A Software Product Vs Project

In short, a software Project is all about to execute a Statement of Work of an internal or external customer, where what customer required is right irrespective of what is ideal or what the end user would expect. Though some projects are scoped in such a way that certain aspects of non-functional requirements are left to the choice of the project teams.

Product development isn’t about implementing what the customer wanted to. In product development, the product manager owns and comes up with the product requirements. A large product or product suite, typically comprise of many projects and will evolve over time.

Unlike a project the product will be improved continuously without an end date based on feedback from end users and the product team prioritizes what needs to be built next based on its perceived value for its target users or customers.

A project on the other hand is funded with specific goals, a business case in mind and with finite expected value and cost.

Here is an attempt to bring out the differences between a software project and product and such differences are categorised as below:

The Mindset:

Projects are many a times started off with main focus on to deliver on time, under budget, within scope and with a temporary team. All these constraints are set in stone and any deviation is viewed seriously, which may impact the course of the project depending on the methodology adopted. So, the mindset of the project team will be with primary focus on the project parameters that determine the success of delivery and may not be the success of the product that the project may form part of. This is more so as the resources keep changing and the resources with no or little knowledge on the business domain may still deliver the project, but the product may be crappy.

Products tend to have a longer lifetime than projects and mostly built with more focus on the outcome instead of the output. Product teams are given the freedom and responsibility to think of a strategy they believe will result in the best product within a boundary of product framework. This leads to less waste and more creativity being introduced into the product development process, allowing room for embracing changes continously.

Management:

The product roadmap is key for the success of the prodct and as such, the product manager shall align the product vision and strategy with that of the business. A Project Manager, on the other hand, is responsible for executing on a predefined objective.

A Project Managers function is to create a plan, that the project will follow, and then to drive the people involved in the project to follow that plan with as little change as possible. If deviations from the planned execution are beyond an accepted threshold, the Project Manager must escalate and explain the situation to the stakeholders, who in turn will either accept the deviation or may choose to fail the project.

A product manager with the focus on constantly evaluating the viability of the product, will typically follow an agile approach with shorter sprints of developments, so the product evolves incrementally, delivering values at every stage.

Motivation:

With the primary focus of the project team being on delivering on time and within budget, the team does not have enough room to be creative enough. This brings down the motivation because the teams lose a sense of purpose and the autonomy in how to operate.

On the other hand, as typically, the resources stay longer with the product teams, they get aligned to the product strategy and the vision and thus they are given the freedom to bring in their thinking and creativity into the product, process and methodology. The feedback and collaboration with stakeholders enables the right environment, where the resources reach a higher potential and operate autonomously, resulting in better problem solving, higher ownership of outcomes, and faster time to market.

Tools:

Product management software and project management software are entirely different tools — each designed for a different type of role, to help address different business needs. Product management software helps product managers organize, develop, and communicate the product strategy, while project management software helps project managers in track the execution and incidentally manage the resource allocation, risk and issue management.

Scope:

Product scope is defined as "The features and functions that characterize a product, service, or result". Whereas the project scope is defined as "The work performed to deliver a product, service, or result with the specified features and functions".

The Product Scope defines all the capabilities of a product from the User point of view. The Product is the end result of your project and characterizes by the Product Scope. Thus, the Product Scope description includes features of a product, how the product will look like using these features, and how will it work. Product Scope also describe the ways of measuring the product performance.

The Project Scope on the other hand is an agreement of the work which is needed to deliver the product, service, or result. To develop a product features, you establish a project which has a schedule, budget, and resource allocation. In other words, the work you do to construct your product is the Project Scope.

Design & Architecture:

The product owner or manger is responsible for defining the architecture and design of the product, which should take the following into consideration:

• Business Idea & Strategy
• Identifying and Creating a product feature
• Aligning with Market Trends
• Define Product Performance Indicators
• Prioritize the implementation of features and bugs

Though a project may include the product architecture and design as part of the scope, the focus of the project team will be more on the following:

• Defining the project scheduling, taking into account the deliverables at various milestones.
• Monitoring the budget
• Planning and managing resources
• Problem and issue management
• Risk management
• Managing the scope creep.

IT Governance - Implementation Obstacles

IT governance is a process which include a set of controls and practices that ensures that the IT function is working on the right things at the right time in the right way with a view to accomplish the stated objectives and thereby contributing towards the meeting enterprise objectives and goals. Any process that aligns IT to business goals is the right strategy. However, it’s the change required and the compromises on the part of business leaders that can come in way to make it a not so easy program.

IT Governance offers many benefits, which include reduce the cost of day-to-day operations, improve overall operational efficiency and consistency, free more resources for strategic initiatives that improve competitiveness, choose those initiatives far more wisely working on the right things, bring those initiatives to market faster with less risk and bring IT into close alignment with business priorities. But at the same time the results of an ineffective implementation can be devastating. Some such devastating results could be:

• Business losses and disruptions, damaged reputations and weakened competitive positions
• Schedules not met, higher costs, poorer quality, unsatisfied customers
• Core business processes are negatively impacted (e.g. SAP impacts many critical business processes) by poor quality of IT deliverables 
• Failure of IT to demonstrate its investment benefits or value propositions

The Three Pillars of IT Governance

To understand the obstacles to IT Governance in an organization, it would be appropriate to understand the three critical pillars on which a successful IT Governance program is built on. The following are the three critical pillars of a successful IT Governance implementation:

Leadership, Organization, Decision Rights and Metrics

The IT Governance Initiative must be decomposed into manageable and accountable work packages and deliverables and assigned to owners for planning, development, execution and continuous improvement. The IT Governance program must have clearly defined roles, responsibilities and decision rights for the entire program and for each major component of the integrated IT Governance framework and road map.
A decisions rights matrix identifying decision influencers and decision makers is necessary to clarify decision roles and authority levels for the major IT Governance components.

Flexible and Scalable Processes

Processes form an integral part of the IT Governance program and as the IT Governance framework is made of such processes and controls, which shall be defined. It is also important these processes evolve over its usage based on feedback collected through various metrics. At the same time, processes should not only be simple enough to understand and implement but also flexible enough to provide room for improvement. People tend to ignore processes, if it is difficult to understand and practice as part of their day to day work. Thus the integrated framework approach works best.

Enabling Technology

Most business components rely on Technology for most aspect of their value, reliability or efficiency. Even choice of right technology plays a key role in making up the first two pillars. Given that technology evolves in an accelerated rate, there should be a clear watch on such advancements and the technology road map should provide for identification and adoption of the right technology at the right time to get the maximum value. Most organizations have recognized and accordingly have started managing this area well.

The Key Obstacles

Most often, the business leaders are motivated and rewarded by having their small part of the organization succeed. IT governance requires that the scarce resource of technology capacity be diligently distributed across the organization for overall business success. In other words, it requires that IT cannot be allocated on the basis of individual team needs but rather on collective, organizational goals. A recent empirical study by Lee uncovered factors such as ‘lack of IT principles and policies’, ‘lack of clear IT Governance processes’, ‘lack of communication’, and ‘inadequate stakeholder involvement’, as inhibitors of IT Governance implementation success. A good understanding on the barriers or obstacles that hinder the success of IT Governance implementation is important as once understood, their effect is understood and pre-emptive actions can be taken to address them

Implementing IT Governance is a long and continuous journey, where obstacles and challenges are aplenty. A good understanding on the barriers or obstacles that hinder the success of IT Governance implementation is important as once understood, their effect is understood and pre-emptive actions can be taken to address them. The most frequently experienced obstacles include:

Culture

Instituting effective IT governance requires dealing with the “c-word.” The culture of a company—“the way we do things here”—can be a tremendous driver for business success. It can also be—and often is—a giant resistor that dampens positive change. Immeasurable amounts of energy have been dissipated trying to change embedded habits and methods that hid behind the cloak of “culture.” Today, worldwide, the trend is toward collaborative culture, especially in the sharing of information. The attitude that “information is power” lingers in some dark company corners. In some disciplines, such as sales, where compensation is directly related to personal contacts and initiative, it is arguable that the status quo has value. In most cases, though, managements are trying to rid the company of these attitudes in order to unlock the power of teamwork leveraged by technology. IT governance requires teamwork and information sharing to succeed.

Resistance to Change

Virtually every manager in business today has encountered employees who held up organizational change by insisting on continuing with the “old way” of doing something, even though the success of the “new way” depends on universal adoption. Fear of failure could be one of the reason why people are afraid to commit to change, uncertain that they can successfully implement it and fearing that if they fail, they will be held accountable. Another reason could be the existence of innate conservatism and uncertainty emanating and causing resistance

Lack of Appropriate Communication

Communication is really at the heart of IT governance and the lack of appropriate communications can cause a major disconnect between IT executives and business executives. IT still continues to communicate in more technology terms, which is just not relevant to the business and they just don't understand it. So good communications is extraordinarily important so that everybody is on the same page and that the business and IT become very closely engaged. Again -- we're making strategic decisions on where we're going to invest in technology and those are really business decisions, not technology decisions. That way, lack of communication can easily derail the IT Governance program of an organization.

Lack of Value Proposition

CIOs must be willing to take the lead in the search for value-creating IT processes. If they are not, others—real experts—are glad to do so, in language that resonates with CEOs. For instance, if you take the Project and Porfolio Governance the 'Fail Fast' or 'Fail First' approach may be helpful. If the processes are designed around this approach, we could see that the IT programs and functions get evaluated at various stages by analyzing the collected metrics to see if it would still make sense to let the project, or program to move into the next stage. At every stage there using the metrics, a revisit to the project charter and the business objectives would ensure that the desired value out of such project or program is still the same.

Internal politics

Internal organizational politics may exert themselves, as the adoption and implementation of formal ITG practice will sometimes bring a shift in decision rights and associated powers that currently exist in the organization. It is seen in most organizations that projects that should be given a higher priority mostly be based on “who speaks the loudest” rather than“ looking at the current business, collected metrics, what is the immediate need?”

The Principles of Agile Enterprise Architecture Management

Change is happening everywhere and that too at an accelerated rate not only in IT but also in many other functional areas, though the same is very high in the area of IT. Business users are encouraged to innovate in every possible area and that brings in more and more transformation projects, an important category of projects in the enterprise program and portfolio management. Many a times these transformation projects are time critical, which if not implemented on time will use the market advantage. On the same lines, technology adoption is becoming a key aspect for the success of the businesses and the predicting, tracking and embracing the upcoming disruptive technologies has become an important business and strategic risk as it can have wider impact across business strategies, capabilities and processes.

Enterprise Architecture function has equal responsibility in ensuring these changes are embraced with least impact. While running the business as it is an important aspect, enabling transformation of business capabilities and information management capabilities is another key goal for the Enterprise Architects. One of the key elements that Enterprise Architects should consider and address is complexity around business and IT Architecture management so that transformation projects get implemented at desired time schedules and thus reap the intended business benefits. While there are other key objectives like delivering stakeholder value, managing complexity is an objective that comes close to being Agile.

The Agile Enterprise Architecture is all about letting changes happen and thus keep the Architectural Principles continuously evolving. This will also call for having an appropriate lifecycle that facilitates the evolution, development and adaption of the current and the target reference architecture continuously. This will keep the maturity levels of various IT management functions also changing over time. In this blog, let us focus on the key principles that enables an Agile Enterprise Architecture Management:


Value Individuals and Interactions over Tools and Processes

It is a well established and understood fact that it's the people who build success in the enterprise, and the tools and processes are just enablers. With people being the greatest asset, the organizational culture plays an important role in motivating the employees to collaborate, innovate and deliver the results more effectively and efficiently. Build the EA team in such a way that it has representation or interface with the Top Management, Business & IT Owners, Business & IT Operations teams and the Project Teams driving the change within. Choose and deploy the right set of tools, technology and processes that facilitates the collaboration with different business and IT functions.

The EAM team shall aim for sustainable evolution, with a pace as is driven by business and IT users; Help the project teams to avoid panics, and discourage culture clashes; Understand that everyone has their own area of expertise and thus can add value to the project or program.


Focus on demands of top Stakeholders and speak their languages

Typically the top stakeholders need continuous input from the EA team on various business and IT functions, to decide on further strategic alignments or improvements, which in turn would lead to new transformation projects or change of course in case of existing projects. The inputs could be in the form of metrics, visualizations and reports. It is very important that these inputs should be relevant and make sense to the target recipients. The following key considerations are worth considering to ensure that the stakeholders realize the maximum value out of such inputs from EA teams:

• A single number or picture is more helpful than 1000 reports
• Avoid waste - Share information that is relevant and nothing more and nothing less.
• Leverage the existing process to generate and deliver these inputs as against a whole set of EA specific processes.

Promote rapid feedback, by working jointly on models and architecture blue prints with other people and functions. Remember that the best way of conveying information is by a face-to-face conversation, supported by other materials. Shared development of a model, at a whiteboard, will generate excellent feedback and buy-in. Work as closely as possible with all the stakeholders, including your customers and other partners.


Reflect behavior and adapt to changes

The effect of a change in the end reflects on the behavior of individuals, tools, and functions. The EAM function shall atempt to understand the likely directions and behavior of such changes using techniques such as scenario analysis and change cases. This will help the EAM function to determine how best to embrace the change in terms of timing, approach and methodology. This is where a pattern based approach in developing the EAM function would facilitate change adoption with much ease and least impact.

EAM should manage and plan for the changes and shall never resist a change. It may not always be easy in embracing changes, but a well thought out EAM evolution lifecycle would certainly make it simpler. It is always possible that one big change can be broken into various blocks and can be taken one at a time, depending on the time, efforts and business priorities.


Here are some of the useful references for further reading on the Agility and the Enterprise Architecture Management.

1. Towards an Agile Design of the Enterprise Architecture Management Function

2. Principles for the Agile Architect

3. The Principles of Agile Architecture

4. Actionable Enterprise Architecture (EA) for the Agile Enterprise: Getting Back to Basics