it is used correctly.

Microsoft’s goal for SharePoint was to provide a simple, familiar, consistent user experience, integrating a variety of applications (email, document storage, data sheets, etc).  Supporting embedded process management modules and the ability to host web sites that access shared workspaces, SharePoint’s management platform can potentially save businesses money by:

• reducing man hours, increasing the use of electronic forms and allowing faster locating of information
• reducing printing, paper and associated costs by increasing the use of electronic forms
• reducing response times and problems associated with lags by allowing employees to have instant access to shared, well-organized data
• reducing IT support and training costs by offering such a versatile and inclusive platform.

Praecipio Consulting has taken full advantage of SharePoint’s capabilities; for this reason, it has proved remarkably valuable to our business operations. We have deliverable reference, technical, and white paper documents stored for easy, simple open-source access. We also boost our employee productivity by simplifying everyday tasks like reporting common business activities and issue tracking. We even base our accounting operations in SharePoint by allowing our employees to log hourly time and company expenses, governing these operations by making use of SharePoint’s ability to specifically restrict the privileges of individual employees. These restrictions can also be imposed on the editing of important business documents—SharePoint allows authors to create and submit content for approval and scheduled deployment to the Internet. We can therefore effectively manage and re-purpose our content to gain increased business value. Our mindful leverage of SharePoint’s abilities and applications has helped us benefit practically and financially as a business. We value our learned expertise and best practices, and hope to assist other businesses in benefiting from SharePoint in the ways appropriate for them. However, again, SharePoint will likely prove useful to a business if they use it to its full capacity.

SharePoint can be an expensive investment when purchased through Microsoft. Server license prices increase incrementally depending on the size of your business; pricing can steep dramatically with larger companies. In addition to setup and purchase costs, of course, one must consider the cost of training employees to use it and the cost of support from Microsoft (given its clout, Microsoft is able to demand a high price for its support services, which is otherwise unheard of).

In order to save our clients money, however, Praecipio Consulting offers SharePoint hosting servcies. In the past we have driven our clients’ Microsoft Exchange costs down to an affordable monthly price and now offer our clients affordable SharePoint/Microsoft Exchange services. Finding an intelligent, affordable, professional SharePoint hosting provider can be difficult and nerve-wracking, but Praecipio Consulting’s new service provides our clients with a convenient, cost-efficient hosting of their SharePoint instances.

Now, another concern businesses considering SharePoint may have:  SharePoint works best with the Microsoft family; it was meant to integrate the Windows OS, MS Office, Internet Explorer, etc. If a business is looking to collaborate with traveling teams, clients, and partners, they must keep their fingers crossed in hope that such cross-platform interaction will work smoothly. Microsoft obviously desires and nearly induces a full commitment from its customers, and logically has no reason to design its services to run quickly and smoothly in non-Microsoft environments. Fortunately for our clients, we have the ability to implement other frameworks into our SharePoint platform in the event a client operates in a non-Microsoft environment—a huge asset that sets us apart from other SharePoint hosting providers.

If your business plans to take full advantage of SharePoint’s advanced abilities—SharePoint can become a valuable asset to your business and its ability to collaborate with open-source technology.

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The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is currently the best (and only) comprehensive documentation of IT Service Management best practices.

The library is made up of a series of books which thoroughly explain (in really, really big laymen’s terms) what quality IT services should look like. The books describe how IT services should operate—as well as what base structure and functionality an organization needs to be able to effectively support IT.

Thousands of companies around the world have adopted an ITIL philosophy from the library, which clearly defines the organizational structure and skills requirements for an IT organization. ITIL theory works. The library’s standard operational management procedures and practices allow the organization to effectively manage an IT operation. The operational procedures and practices apply to all aspects within the IT Infrastructure.

The major disciplines (main focuses applicable to IT service providers) of ITIL are as follows:

• Service Desk (Help Desk)
• Incident Management
• Problem Management
• Change Management
• Release Management (Software Control and Distribution)
• Configuration Management
• Service Level Management
• Capacity Management
• Continuity Management (Contingency Planning)
• Availability Management
• Financial Management (Cost Management for IT Services)

While these terms are probably familiar to most ITIL personnel, the formal explanation ITIL gives these disciplines is typically far beyond the level of sophistication in the majority of IT organizations. Additionally, the specificities and separation of IT tasks within each of these ITIL support disciplines are considerably more defined than those which most companies have implemented in the past. The distinction between “incidents” and “problems,” for example, is something companies still do not usually recognize—whereas ITIL clearly defines the two terms as separate disciplines with their own unique set of processes.

An incident is active only until service is restored; a problem continues to be active until appropriate outputs/remedies are created and implemented. Incidents and problems are therefore not synonymous—instead incidents, problems, and changes have thorough relations with each other.

The “library” itself continues to evolve. ITILv3, the library’s third edition, was released in May 2007 and includes five distinct volumes: ITIL Service Strategy, ITIL Service Design, ITIL Service Transition, ITIL Service Operation, and ITIL Continual Service Improvement. The volumes can be purchased from their publisher, TSO Books.

ITIL is a framework. Praecipio Consulting has qualified ITIL-certified consultants with the experience, intelligence, and innovative ability to help your company implement ITIL confidently and effectively. Understanding ITIL can be difficult; if this is the first content you’re reading about it, you’ll probably agree. We wish to implement ITIL in a manner that makes the most sense for our clients’ business models. As the de facto standard and model for IT Service Management, ITIL not only enables businesses to run more efficiently and reliably—it also helps IT managers reduce incurred costs associated with IT Service Delivery.

If you’re curious, ITIL was originally created by the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) with the sponsorship of the British government, and is a registered trademark of the UK Government’s Office of Government Commerce (usually known as the OGC).

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