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According to the market research company, Research and Markets, US spending on IT products and services is forecasted to grow to $514.5 billion in 2010. However, the estimated cost of IT failures to the US economy is $1 trillion! Now we’re talking about IT system failures and their net affect on the companies that rely on those systems. But you can bet money on the fact that the institutions and companies experiencing these losses know the IT company who built their system. Furthermore, they’re not going to be buying from that company again, much less recommending it to their partners and contacts. In any company, large or small, your reputation is your biggest asset – you want to be in that 8% group. If your IT projects are failing, then you are not going to win the market share you need to compete in that $514.5 billion market!
The following 5 principles lay out the steps you should be following, to make sure that your projects are completed on time, and on budget, successfully. Read them, learn them, know them, teach them and then make them stick.
Principle One: Communicate
• 40% of project managers cited poor communication as the leading cause if IT project failures
If everyone involved in your IT project doesn’t know what they’re working on, when it’s due, how to get it done and who the audience is, how can you possibly expect your project to succeed?

Everything is jogging along swimmingly in the real world, orders coming in thick and fast, the business is booming. World-wide recession, hah! In the development bullpen, velocity is faster than a speeding bullet, they're playing office boules most of the day. But hark! The sound of over five thousand orders plummeting down through the depths of the system sends shudders through the department. Time to down boules and fix the problem.  Suddenly the CEO's door opens and the dev manager is summoned. He knows what's coming but is a bit taken aback when he discovers its not the five thousand customers in limbo that has lit the coals he's being dragged over but the issue that is holding up the order belonging to the CEO's chihuahua-sitter. He points out the devs are working on a solution for the five thousand stuck orders but the CEO is not having any of it. "The order of priority is obvious!" booms the CEO.

Prioritising issues

Production Issue Processes

Another perfect release- this is what it’s all about, now time to kick back, cocktail in hand, bathing in the glorious glow of heaped praise as stakeholder after stakeholder thank Goldilocks and the Three Bears for managing to translate their requirements into flawless, working software. Ok we may have slipped into dreamland there.  Here’s what really happened:

It’s the 35th release and the sales department is deliriously happy. Their sales systems are implemented in an agile fashion so they can stay well ahead of their competitors as they can react quickly to the market. They’ve had a huge increase in customers but unfortunately they’re not all happy ones. Customer services have been inundated with a whole host of complaints. Luckily for them they have a production support team armed to the teeth with agile weaponry. Now let’s see how they put their agile arsenal to good use.

A number of orders have been reported as delayed. A bit of SQL magic later and it is discovered that hundreds of customers have been affected for one specific product range. Liaising with the development team it is debated whether it is expected behaviour, let’s assume in this instance it is not. An issue tracking ticket needs to be raised. The product range affected is the latest premium range but there are a relatively small number of orders in trouble we’re going to raise it as a major issue- one which does not need immediate attention. The SQL query and any relevant logging information found are attached to the ticket.  The issue summary is written on a bug card and goes in the ‘New’ column on the support task board.

When people put on their agile hats and go through their agile check list they lovingly purr over their test driven, pair-built, continuously integrated codebase and pat themselves on the back as the stories drip through to Done like honey from a spoon. The devs cool down post codefreeze playing Quake, the last story is UATed and hey presto that honey is out in the wild. Where the bears live. And the bugs, and boy do bugs love that honey!

In an ideal world there won’t be any problems in production. In an ideal world there’s a great soundtrack playing while the dev team, PMO and the business high-five one another in slow-mo.  If you’re talking about a complex enterprise system even the most able teams will produce code that encounters some problems. Test driven development and pairing will minimise production issues that’s true but there’s no practice that eliminates bugs and missed functionality.

So what part of the agile world deals with issues in production? Its going to be either a support analyst or someone playing that role. In the enterprise the support analyst will be part of a larger support team. The support team will investigate problems raised by the business. They’ll analyse the issue, quantify the problem and raise a bug for the dev team to fix.