Agile is gaining in popularity among IT developers and departments around the world for a reason: To put it simply, Agile works. When you use it, your projects run more smoothly and time constraints are more manageable, no matter what project management framework you are using.
Project managers are seeing that agile works. Trending now in SD Times is a look back at 2015 that says “Agile was the New Norm in 2015,” which shows the popularity of this approach to developing software projects.
The Agile project management style has taken the coding world by storm for every reason, it seems, except for the wishes of the people actually doing the coding. This method of project management places accountability on talented software developers to a burdensome degree, harnessing them to the fickle whims of clients and management teams that do not know or care about how software is actually built. Read More
Being a programmer never gets easier. Many of your tasks end up being bigger time sinks than you expected, and in the meantime a backlog piles up. Sometimes, you can even feel like every time you complete a task, two more magically appear just to aggravate you, like some sort of confounding Tribble. Read More
Looking back into the dim recesses of my mind, I cast my gaze upon the short period in which I thought I was going to be a programmer. (We didn’t call ourselves software engineers at my college, I think because we didn’t want to be identified with the engineering college, which was in a building with a massive crack in its foundation and a developing tilt.) Read More
Much has been written about big data and how it is revolutionizing business and business intelligence. Today, we’re going to give some recognition to a less hyped sibling – small data.
Allen Bonde, VP of Product Marketing and Innovation at Actuate, has been written about small data in many places, including the Small Data Group blog. His definition of small data:
“Small data connects people with timely, meaningful insights (derived from big data and/or “local” sources), organized and packaged – often visually – to be accessible, understandable, and actionable for everyday tasks.”
Put even more simply, big data is about machines; small data is about people. Read More
There is an often misused quote attributed to Henry Ford, although there is no evidence he actually said it. “If I had asked the people what they wanted, they would’ve said faster horses,” the old saying goes.
That sentence prompts a lot of discussion in business and marketing circles. Many people dismiss it, suggesting it claims organizations shouldn’t look to their customers for answers or solutions to problems. Others contend the “quote” was about not just listening but understanding your customer’s needs and asking the right questions.
Look at the phrase through the world of business intelligence and it takes a different twist. Shaun Connelly of Teradata did so in a recent blog:
“Business people can generally tell you what they want, but struggle to know or communicate what they need. To be successful, Business and IT need to collaborate, spar a little bit and figure out what’s possible in terms of objectives, analysis, and actions to drive specific results.” Read More
Business application-users need and expect fast, real-time business intelligence. In the past, traditional reporting methods required waiting for IT to run a report that might take days to receive. In considering an embedded self-service BI solution, here are five key features your application needs:
Flexible Fields. It’s not enough to custom-build reports. You have to have the capability to add or revise fields, and your reports and dashboards have to change in real-time, and not require waiting for IT help. Read More
What makes a great web app?
You know it when you see it, its function is clear, and it makes intuitive sense to the users. It’s beautiful, and it runs smoothly with few bugs.
But plenty of apps are built that fail to meet these requirements, and they land quickly in the web app graveyard, or never get the love and attention they need from developers to make things right.
That’s why we turn to experts like Fred Wilson, whose company invests in apps that have a certain set of characteristics. These ten points, when put together, make for a great product, that people want to use. At the Future of Web Apps Miami conference in 2010, he laid out these principle. We recently ran across them again, and found them just as meaningful now as three years ago.
Many of these bold ideas about minimalist software engineering are the basis of our work at Izenda. If we’ve removed all the clutter and unnecessary barriers to a smart, well-designed product, we believe this benefits our clients, partners, and their end users too. We love seeing these guidelines so simply expressed.
As a software company supplying and serving fellow software companies, Izenda is in a unique position. We are always striving to learn more, improve, grow our company, and we want our partners and clients to be expanding and growing as well. So we’re always looking for tips to pass along.
The Harvard Business Review recently featured Steve W. Martin’s research and conclusions, after he interviewed hundreds of business-to-business clients of his own, over the course of a year. He sought to discover what specific obstacles were preventing business deals to close, rather than a general list of the problems that made their jobs more difficult. His subjects are spread over a variety of sectors, from high-tech to finance to healthcare, but the basic sales issues make up a short, helpful list.
Some of the most basic reasons begin internally, before the process has even begun. That includes administrative duties that consume time, like reports and post-sales activities that eat up valuable sales time. Then there is the issue of making the internal sale: rallying internal support to pursue and account, working with the team, and dealing with the internal processes to generate leads, proposals, quotes, and contracts. Others cite their lack of pre-sales resources, like adequate staffing and availability of product specialists to fully support their efforts.
There is also the continual battle for the elusive new account. The sales team needs more leads, Martin found over and over. The most difficult step is getting the initial interest of a potential customer, and setting up that first introductory meeting. Within this, there is a constant effort to differentiate your product in a market plagued by commoditization, where features, functions, and specifications of the products might not differ that much from the competition.
The sales cycle can be interminably long, riddled with other distractions and emergencies on both ends of the deal. There are the unavoidable 800-pound gorillas, too, powerhouse companies like Microsoft and IBM that often get market share by default. If your product falls anywhere near the “Nice-to-Have” category, the kind of product that might be considered luxury or non-essential, you’re then plagued by dismissals with a simple “wish we could” response amidst cut-backs.
From the customer’s side, there is always the weighing of price versus value, and where your product winds up on that spectrum affects the end result crucially. This also stretches the sales cycle significantly, as decision-makers stall and deliberate. Customers will go to great lengths to ease their anxieties about a buying a product, including hiring consultants and doing a lot of involved research. And at the end, there still might not be a decision. Within this, part of the problem is often their own internal sales, and how well their representatives can sell the product within their own company. And again, managers and executives pulled in many directions slows down the sales cycle across industries.
Keeping aware of what your sales team sees as its biggest obstacles helps clarify areas for improvement. Every single employee should understand the process so that at every level of your company, whether large or small, the process is continuously amended and streamlined.
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