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September 28, 2007
Cutter Latin America - IT in Mexico is Alive and Well…
Whew! I just returned from a 2 city tour in Monterrey Mexico and Mexico City. It was a fantastic week teaching negotiation techniques for IT, to a diverse and energetic group of managers, executives, and CIOs in Mexico, provided by the Cutter Consortium Latin America.
The event was part of a “Strategic IT Training Cycle" – 6 workshops conducted by the Cutter Consortium Latin America on issues that IT executives must be aware of in order to make IT a strategic resource for the organization. Cutter Consortium framed these workshops as critical skills for current and future CIOs. I found all of the attendees to be highly engaging and thoughtful managers, eager to apply new ideas to an old problem: getting the best deal possible and creating high value outcomes on difficult IT negotiations on outsourced and in-house alliances/partnerships. It was exiting being part of our Cutter Faculty for this series, which included folks like Tim Lister, Mike Rosen, Christopher Avery, and others. My session was entitled, “Negotiation Strategies for the Agile IT Leader.” Take a look at more pictures at this photo-sharing site.
For me, the trick was to make it seamless through a real-time language translation using English/Spanish interpreters. The last time I had done this was quite a while ago in Japan, with a team of interpreters going back and forth between English and Japanese. What made this workshop different from the Tokyo event though was the interactivity of the “mock negotiation” sessions that I run for this course. Much of what I glean for the follow-on discussion sessions comes from listening in to the attendees as they apply the ideas I convey during role play scenarios. This time I’d be a bit deaf during those portions since my Spanish speaking skills are non-existent, vaporized long ago from a lack of use after several years of Spanish in my earlier years. (Sadly, my Mandarin Chinese is really rusty too…)
My worries were overblown. Both sessions were great, and many of the audience participants were bilingual in English. The interpreters were world-class and probably could handle the toughest real-time translations – I bet they could do double duty at the United Nations. We had these wireless headsets and transmitters, and if a participant asked a question in Spanish, seconds later the English language feed would come through my headset, transmitted by the interpreters sitting behind a soundproof partition. I’d answer in English, and for the attendees, a Spanish answer would come through their headset. How cool is that?
Some things I learned – Monterrey is the capital city of the northeastern Mexican state of Nuevo León, and is also known as the "City of the Mountains". It is the third most populated metropolitan area in the country, has the highest GDP per capita of all metropolitan areas in Mexico and is also the second largest in area after Mexico City with about 4 million people. Surrounding the city are stunning mountain peaks which give the place an incredible feel. One amazing formation is Saddle Hill, named for its distinctive saddle-shaped profile when viewed from the west.
Greater Mexico City has a population of about 20 million, making it the largest metropolitan area in the western hemisphere and the second largest in the world. In 2005, it ranked as the eighth richest urban agglomeration GDP in the world. I was amazed at the energy of the city – as my friend Tim Lister said, “You’ll love being there; it makes New York seem slow (heh heh).” One thing that was remarkable was the number of trees all around. It made you feel like you were driving through a park most of the time. But don’t be lazy while driving - Mexico’s taxi drivers are insane. They make NYC cabbies seem tame.
Another thing I discovered the hard way. That quarter-sheet immigration card that the airline gives you to fill out while on an incoming flight to Mexico? Don’t lose that! When you go to leave the country, you have to give that back to get your airline boarding pass. If you don’t have it, they send you to the Immigration Office at the airport. A very grumpy-looking bureaucrat looks at you scornfully, and makes you fill out several forms (all in Spanish), telling you to sign several of them while grunting at you in mild disgust. (I was wondering if I was signing a pre-written confession to some recent unsolved murder.) After about an hour and a half – they let you go, and if you’re lucky, you just might still make your flight home.
I was lucky. Whew!!
But seriously, I have to say that my experience in Mexico was amazing and wonderful. The people are warm, friendly, and hospitable. The IT executives that I met were sharp, savvy, and worldly folks who were an absolute pleasure to work with. My experience as a trainer and consultant was made even more satisfying because of the top-notch Cutter Mexico team (click here). I'd go back to Mexico in a heartbeat, and for sure, I won't lose my immigration form again!
Posted by Mike at 07:44 PM | Comments (0)
September 18, 2007
Agile Company #5 Is Revealed
The secret is out. After our productivity analysis of Agile methods at BMC Software, executives at the firm were so excited about the results that a press release was issued last week about the findings:
Agile Excels at BMC, Programming Technique Provides Customers Higher Quality Products in Record Time
SLIM Analysis Shows Agile Development Can Bring Positive Results for both Developers and the Bottom Line
PITTSFIELD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--QSM Associates and the Cutter Consortium today announced unprecedented quality and productivity results for a major development initiative at BMC Software [NYSE: BMC]. Using QSM Inc.’s SLIM (Software Lifecycle Management) suite of benchmarking and project management software, the Cutter Consortium concluded that BMC had achieved “remarkable levels of time-to-market and quality in their software development” using Agile programming, a teamwork-based approach developed in recent years.
“Developers who adopt Agile programming techniques enable the company to be more nimble,” remarked Michael Mah, a senior consultant with The Cutter Consortium and managing partner at QSM Associates, who worked with BMC on the benchmark project. “When a software company pushes high-quality products to the market in record time, it’s their customers who win.”
BMC worked with Mah to assess the performance of its IT organization and identify strengths/weaknesses across the software development lifecycle. SLIM was used to obtain objective data and benchmark BMC projects for time and effort against QSM’s database of more than 7,000 completed projects. BMC’s performance was compared to software industry averages for cost, efficiency, speed, and quality, representing traditional as well as Agile development projects.
The company’s adoption of Agile programming enabled BMC to produce large scale enterprise software in four to five months, compared to the typical organization, which takes about a year to deliver comparable software.
“BMC is hitting exceptional time-to-market without sacrificing quality, which provides a real competitive advantage” continued Mah. "Especially noteworthy is the fact that BMC has found a 'Secret Sauce' that enables its SCRUM process to succeed in spite of teams being geographically dispersed. Other companies experience higher defects and longer schedules with split teams, but BMC does not. I've never seen this before. The low bug rates also result in very low defect rates post-production, which is great news for their customers who demand a high quality product."
“In an era characterized by requirements changing faster than traditional development cycles, Agile development has helped BMC reach a level of proficiency that enables us to respond to our customer needs much more quickly,” said Israel Gat, BMC’s Vice President of Distributed Systems Management. “BMC has always had great confidence in our development team. The unbiased numbers from Cutter validate that high level of confidence.”
In addition to analyzing BMC’s performance against industry standards, SLIM enables development and business management to further measure, reliably estimate, and control the destiny of their projects with state of the art management practices.
“Agile development contributes to the making of an agile manager,” Mah said. “When managers have instant access to critical decision-making data --such as productivity metrics, the ability to accurately forecast/predict project schedules, reliably estimate time, effort, staffing as a function of the volume of requirements/features/stories, and measure projects instantaneously in ‘mid-flight’-- everyone wins.”
The SLIM-Estimate and SLIM-Control models were used to demonstrate how to avoid typical programming pitfalls in the future. SLIM scenarios show how management can optimize future time/scope/reliability trade-offs in virtual space, running simulations in advance to execute a more effective release strategy.
Mah continues, “My experience is that many companies pay lip service to being Agile, others are at different levels of maturity but BMC has obviously made a serious commitment and the results speak for this achievement. With results clearly ahead of more than 95 percent of all the software projects captured in the SLIM metrics database, they’re among the best I’ve seen at this.”
About Cutter Consortium
Cutter Consortium is a unique IT advisory firm, comprising more than 200 internationally recognized experts who offer content, consulting and training services. These experts have done, and are doing, groundbreaking work in organizations worldwide, helping companies deal with issues in the core areas of software development and agile project management, enterprise architecture, business technology trends and strategies, risk management, metrics, and sourcing. Cutter's goals are to further the thinking in business-technology and to help organizations leverage technology for competitive advantage and business success. They accomplish their mission by serving as a catalyst for collaboration between business-technology thought leaders worldwide and by giving clients access to this think tank through its research, training and consulting.
Cutter's clients are able to tap into this collaborative community of thought leaders in a variety of formats including online and multimedia research, mentoring and inquiries, and training/consulting services.
About QSM Associates
QSM Associates, based in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, has furnished solutions in software project estimation, control and productivity measurement and benchmarking for more than 15 years. It provides tools such as the QSM SLIM Suite, plus consulting, metrics training, and negotiation workshops along with its partner-affiliates to many of the world’s leading producers of software. Information is available at www.qsma.com
More of Michael Mah’s work, including Agile Executive reports, can be found at www.cutter.com.
Contacts
Cutter, QSM Associates
Edward Bride, 413-442-7718
Ed@edbride-pr.com
or
BMC
Jennifer Cadmus, 713-918-2353
jcadmus@waggeneredstrom.com
Posted by Mike at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)