The Speed of the Cloud

It's been a while since my last blog as I as I have been busy working my two jobs as first a daddy and husband and secondly as a TA at Astadia. So apologies for the delay and here goes. When I started out as a young, wet behind the ears graduate as a developer many years ago, before Agile, before SaaS, before the cloud it was a well known cry of business all over the world that IT could not react quickly enough to service the business. Typically any new IT solution was completely handicapped from the start. Using the immensely popular methodology of the time, the project would started using the waterfall approach. Several weeks upfront on analysis and design, followed by another few weeks getting the design signed off and then over to the developers. Following any number of months, the design would be subject to significant and expensive changes as the business needed to react to new processes, new legislation, new products / service etc... This made IT projects a massive headache, it was a real challenge to deliver solutions on-time that:

1. Met the original design + and any accepted change requests
2. Was within the budget
3. Was devlivered on time
4. Was actually what the business needed

1 & 4 could not be relied upon to be the same thing! No matter how hard you tried, the design was always a point-in-time reference to the business requirements at the time of the projects beginning! No matter how good the change management process was, talk of phase 2 or release 2 always started to creep into conversations as the changes became more and more complex. Here we are now however in 2012 and now I believe the tides have changed, the roles have reversed, the shoe is on the other foot :) In the past year I have started to hear an almost totally unheard situation. The business are not able to adapt to the rate of change from IT! In my current project where myself and another TA from Astadia (Twitter @stuagare and blogger ) have been developing enterprice solutions for a Sales and Financial applications on the SalesForce.com for a telco client with a multi-continentental presence. We, along with the assistance of development teams from many different shores and timezones have worked with the business to capture their reqirements and build them a solution to allow them to massively update and automate complex sales processes. These complex and powerful solutions have been designed, developed and deployed in such a short timescale that the business are having real problems reacting to the speed of IT. The main reasons of this have been

• An Agile based project methodology tailored specifically by Astadia
• The SalesForce.com and Force.com platforms
• Business stakeholders, decision-makers and subject matter experts being heavily involved throughout the entire project.

So with fresh-faced enthusiasm and overwhelming optimism I am now looking forward to a change in my career. I predict that 2012 will be the year where the old problems and headaches will become a distant memory,

• project timescales will reduce significantly as more and more companies leverage the power of Cloud and SaaS solutions.
• 1 Year+ projects will be consigned to be the exception rather than the rule
• Project change requests will significantly reduce, this will have the knock-on effect of lowering risk to timescales and budgets
• Delivered solutions will be more complete, more in-line with what the business need today, rather than 6 months ago when the requirements were captured

The new problems will be lesser in comparison, the softer skills of the consultant will come to the fore, adoption assistance, training and user support. 2012 in the cloud will see ever closer alignment of business and IT and SalesForce.com and the Force.com platform will be a massive part of this.

What did that chap just say?

Business and IT, two bodies working for the same company on the same project separated by a common language. How many times in your working life have you as a business user come out of a meeting or workshop and thought,

"What on Earth were those techy guys going on about? A workflow with a field update and an outbound call to a web service to integrate with the outlying systems via the middleware tier, I have no idea what that means"

You are not alone in this, many's the time I have left a workshop and had a developer ask what the business users meant by:

"We need a solution which will enable our back office staff to get all the information necessary for fulfilment without having to go back to the front office B2B reps to get extra detail."

Neither of these statements are complicated per se but, one of my jobs as a consultant is to make sure that when communications happen between technical resources and business users that they communicate in a common language and my role is interpreter.

Luckily this is not a difficult problem to overcome. All you need to do is invest a little time in the technical team prepping them. Here is a short list of what I like to do to better faciliate the conversation

1. Get a list of all the issues that the technical team need to discuss up front, find out what the developer needs to know to complete the work. This way, you will be having the conversation.
2. Coach/Mentor your technical team. Have a pre-meet with the team to make sure there are some simple ground rules laid down:
1. Under no circumstances should the developer talk about code or offer to show it
2. Business users do not want to hear about the details, Workflows, Classes, Triggers, Unit tests. None of these should be mentioned
3. Where appropriate, try and ask the question to your own consultants. It’s their job is to translate between Business and IT

Communications between Business and IT need not be a stressful ordeal. With a little preparation then it can become a productive and stress-free experience.