Project Management
7 Excellent Apps To Help You Simplify Your Worklife
Today, we are listing 7 Excellent Apps To Help You Simplify Your Worklife. If you are designer, developer, office worker, manager, supervisor, student, home user, etc but we hope that these are worth checking for all of you. Most of them are not very well known but they are really amazing in respect to their features. Just take a look at them and share your thoughts here.
You are welcome to share more useful web apps that will be helpful and 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.
MyFax Free lets you send a fax at no charge through the Web to 41 countries including the US, Canada, most of Europe, China, Japan, and South Korea. MyFax supports 178 files types including files created by most popular word processors and graphics programs.
CeeVee is really easier and smarter way to create and share your résumé with anyone. It can simplify the process of posting your resume online.
meebee uses the devices and apps you already use: your email accounts and your calendars, and helps you organize meetings with your friends. Best of all meebee will contact you about meetings, in the way you prefer i.e. vie email, or on your iPhone, or via SMS, even on Facebook
Moreganize is a multifaceted organisation tool. It is suited for both professional and private use and is especially convenient if a larger group of people needs to get organized.
Pixavid is a FREE image hosting and sharing service. There are no complicated login or sign-up requirements. With Pixavid, pictures can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Reddit and other social networking sites. Pictures can also be posted on personal sites, message boards and emailed.
Present.ly is an award-winning microblogging platform that keeps your company connected in real-time. Increase your team’s productivity by posting updates, sharing files, exchanging ideas, and more.
Creating your own website with Moogo is incredibly easy. Moogo offers you a simple way of creating your own easy-to-update website with style even if you have never created a website in your life before. Moogo is perfect for individuals, small businesses, clubs and organizations, sport teams, real estate…or making a website for your band or your pet.
23 Brilliant Web Apps To Simplify Designer’s Work Life
This is one of the very best list of its kind where you can find the simplest online web designer’s tools that are developed for designers and may be very helpful for you as well when you want to get your work done or just for fun. I hope web designers will like this list, but you can also use them and will love them whether you are an office worker, a manager, a supervisor, a student, a home user, etc. Most of them are not very well-known, but they are really amazing in respect to their features. This is the list of 23 Brilliant Web Apps To Simplify Designer’s Work Life. Just take a look at them and share your thought’s here.
You are welcome to share more Useful web tools that will be helpful for web designers and 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.
An easier and faster solution for cross-browser testing. You can preview and test your web pages on leading browser and operating systems. This will help you get your results in real time, from virtually any computer connected to the internet.
Color Scheme Designer generates color schemes of several types. Every scheme is based on one (base) color, which is supplemented with additional colors making together the best optical imperession.
PHPanywhere is a new online service that’s changing the way people develop on the web. They enable users to develop and maintain their php/html projects online using any standard web browser.
With Carbonmade, you can manage your online portfolio with a variety of tools that allow you to change how you display your work. The core idea behind the design of Carbonmade is to keep your images or video at the forefront.
Posterous lets you post things online fast using email. If you can use email, you can have your own website to share thoughts and media with friends, family and the world. You can attach any type of file and they’ll post it along with the text of your email.
With iPlotz you can create clickable, navigable wireframes to create the experience of a real website or software application. You can also invite others to comment on the designs, and once ready, you can then manage the tasks for developers and designers to build the project.
This is your online photo sharing, editing and hosting resource. You can upload, organize, edit, store (up to 2GB free) and share your photos.
The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. Its primary role is to make web designer’s life easier. As the new fonts are bundled into operating systems.
Pict is a free image hosting service that lets you upload and share your images with one click.
You can upload images up to 3.5Mb, JPG/PNG/GIF formats supported, it has automatic image resizing, multiple uploading & much more.
Font Burner is the easiest way to add great fonts to your website. Just pick one of over 1000 quality fonts, add a chunk of code to your site, then sit back and admire your beautiful typography.
A collection of free icons that can be colored and reduced in size to your taste. If you are a happy site or blog owner, you will be able to pick icons that will fit right into your design.
Verb is a user focused task management and sharing application. If you have things that need to be done, then this is for you. Verb was built with individuals and small teams in mind. It is the perfect solution for freelance designers and coders who want to manage themselves and their collaborations.
CurdBee is a safe and secure web-based billing application. You can use it to send clients invoices and then collect payments via PayPal or Google Checkout, billing them easily in the currency you choose. It’s so simple, you won’t believe it till you see it.
EmailTheWeb is the only web-based service that allows you to email any web page to any one. The entire web page is emailed in a flash and is captured as it is now. Your recipient will see the same exact page as you.
MyFontbook is an unique online font viewer that helps save designers time by providing a number of tools to view installed fonts quickly and easily. Unlike a classic font management tool, MyFontbook is platform independent and can be used freely through any web browser.
Having a good uptime is essential for the success of your website. 247webmonitoring will monitor it 24X7 from their servers and notify you whenever it goes down. This will check your website every 15 minutes to know it is up. They will send you notification by email or SMS when it goes down. So you can quickly fix the issue and you can stay happy. This way you can relax and focus on your core business. In future, you will also find out how fast your site is from different location.
This is a brand new site that allows you to check out how your website looks in the most popular resolution formats. It’s all powered by Ajax & PHP so no need to download anything. Using ViewLike.Us is perfectly free.
Tracer is a brand new way to generate more visits and page views. You can get credit when content is copied from your site. It will help you to measure and understand user engagement and Improve your search engine ranking.
Picnik makes your photos fabulous with easy to use yet powerful editing tools. Tweak to your heart’s content, then get creative with oodles of effects, fonts, shapes, and frames. It’s fast, easy, and fun.
Go2Convert is a set of free web based tools that allow you to convert, resize a picture without having to install any software on your computer. It is not meant to be a complete Image editing software package. It is meant to be an easy to use solution to convert, resize your pictures and digital photos without the need to learn a complex software package. Once you convert, resize an image, you can choose to copy image’s URL or download it directly to your computer – It doesn’t get easier than that.
ShowDocument is a free service for online meetings with fully synchronized co-browsing of any document. It is a quick and simple way to share a document with other people at the same time. It is a web collaboration platform that lets individuals have a free online meeting. It is an alternative to various commercial desktop sharing applications. One can easily upload any file and during the session mark it up with a pen or a highlighter tool in addition to a text box tool and eraser.
This is an online calculator that can help you easily covert pixels, to EM, to percent or to points.
A simple online usability test that helps you identify the most prominent elements of your user interfaces.
7 Awesome And Useful Software For Linux
We have lots of commercial software available to use on different platform to complete our different work, but they are not free and sometime we do not able to purchase. Don’t worry about it, today we are listing here 7 Awesome And Useful Software For Linux in which most of them are cross-platform. There are many alternative available for single software, but I just tried to list down some very similar and useful alternative. You might not be able to enjoy all the features as original software but it will really help you to perform your task in a better way when your pocket does not allow you to purchase commercial software.
You are welcome if you want to share more useful softwares for linux that we have missed here and you think 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.
OpenProj is a free, open source project management solution. OpenProj is a replacement of Microsoft Project and other commercial project solutions. This is the most advanced project solution ever provided to the open source community.
Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdesigners, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages, and it focuses on editing dynamic and interactive websites.
Dia is a program for creating diagrams of all kinds. The current version can do UML class diagrams, Entity-Relationship modeling, network diagrams, and much more. The engine is very flexible and dynamically loads diagram-types from disk. It stores diagrams in an XML format, but can read and write a number of different formats.
CinePaint is used to retouch feature films and in pro photography. CinePaint opens high fidelity image file formats such as DPX, 16-bit TIFF, and OpenEXR, and conventional formats like JPEG and PNG. It has a flipbook for movie playback of image sequences in RAM. It supports 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit color channels, HDR and CMS.
With KSpread you can create table-oriented sheets with information and powerful calculations with ease with good support for the OpenDocument format. For calculations there is a huge list of formulas available that allow all the expected numerical, financial and textual features that are expected in a spreadsheet.
KMyMoney intends to provide all important features found in the commercially-available, personal finance managers. KMyMoney strives to be the easiest open source personal finance manager to use, especially for the non-technical user.
Guarddog is a firewall configuration utility for Linux systems. Guarddog is aimed at two groups of users. Novice to intermediate users who are not experts in TCP/IP networking and security, and those users who don’t want the hastle of dealing with cryptic shell scripts and ipchains/iptables parameters.
15 (More) Free Web Tools To Simplify Your Work Life
Today, we have a new post in which we are covering few more simplest free web apps that can really simplify your work life. Whether you are office worker, manager, supervisor, designer, developer, student, home user, etc. But we make sure to add something useful for everyone. Most of them are not very well-known, but they are really amazing in respect to their features. Just take a look at them and share your thought here.
You are welcome to share more free web apps that are really simple and useful and 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.
MyFontbook is an unique online font viewer that can save your time by providing a number of tools to view installed fonts quickly and easily. Unlike a classic font management tool, MyFontbook is platform independent and can be used freely through any web browser. MyFontbook tries to fill the gap between the limited font tools provided by your operating system and the expensive font management applications aimed at power users.
Box.net’s online file storage makes it easy to securely share content as a link or a shared folder with anyone inside or outside your company. This will help you create an online workspace where you can share project files, add comments, assign tasks, start discussions or create new content.
Ronin is a flexible application designed for creative professionals looking for an easy, affordable, web-based way of managing clients and invoices. You can send invoices and estimates in multiple currencies. The dashboard provides an at-a-glance summary of account activity for all of your staff users. Quickly access existing invoices and create new clients. Manage your account with simplicity.
Go2Convert is a set of free web based tools that allow you to convert, resize a picture without having to install any software on your computer. It is not meant to be a complete Image editing software package. It is meant to be an easy to use solution to convert, resize your pictures and digital photos without the need to learn a complex software package. Once you convert, resize an image, you can choose to copy image’s URL or download it directly to your computer – It doesn’t get easier than that.
Managing projects and work via email is just so old-school. How do you keep track of tasks, issues, files, timesheets & feedback via email? How much work is still yet to be completed? Who is working on what? Where is all the communication related to this project? Is it done yet? What’s holding the project back? DeskAway is simple to use, feature-rich online service. This is a web-based project collaboration service that provides teams a central location to easily organize, manage and track their projects.
Atmail allows users to access IMAP Mailboxes on any server of your choice. You and your users can experience webmail via a fluid, intuitive interface that excels aesthetically and functionally; a benchmark that very few webmail clients have achieved. Staying in touch with business or personal contacts is made easy by the groupware features of Atmail. The easy-to-use calendar events, tasks, and free-busy scheduler provide collaboration and communication around the clock, with the simplicity of a browser-based interface.
Having a good uptime is essential for the success of your website. 247webmonitoring will monitor it 24X7 from their servers and notify you whenever it goes down. This will check your website every 15 minutes to know it is up. They will send you notification by email or SMS when it goes down. So you can quickly fix the issue and you can stay happy. This way you can relax and focus on your core business. In future, you will also find out how fast your site is from different location.
This is a brand new site that allows you to check out how your website looks in the most popular resolution formats. It’s all powered by Ajax & PHP so no need to download anything. Using ViewLike.Us is perfectly free.
You can use PDF to Excel to quickly and easily create highly, editable XLS files, making it a cinch to re-use tables and spreadsheets from PDF files in Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice, Google Docs, and WordPerfect Office. Best of all, you can do it entirely free.
With Shareflow you can share your team conversations so everyone involved can clearly see what’s being said, and you can all get more done. The more you use email, the more work you create for your team. Important information gets lost in the shuffle. The Shareflow bookmarklet gives you one-click access to post content from the web to any of your flows. You can use the bookmarklet with Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Mail, and Gmail to share your email on a flow. Create multiple flows to organize different projects or teams. You can add or remove someone at any time and invited members can create their own flows, so different teams can work amongst themselves.
Vyew is a new and powerful platform for real-time and always-on interaction between people and connent. Vyew’s clear-view workspaces enable a transparent collaboration flow with content. Review the past, work together in the present and prepare for the future.
Windows Live SkyDrive works well on any Windows or Macintosh computer with Firefox 1.5 or higher, or Internet Explorer 6 or higher. 5 GB of free online storage, available from any computer with Internet access. You can create personal, shared, and public folders and you can decide who has access to each folder.
ShowDocument is a free service for online meetings with fully synchronized co-browsing of any document. It is a quick and simple way to share a document with other people at the same time. It is a web collaboration platform that lets individuals have a free online meeting. It is an alternative to various commercial desktop sharing applications. One can easily upload any file and during the session mark it up with a pen or a highlighter tool in addition to a text box tool and eraser.
AlertFox is a revolutionary new self-service website transaction monitoring service that is capable of keeping tabs on the functioning and performance of all websites. You can monitor even complicated steps, (e.g., complete check out process, not just store uptime) , only AlertFox can monitor the function and performance of sites that are based on any of the major rich internet applications (RIA), including ActiveX, AJAX, Flash, Flex, complex HTML and Silverlight technology. AlertFox also helps SaaS users monitor their provider’s reliability.
tgethr is for Project teams who need a no-frills, secure email-based collaboration solution and useful for families, friends, and clubs who don’t need the overhead of more complicated solutions. This is also best for remotely located people who still use email as a primary collaboration mechanism. With tgethr all correspondence over the web and email can be safely encrypted.
DeskAway, An Easy To Use Online Project Collaboration Software For Virtual, Distributed And Global Teams
Managing projects and work via email is just so old-school. How do you keep track of tasks, issues, files, timesheets & feedback via email? How much work is still yet to be completed? Who is working on what? Where is all the communication related to this project? Is it done yet? What’s holding the project back? DeskAway is simple to use, feature-rich online service. This is a web-based project collaboration service that provides teams a central location to easily organize, manage and track their projects.
DeskAway utilizes some of the most advanced technologies when storing and securing your information. DeskAway is 256-bit SSL encryption-enabled. What this means is that the data that you send between your computer and the DeskAway server is encrypted.
Salient features:
- Web-based collaboration from anywhere, anytime
- Manage & track work across projects & people
- Built with social features and a growing community
- Responsive, elegant, simple & branded
- No downloads, no installs, cancel anytime, hassle-free
- Sign up for free that lets you manage 3 projects with 5 people
13 Free Adobe AIR Apps That Can Make Your Lives Easier
Adobe AIR is a cross-platform runtime environment for building rich Internet applications using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML, or Ajax. It’s popularity is increasing every day and getting more lovers who are using tools developed on Adobe AIR for diversified purposes. Designers are the top on the list in those lovers and this list is specially for designers who can save their time and complete their task in the less time using these little but simple AIR apps. But you probably will like this if you are developer, office worker, manager, supervisor, student, home user, etc. Because we make sure to add something interesting for everyone. Most of them are not very well-known, but they are really amazing in respect to their features. The best thing about these apps that they are cross-platform using Adobe’s AIR technology. Just take a look at them and share your thought here.
You are welcome if you want to share more free and simple Adobe AIR apps that are useful and 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.
TweetDeck is your personal browser for staying in touch with what’s happening now, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook and more. TweetDeck shows you everything you want to see at once, so you can stay organised and up to date.
Doomi has all the features you can use, and none of the ones you don’t. You can create, edit, set reminders, and keep archives of your old tasks.
Live Presentations is a web-enabled presentation authoring application that can be used either as a software on your desktop or as a service within any browser giving you unprecedented choice and flexibility so you can share your presentations with anyone without worrying about incompatibilties around operating systems, application versions or document formats.
Ora Time and Expense is a small easy-to-use application for tracking and generating timesheets, expense reports, and invoices. You can use your webcam to scan expense receipts for automatic inclusion in expense report. There are option to generate timesheets, expense reports, and invoices in HTML, Excel, CSV, or XM.
focus booster is a simple and elegant application designed to help you eliminate the anxiety of time and enhance your focus and concentration.
Remember The Task is a light-weight Adobe AIR application that allows users to view their pending tasks on Remember The Milk with due dates. Users can also Add, Modify and mark tasks as complete.
Tired of copying pasting those LOOOONG URLs into emails only to see them break? Then Shrinkadoo is for you! Built with Adobe® AIRâ„¢ technology, Shrinkadoo accesses the services of many of the internet’s most popular URL shortening services allowing you to build a short URL quickly and easily.
Dukt lets you track the time you spend working on your projects. The application also shows you the time you spend and the money you earn for each task.
Skimmerâ„ is an Adobe AIR desktop application designed to streamline, beautify, and enhance the experience of participating in your most frequently used social networking activities. It improves upon your day-to-day interaction with multiple social networks, removing distractions and providing a rich experience that is particularly suited to multimedia content.
A handy tool for web and interface designers which allows them to measure objects in pixel and preview design.
Snippely is a basic text and code organizational tool. Instead of storing bits of code, quick notes, and memos in text files all over your hard drive, this application will let you save and organize “snippets” in one convenient location. A snippet is a collection of one or more pieces of code and notes.
ShareFire is a feature-rich news aggregator that lets you share stories via AIM, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, email and more with no copying and pasting, or dragging and dropping.
If your company does not allow you to use twitter and you are a guy who loves twitter a lot. So, this is really for you. This is an awesome twitter tool that looked just like Excel. You can get some simple functionalities like viewing direct messages, replies and send tweets in this application.
TimeGlider, A Free Web-Based Timeline Software For Creating Project Planning And Much More…
TimeGlider is a data-driven interactive timeline application built on the (Adobe) Flash platform. You can “grab” the timeline and drag it left and right, and zoom in and out to view centuries at a time or just hours. TimeGlider allows you to create event-spans so that you can see durations and how they overlap. Being web-based, TimeGlider lets you collaborate and share easily.
You can create timelines about the last year of your family, the last century of world events, or about pre-historical (bce/bc) times. You can try the application here without needing to sign up.
TimeGlider interface is draggable and zoomable: navigating TimeGlider is a lot like using familiar applications like Google or Yahoo maps. TimeGlider allows you to show the time span of events, indicated by a band of color. Simply enter the start date and an end date.
Timelines that zoom are tricky: If they are dense with events, they stack up and get cluttered. But with TimeGlider, this can be easily managed by assigning an importance level (from 1 to 100) to each event. As one zooms in, certain things can emerge that weren’t visible at a wider scope.
A free account comes with
- a really cool application for visualizing history and project planning!
- a basic image library & uploader
- linking and embedding tools for sharing your timelines
Onyaka, The Simple And Free Staff Scheduling And Planning Software
Onyaka is an online staff time planning software service that takes all the pain out of staff scheduling. Onyaka provides you with easy to use staff scheduling software, with no downloads, no expensive license fees, and no installation hassle.
It has a simple drag and drop interface and you can use all of the features absolutely free. As Onyaka is online application that’s why you can use it from everywhere without any restriction on standard web browser.
You can click here to see onyaka in action.
5 simple steps to setup it for you!
- Start a new project
- Add your staff (just names and email addresses: no shifts, no templates, no complicated stuff!)
- Add skills (actually just skill names)
- Drag-and-drop skills you want covered straight into the calendar.
- And That’s It…
OpenGoo, An Open Source And Easy To Use Web Office
OpenGoo is an Open Source Web Office. It is a complete solution for every organization to create, collaborate, share and publish all its internal and external documents. You and your team can create and collaborate on:
- Text documents
- Spreadsheets (coming soon)
- Presentations
- Task Lists
- E-mails
- Calendars
- Web Links
- Contacts
OpenGoo gives you all the tools to manage the work of all the divisions of your company. You can plan and manage all your projects, easily following the status of every task.
There is the mashup approach. This means OpenGoo takes many existing OpenSource projects, and “glues” them by developing tools to easily integrate them and make them look and feel like one single application.
Yes, there is the classical approach, where they build a new piece of software. This will be the case when no OpenSource alternative convinces the OpenGoo team.
It seems, they aim to develop a system that is:
- Easy to install
- Cross-platform
- Secure
- Open Source
- Easily Extendable
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.
