One of the greatest threats to the success of any software development project is the tendency of the development team to underestimate its dependency on the executive team driving strategy and the IT operations team enabling and monitoring service levels.
Consider that even the best run software development team cannot meet expectations if the business processes it is asked to deliver or enhance are poorly defined and managed by management. And how much control can the development organization have over end user satisfaction if the production environment is under resourced and lacks the facility to detect and diagnose service-undermining bottlenecks?
These dependencies existing between business, development and IT operations - that is, across the IT lifecycle - are the determinants of solution delivery success. IBM studied this phenomenon and, through the collaboration of its Software Group brands - including Rational, Tivoli and WebSphere - have designed a set of complete but modular solutions that reduce the friction at areas of intersection within IT.
Teams must be proactive about their management of this IT lifecycle to prevent cost, schedule and quality mishaps from occurring. Where to start? IBM has identified four primary areas meriting attention:
IT governance, the real-time planning, monitoring and management of IT projects to ensure the delivery of expected results using finite resources. Functional quality assurance, in which end user satisfaction is addressed from a multitude of perspectives, including business process and requirements clarity and accuracy to architectural integrity and test discipline. Managed deployment, where teams adopt repeatable, auditable methods for the release of code into multiple environments including the test lab, the staging area and the final production environment. System performance optimization, the iterative evaluation, testing and refinement of assets, service level commitments and underlying code to optimize performance, coupled with a system for rapid detection, diagnosis and repair of bottlenecks occurring in production systems.
To learn about IBM's solutions for these challenges of IT lifecycle management, please visit the ITLM homepage.
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