Earlier this week I went to a seminar where one of my prospects was a presenter. During the coffee break I joined a conversation with some people that were talking about a huge Life Cycle Management project that has been stopped by management as it didn’t bring the expected result.
What happened? People!
It seems it all went wrong as a tight central approach has been taken with little or no involvement of the relevant stakeholders. Twenty million euros later: full stop. The good news of course is that it seems that some companies still can afford to lose 20 million euros or more… What are the lessons learned?
“There is never enough time to do it right the first time, but there is always enough time to do it over.”
Proper Life Cycle Management involves people, processes and tools. When none of these are in line it is almost sure it will fail.
For people it seems that change hurts. Don’t forget that. Life Cycle Management affects different stakeholders and not only changes the way they’ll work individually, but also how they work with their peers and other stakeholders, earlier or later in the process.
Second, be sure what you currently have (what is) and where you want to go to (to be situation).Clearly identify and document your business objectives, the functional processes and data needed and develop a proper implementation plan. Like building a house, understand you need different disciplines or contractors. Know then different disciplines you need (development, versioning, build, deploy, testing, provisioning,….)
Last but not least: think big, start small! Why not with Oracle Data Integrator?
About the author
Hello, my name is René De Vleeschauwer.
Throughout my career I've been responsible for the development of enterprise software. Since 12 years I've been leading the development of IKAN ALM, an open DevOps framework.
Do you have any questions about this post? Just ask me!