Agile projects come with their own challenges. While the tech industry has increasingly adopted agile, practical experience about agile methods is not always available. Certain consultancies and third parties have made roaring business out of the agile coaching usually solicited by corporations while embarking on agile transformations. In many cases, the corporations did not have a system of follow-up and in others the consultants did not help adapt the frameworks to the specific case at hand. In the end, teams end up without understanding the agile values and “whys” of using agile and focus on ceremonies like the stand up meeting or having a kanban board. Along with misconceptions and lack of clarity about the methods to be worked with, these are some of the main reasons I’ve seen agile projects fail.
Microsoft has been instrumental in pushing the envelope on managed self-service BI with it’s Power BI SaaS platform.
I wrote about this back in 2009 [1], when Microsoft was working on Project Gemini (later PowerPivot) used SQL Server Analysis Services as an in-memory engine, with data compression to really bring BI to the masses, so to speak.
Since then, Microsoft’s vision of self-service BI evolved from providing Excel plug-ins viz. PowerPivot, Data Explorer (later renamed PowerQuery) and sharing bulky Excel files on SharePoint (with Power View [2]) to a manageable managed-self-service BI with the launch of Power BI in 2015.
Today, Power BI is powered by Azure, and deployed as a SaaS across datacenters in Microsoft regions across the world.
Agile planning is different from predictive planning done in traditional project management. Often we come across posts by certain agile evangelists who claim that agile doesn’t need planning. To believe these claims would mean there would be endless iterations with a fully-funded product development team to get to a perfect end-state without concern for time or cost. This is utopian and untrue. Usually these claims are made by developers or people far removed from business. No business runs without planning or without any estimates of how much a product/service would cost. Agile projects also plan.The difference is in the planning.
The Project Management Institute PMI is the premier standards and professional organization for project management. It works in collaboration with American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to develop and promote project management standards. Its certifications recognize knowledge and competency and the Project Management Professional (PMP® ) certification is widely considered as the gold standard. PMI has been criticised for being slow to adapt to changes e.g. acknowledging that agile methods were being increasingly adopted in the tech industry as well as these being particularly suited to changing requirements and initiatives with uncertainties e.g. those in startups. However there’s not much generalized awareness in tech about standards beyond those related directly with tech.
Disruption has gone mainstream. Ever since the media picked up on the disruption thread and the technology revolution where startups have disrupted established slow-moving corporations, there has been a flurry of activity at these staid organizations to get onto the innovation bandwagon. Advisory firm Gartner, who gave us “hype cycles” and who thrive on publishing “magic quadrants” has coined the term “bimodal” to sanctify an exploratory, experimental approach to IT. Organizations are rushing to instill “intrapreneurship”, accelerators, corporate venture capital funds, and innovation labs to preempt being disrupted.
