Archive for May, 2009
Agility! An Approach to Fight Global Recession
Most of the countries all over the world are going through the phase of economic recession. Many old and big companies have already been brought down on their knees to bite the dust. Many companies as well as countries have become bankrupt or are on the verge of it. Millions and millions of people have lost their jobs. Many people have lost millions and billions of dollars. People in general are scared and fearsome. This is not the first time that the global economy is going through recession and this is also not the last time. There is a pattern involved in it. On an average it is happening after every 8-10 years.
Information Technology industry too takes the impact of global recession and a difference in the average IT investment can be monitored during the times of recession. Analysis of IT investment shows that Information Processing equipment and Software investment increased a modest 5% in 1990 recession before taking a major jump to 15% in 1992. However the 2001 recession, in contrast with the decline in 1990, was much harder on IT spending because there was a great deal of overspending on IT equipment and software in the latter part of 1990s. The need for extra hardware and software for Y2K remediation ended abruptly in 2000. The 2001 recession was somewhat unique in that this huge overhang of excess IT equipment needed to be burned off before investment levels could recover. This intensified the negative impact of the 2001 recession on IT spending. However the current recession bears remarkable similarities to the recession of 1990, which was led by the financial sector. It also bears some similarities in IT spending patterns during the 2001 recession. In either case, over the past 20 years the negative impact on IT spending has never lasted more than two years. Therefore, the analysis shows IT spending will remain weak through 2009, with a recovery in 2010.
IT Agility
A key goal of every IT department is to reduce the time and effort needed to deliver value to the business. To accomplish this, the best long-term trend we have in IT beyond Moore’s law and the power of the Internet is the improvement of IT agility. Increasing IT agility is important because it provides a value innovation and delivery method that harnesses these fundamental advances in infrastructure.
Agile practices enable teams to build less, but return the same value by focusing on early delivery of the features that have the highest business value and not wasting money on the features that don’t.
IT agility is driven by three major innovations: agile development, Software as a Service (SaaS), and Web 2.0 social networks. However, without agility in development and software releases, the innovations of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 are elusive.
Agile Process Model
Agile development is an iterative and incremental (evolutionary) approach to software development which is performed in a highly collaborative manner by self-organizing teams within an effective governance framework with “just enough” ceremony that produces high quality software in a cost effective and timely manner which meets the changing needs of its stakeholders.
The following illustration depicts a typical agile development model.
Agile methods choose to do things in small increments with minimal planning, rather than long-term planning. Iterations are short time frames (known as ‘timeboxes’) which typically last from one to four weeks. Each iteration is worked on by a team through a full software development cycle, including planning, requirements analysis, design, coding, unit testing, and acceptance testing when a working product is demonstrated to stakeholders. This helps to minimize the overall risk, and allows the project to adapt to changes quickly. Documentation is produced as required by stakeholders. An iteration may not add enough functionality to warrant releasing the product to market, but the goal is to have an available release (with minimal bugs) at the end of each iteration. Multiple iterations may be required to release a product or new features.
Team composition in an agile project is usually cross-functional and self-organizing without consideration for any existing corporate hierarchy or the corporate roles of team members. Team members normally take responsibility for tasks that deliver the functionality of an iteration. They decide for themselves how they will execute during an iteration.
Agile methods emphasize face-to-face communication over written documents, when working in the same location, or in different locations but having video contact daily, communicating by videoconferencing, voice, e-mail etc.
Most agile teams are located in a single open office to facilitate such communication. Team size is typically small (5-9 people) to help make team communication and team collaboration easier. Larger development efforts may be delivered by multiple teams working toward a common goal or different parts of an effort. This may also require a coordination of priorities across teams.
No matter what development disciplines are required, each agile team will contain a customer representative. This person is appointed by stakeholders to act on their behalf and makes a personal commitment to being available for developers to answer mid-iteration problem-domain questions. At the end of each iteration, stakeholders and the customer representative review progress and re-evaluate priorities with a view to optimizing the return on investment and ensuring alignment with customer needs and company goals.
Agile methods emphasize working software as the primary measure of progress. Combined with the preference for face-to-face communication, agile methods usually produce less written documentation than other methods. In an agile project, documentation and other project artifacts all rank equally with working product. Stakeholders are encouraged to prioritize them with other iteration outcomes based exclusively on business value perceived at the beginning of the iteration.
Enterprise agile adoption roadmap
Like any mission-critical systems or initiative, you need a vision and roadmap to steer your adoption and rally the troops. The roadmap for an enterprise to adopt agility is described in the following illustration.
There are three keys to effectively managing this process:
- Work incrementally, in an agile fashion, through the steps and gain proficiency before widespread scaling.
- Develop a vision/roadmap and change backlog with key executives before you attempt to move up to step 3 and beyond.
- Share the vision and roadmap with the entire organization and manage the rollout in a collaborative fashion with complete transparency.
Many of these rollouts have started with a grassroots effort to get to Step 1 and Step 2. With the help of external coaching and parallel tool rollouts, many companies have taken more aggressive, “flash-cut” moves with top-down leadership and investment to jump to step 3 in the roadmap within months.
Flash-cut approaches
Given the pressure and opportunity of this crisis, as well as the increasing number of public proof points showing how large organizations can quickly transition to agile, you might be thinking about your ability to do accelerate your adoption and capture savings in 2009 from your efforts. There are three things to heed while considering this:
- Adopting agile needs complete management buy-in and a true sense of urgency. What is it going to take for your management team to get buy-in to adopt Agile on a major portion of your organization?
- You are going to need a strategic partner to help you manage this organization change effort. I do not know a company that followed the flash-cut approach without an outside coaching or consulting firm. As a result, you will have to budget for this investment and the time to choose and schedule them. These partners will help you build the organization capacity for agile while also supporting the professional development of your middle managers as the organization becomes flatter and leaner.
- This is a whole system change from a world of plan-driven to value-driven ideas. As a result, you will see immediate changes in your process, organization, and technology. This transition will set up a culture of continuous improvement and even drive changes in your overall development and business strategies. To make this transition go well, you are going to need to implement a collaborative project management solution to provide visibility across your development teams.
Conclusion
We don’t know how long or how deep this recession will be. Belt-tightening and staffing cuts almost seem inevitable. You can either reduce costs by just cutting your budget, or you can use this opportunity to make systemic changes in your business. Enterprise IT agility is proven to do that — more so than investments in technology point solutions that only have a point in time savings. Most important, this approach will help ensure the savings from today’s cuts do not create worse problems in the long run.
Guest post by Muhammad Usama Alam, who is a software engineer and web developer with over 8 years of experience in designing and developing business solutions for enterprise. You can follow him on twitter.
50+ Truly Useful Photoshop Tutorials For Amazing Photo Effects
Designers love all of those photoshop tutorials that can help them to learn more and more everyday and give them direction to design more beautiful and attractive creative works. And the demand for Photo Effects tutorials are too much in these days. We know this very well and SmashingApps is all about to feature all those smashing stuffs that are free and useful for designers. Today, we are going to list down 50+ Truly Useful Photoshop Tutorials For Amazing Photo Effects. We hope you all will like this collection.
You are welcome if you want to share more Photoshop tutorials that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at smashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.
You may be interested in these older posts
43 Really Useful Photoshop Tutorials For Excellent 3d Effects
17 Mind-Blowing Digital Painting Tutorials Of Beautiful Girls
31 Masterpieces Of Creative And Clever Advertising Concepts
23 Magical Photographs To Believe That Are Not Photoshopped
13 Premium-Like WordPress Themes That Are Free And Stunning
21 Really Stunning Photoshopped Photos For Creative Inspiration
43 Of The Extremely Creative Wonders Of Macro Photography
27 Best Places You Should Visit To Get Incredible Web Design Inspiration!
13 Simple And Elegant Free WordPress Themes
21 Extremely Vibrant And Creative Advertisements With Animals
39 Masterpieces Of Creative Advertisements
17 Digital Image Illustration Which You Probably Never Seen Before!
15 Digital Photo Manipulation From Flickr To Get Inspiration
23 Awesome Photos That Look Like They’re Photoshopped But Are Not
How to Digitally Paint Lip Gloss with a Tablet
Reducing 5 O’Clock Shadow And Beard Stubble In Photoshop
Airbrushing – Natural Smooth Skin
Photo to illustration Vector EffectÂ
Retouch A Girl with Lighting Focus
Enhance eyes and make them stand out in photoshop tutorial
Easy Digital Nose Job In Photoshop
Photo retouch adding lipglossÂ
Age Progression – Photoshop Tutorials
Simple photo adjustment manipulation
Comprehensive Skin and Facial Enhancing
Easy composition but nice result
Breathtaking Split Toning Effect
Create A Portrait Studio Background
Create a Face Shattering Effect
Portrait Retouching Techniques
Adding Light Streaks To A PhotoÂ
Blending And Combining Photos With Layer Masks
Guest Post by Umair Jawed who is a Graphics and Web Designer and a part-time blogger.
Now Feel The Power Of Sending Voice Messages Out To Entire Phone Lists In Seconds
DialMyCalls lets everyone tap into the power of sending voice messages out to entire phone lists in seconds. No messing around with expensive equipment or calling servers because now you can send your own voice messages from 2 to 20,000 phone numbers all within a few minutes.
You can use DialMyCalls to send group announcements to your friends. Remind them of parties, events, or any other announcement you may have. It’s really fun to use and even useful in daily life. You can use their free service and send 1 group call per day to 25 people or less that is sounds interesting.
From their easy to use contacts control panel, you can easily add, remove, and modify your call lists.Their call groups feature makes it nice and easy to manage multiple calling lists from one account. Recordings are messages or greetings that you create that are played for your call recipients. You can add, modify, or delete all your recordings at any time. There are 3 different options for creating recordings:
- Record Over Your Phone
- Upload A MP3 or WAV File
- Use Their Text-to-Speech Tool
23 Stunning Examples Of Digital Art & Manipulation
There are hundreds of posts available on the internet about photo manipulation. Today, we are posting another post that probably will make you look twice. In this post we are listing 23 Stunning Examples Of Digital Art & Manipulation. I appreciate to all those talented designers who created these excellent graphics with their efforts, imaginations and creativity to give us a chance to see these wonders. This list is not long in numbers but I promise you that when you start browsing them in details it will surely refresh you and force you to know more about these designers. These are the mind-blowing creations of creative designers who use their creativity with a different angle and approach to get the result that makes a difference.
You are welcome if you want to share more Digital Art & Manipulation that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at smashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well. Click on the images to go from where the images has been taken and learn more about their creators and to appreciate them.
You may be interested in these older posts
31 Masterpieces Of Creative And Clever Advertising Concepts
23 Magical Photographs To Believe That Are Not Photoshopped
13 Premium-Like WordPress Themes That Are Free And Stunning
21 Really Stunning Photoshopped Photos For Creative Inspiration
17 Mind-Blowing Digital Painting Tutorials Of Beautiful Girls
43 Of The Extremely Creative Wonders Of Macro Photography
27 Best Places You Should Visit To Get Incredible Web Design Inspiration!
13 Simple And Elegant Free WordPress Themes
21 Extremely Vibrant And Creative Advertisements With Animals
39 Masterpieces Of Creative Advertisements
17 Digital Image Illustration Which You Probably Never Seen Before!
15 Digital Photo Manipulation From Flickr To Get Inspiration
23 Awesome Photos That Look Like They’re Photoshopped But Are Not
Dream In a Puddle 2 by pixelcriminal
Portrait Manipulation by rosarioagro
Flower Manipulation by ladyrapid
Horror Photo Manipulation by vissroid
Girl Photo Manipulation by Yamshi
Please don’t go tonight by vampire-zombie
Renault Logan by Adhemas Batista
Velocity Manipulation by =HYPD
The Renaissance of Colors by Alberto Seveso
Photomanipulation by David Waters
And Then There Was Light by valse-des-ombres
The Little Kitsch Mermaid by aDolfoZee
Arterical Photon by EtherEagle
Illlustrated Girl Alberto Seveso
15 Excellent And Useful Microsoft Silverlight Tutorials & Resources
Microsoft Silverlight is a free framework empowering you to build new types of applications for the Web regardless of target platform or browser, using all the familiar features, languages and tools of the .NET framework. To see the magic of Silverlight, we must suggest you to check out this showcase applications on Microsoft’s website. Here is the list of 15 Excellent And Useful Microsoft Silverlight Tutorials & Resources that includes some useful tutorials and few great applications that has been developed on Microsoft Silverlight. We are hoping that you will learn further on Microsoft Silverlight after reading out this post.
You are welcome to share if you know more Microsoft Silverlight tutorials and resources which our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.
You may be interested in these older posts
25 Excellent And Useful Adobe AIR Tutorials & Resources
11 Free And Useful Open-Source Alternatives For Designers
13 Online Free Web Apps That You Would Really Love To Use
31 Power Tools For Twitter Lovers To Make Lives Easier
11 Premium But Free And Useful Web Apps For Designers
15 Free Tools For Mac OS X You Should Bookmark
11 Free Windows Programs Alternatives For Linux
19 Most Essential Open Source Applications That You Probably Want To Know
17 Wonderful Free Tools To Make Designers Lives Easier!
17 Online Free Web Based Applications That You Probably Would Love To Use!
17 Online Free Web Based Applications That You Probably Love To Use!
21 Online Free Web Based Applications That You Probably Would Love To Use Every Day!
23 Free And Online Web Based Applications Specially If You Are Designer Or Developer
6 Free Tools To Help You Run Windows Applications On Linux
21 Free Apps For Mac OS X That Are Absolutely Useful
In this article, you will have a first look at Silverlight that focuses on enabling Rich Internet Application (RIA) development.
The Importance of an Impressive User Interface
In this lesson of the Silverlight tutorial, you will learn about the elements used for drawing graphics and to animate graphics by using Expression Blend.
Creating a XAML project for the Web
They are beginning this tutorial by the creation of a project for a Web application, running in a navigator, and who requires the Silverlight plug-in, plus the SDK for programmers.
Silverlight Tutorials Collection
A good and useful collection of Silverlight tutorials if you want to learn how to get start with it?
How To Create An Animated Navigation Bar
This article is a tutorial on how to use Silverlight 2.0 to make a nifty animated navigation bar much like the one at the top of the Silverlight.net website.
Virtual Earth Silverlight Minimap Tutorial
In this tutorial author is going to show you how to create a simple styled minimap to use in your Virtual Earth Silverlight projects that looks exactly like the one we used in our Twittermap demo.
Silverlight 3 Photo Gallery Wall Application
A downloadable source code of Silverlight 3 Photo Gallery Wall Application with useful information to understand how it was done.
Silverlight With Java Script Tutorial
This tutorial will introduce interactive animation. With Interactive Animation, we have the ability to start and stop our animations when we want without having to resort to subterfuge.
Creating Rich Data Forms in Silverlight 3 – Introduction
In this article author will show you the basics of the DataForm control – what you can do with it and why you should use it. He will show you how you can bind an item or a collection of items to a data form. Microsoft guys have done a great job with this control, so there are many features that you can use directly without much pain.
Securing Silverlight Application and WCF Service using ASP.Net Authentication Techniques
In this article you can learn the securing Silverlight Application and WCF Service using ASP.Net Authentication Techniques.
Animation Easings in Silverlight 3
In this author will describe in details how you can use the BackEase animation.
The Silverlight BlockText Control
The main idea is to let Silverlight’s Grid do the work. So at the beginning Author split the given string into words and draw them hidden into temporary grid, so he get the ActualWidth of each word.
Introduction to XAML Browser Applications
This article gives an introduction to XBAPs and provides information about the differences between WPF Standalone applications, Silverlight, and XBAPs. Nihar explains the steps used to create a sample XBAP application and how to deploy and run it.
This is the collection of 50 sample applications developed in Silverlight.
22 Motivational And Excellent Photography Dedicated To The Labor Day
Labor Day is an annual holiday celebrated all over the world that resulted from the labor union movement, to celebrate the economic and social achievements of workers. The majority of countries celebrate Labor Day on May 1, and it is popularly known as May Day and International Workers’ Day. But why we are talking this? Because today, Labor Day is celebrating all over the world, and we are trying to take part by giving labors a warm tribute. Today, we are posting another post that probably will make you look twice. In this post we are listing 22 Motivational And Excellent Photography Dedicated To The Labor Day. I appreciate to all those talented photographers who taken these excellent photos with their efforts, imaginations and creativity to give us a chance to see these photographic wonders from their creative eyes. This list is not long in numbers but I promise you that when you start browsing them in details it will surely refresh you and force you to know more about Labor Day and motivate you to appreciate them. These are the wonder creations of photographers who use their creativity with a different angle and approach to get the result that makes a difference.
You are welcome if you want to share more creative photography that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at smashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well. Click on the images to go from where the images has been taken and learn more about their creators and to appreciate them.
HARDWORKED HAND by Cristian Naidin
Traditional farming by Janusz Wanczyk
The Sweets-Maker by Mitchell Kanashkevich
Sand Collector by Mitchell Kanashkevich
Hard at Work by Mitchell Kanashkevich
Tea Maker by Mitchell Kanashkevich
Working at the Ijen Crater by Mitchell Kanashkevich
Pulling out the morning catch by Mitchell Kanashkevich
A Fisher of Fish by Robert Larson
The Chilly Bearers by Prateek Dubey
The Long March by Richard Ford
Men in the Farm by Christian Aslund
Horsemen. Calcutta by Claude Renault
