Let me preface this post by telling you that I have been the president of a software company for 30 years and worked for multiple technology companies before that. I have been around a lot of developers over these many years and have heard all of the reasons / excuses why the product or feature wasn’t finished on time. Needless to say, I have opinions about the “agile vs. waterfall” subject but that is not the subject for today’s blog post. Today’s topic is that waterfall is the best methodology to use when managing Operations teams.
When IT Operations, Network Operations, Cyber Operations, Regulatory Operations, Acquisition and more, in these organizations, what you want consistency and repeatability, improved quality, and that their commitments are met. How do you improve customer confidence in your organization? How about by doing what you say you are going to do? Not only that. You want to be sure that every team is doing what they do the right way, to the standard. You want to hold them accountable. You have defined your operational processes, i.e. the standard for performing that service. Now, you want to be confident, i.e. assured that everyone is working the tasks in the process when they are supposed to be working them.
(The operational processes are not the ITIL processes. The operational processes represent the things your team does, i.e. the things in your service catalog.)
So, how can you be assured that everyone, enterprise-wide, is working to the standard? You need a system that includes several critical features:
- Templates (i.e. each process) should be used to generate the project plans: one for each time a team is working a process. That way, the project plans are the same.
- A schedule needs to be generated for each project. Each task has a planned start date and a planned finish date. Waterfall does this. Agile does not. A friend of mine calls Agile, “Waterfall without the schedule.”
- People need to be assigned to the tasks so that they know what they are responsible for doing, when the work needs to be done and how long they have to do the work. If you haven’t given each person this level of detail, how can you hold them accountable?
- The performance metrics, task duration and time spent, need to be captured. That way, you know how long it actually took to do each task in the plan and how much time each person spent doing the work over the task duration.
- The data must be auditable. There cannot be any fudging the data after the work has started or finished.
- Automatic notifications to the people doing the work reminding them of when the work needs to be performed to meet the schedule is critical.
Years ago, I did a demo of an early version of APM+ at a user meeting. Several people were watching the big monitor but one man’s eyes kept getting bigger and bigger as I proceeded through the demo. When I was finished, the others left but he was seemingly frozen in place. I asked him what he saw and he said:
“I work for (a large Florida-based utility). For the last year and a half, we had one of the Big 8 accounting firms in to document our processes. When they finished, we made copies of all of the processes, put them in 3-ring binders and brought in everyone to train them on the processes. As they were leaving, every person said: “Yes sir” and “Yes, ma’am. This is exactly what we are going to do.” But, as we watched their backs walking out of the room, we realized we had no idea what they were going to do. We had no idea what they would remember by the following Monday. But if we had your system, we would know.”
It’s true. If you had our APM+, you would know.
Do you know? Do you want to know? Is it your job to know? If the answers are “Yes,” please contact me. Let’s talk about your situation and how we can help, and if you would like to see a demo, we can do that too.
