Luke Hohmann’s Blog

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This month’s issue of IEEE Computer has an article “How Business Goals Drive Architectural Design”. While the authors seem to have something useful to say about how one might align a business goal with architectural design, they fail to address what I consider to be (arguably) the most important aspect of a business or an architecture: evolution over time.

Business goals are an evolving concept, because a successful businesses changes over time. In the article, the authors suggest that the business goal of “opening new sales channels in the form of VARs” must be explicitly supported in the architecture. That may be true, but what happens when the company decides that its business goal is to disintermediate the VAR channel because it has too much power of their customers?

The authors also imply that the business goals of a company can apply uniformly to all of the companies products and services. As organizations become more complex, the business goals become more abstract. Divisional goals set in. And these must be further re-interpreted to the needs of specific markets.

The strategic roadmapping process that I described in Beyond Software Architecture provides a systematic approach for adressing these problems. By making time explicit, the product manager and his/her technical counterparts can create a shared understanding and direction on the evolution of business goals, market needs, corporate strategies, and technical capabilities.

I’ve concluded (sadly) that the winning entry for buzzword bingo at the Agile 2007 conference is “Business Value”. In some way I really shouldn’t be saddeded by this, as the alignment of development resources to business objectives is a hard, but attainable, goal, that is worth the effort. Still, I can’t help but think that most agilist teams are far too willing to accept that business value is defined as the prioritized backlog, without demanding that those who create the prioritized backlog do the necessary homework to ensure that the items on the backlog really do provide business value.

This is hard, but necessary, work. It involves (near) continuous collaboration with customers in an effort to discover how they value potential new features. It involves translating these learnings into insights that represent defined market segments.

It involves understanding the operations of your company well enough to justify internal improvements.

Perhaps more importantly, it involves the analysis of backlog items against a sufficiently rich, multi-dimensional set of pre-defined attributes, that allow the backlog to be prioritized to the true needs of the business. Direct financial attributes, such as IRR, NPV, and payback period are fundemental, but there are a host of others (alignment to corporate strategy, stakeholders, technical architectural care and feeding, maintaining competitive positioning, and so forth).

Creating solutions that deliver maximum business value should be the primary purpose of what every development team does, regardless of their process. Just make certain that your goals are set a bit higher than simply consuming items from the prioritized backlog.

• Appreciations to the conference organizers. They work hard.
• I was very impressed with the breadth and quality of the experience reports. I attended several and found interesting observations and learning’s from all of the speakers. We need more of this.
• www.ript.com looks promising. Not really sure how I’d use it, since I’m not the target market, and the product team seems to have done their homework. But, I’m playing around with it a bit to see how we might be able to work.
• I saw a demo of Thoughtwork’s mingle. I was really saddened by the poor use of screen real estate. My non-scientific analysis of the screens suggested that more than 50% of most of the screens was devoted to labels or whitespace. We know more about usability than this. Which brings me to a really crucial tools rant: I find current approaches for representing complex project structures (multi-project status, multi-release/fielded product status, inter-dependencies) inadequate, at best. Who will create the really killer status app?
• Coolest shirt? Viva Agilista! From the Yahoo! team. And yeah, I got one.
• Coolest Chotchki? My vote still goes to the Rally mini-coopers.
• Best badge bling? Enthiosys, of course!
• Super snack? Dried fruits and nuts. So much better than the standard stale greasy cookie.
• Lots of energy (thankfully!) about portfolio management. I’m guessing that the PMO panel (myself, David Anderson, Liz Barnett, and Neil; moderated by Todd Little) drew at least people 200 people, with a lively discussion of prioritization schemes and funding options.
• I’m proud that our experience report (with Peter Hodgkins from VeriSign, located here) was so well received. Pete did a great job of framing quality levels, which we thought would create some interesting discussion, but seemed to be mostly received as good common sense. Which it is.
  I can tell I’m getting older because it took me longer to recover from the late night meetings. Where we talked about agile things, of course. (This last comment in case someone from work is reading).
• The conference was too long. Too many tracks and the mechanism for finding what you really wanted was atrocious. I’d prefer a shorter, more focused conference.
• The Conference Within a Conference (CWAC) had the most interesting discussions. I should have hung more with that crew. I will next year.

Last week (4/26/07) I taught a two-day class on Innovation Games(R) at the METS Center in Erlanger, KY. Serving the greater Cincinnati area, I found the METS center one of the finest facilities I’ve ever used for a training and/or game. The staff was friendly — and helpful. The food was excellent. Most importantly, the facilities were tremendous. The AV options were rich, and everything worked, the first time, and every time throughout the two days. The walls were geared for facilitation, so taping stuff on the walls, using Innovation Games(R) materials, was easy.

Based on my experience, I can confidently recommend the METS center for focus groups, classes, offsite meetings, and presentations. And no, I wasn’t paid anything for this endorsement :-).