Way back in 2003, Arrk Group’s Executive Chairman Julian Howison was quoted in Computer Weekly (a June 24th article concerning the future impact of offshore on UK IT Services market) saying that when it comes to the offshoring of software development and support, “UK companies have no choice”. He said that for UK IT companies…
The devil makes work for idle hands – or so the saying goes. Nowadays however, getting ‘hacked’ has become far more than being infiltrated by a bored bedroom geek. Indeed, cyber crime is now such big business that it attracts real technical entrepreneurs chasing the promise of serious payback – either directly through fraudulent activity,…
There are a number of problems inherent in the traditional ‘direct’ offshore engagement model where a UK Customer contracts directly with an offshore supplier. These are typically driven by the offshore supplier’s lack of UK domain knowledge, limited capability in effective Customer engagement, inadequate delivery management capability, differences in language, culture, time and distance and…
Now, more than ever, IT management must perform the tricky task of delivering more, faster and for less. A generation of users accustomed to always-on internet applications like Google and Amazon makes meeting customer demands harder, while business units want IT to be more nimble and able to create new functionality more rapidly. In an…
Here’s a question. What’s your business’ greatest asset? You’ll probably say your staff – after all, without them you wouldn’t have a business at all, right? But do you know which staff are your most valuable? Which ones do you depend on to actually create your products – the ones that have the knowledge to…
Over the last five years or so, there has been rapid evolution in the number of technologies that promise to disrupt established ways of doing business and mean that all organisations driving new initiatives should always take a Digital First approach. Evolution in mobile, social media, cloud and big data are revolutionising the way consumers interact with…
Testing applications which utilise Web Browsers is becoming increasing more complex. In the early 1990s, successful testing with a copy of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape meant that you could be confident that the vast majority of users would be able to reliably access your application. Multiple browsers from many different providers are now in…
So you have successfully completed a sprint with a majority of your deliverables accepted by your customers. What do you do next? It’s that point in time when you are ready to begin with your next adventure but only after that final campfire where you can look back at the sweet (and not so sweet)…
The Sprint Retrospective ceremony is one of the most important ceremonies for a scrum team as this is the time when the team reviews the sprint, ways of working, existing processes and comes up with improvements/actions which will help them in becoming more productive and successful. When we started scrum, we followed the What went…
How many deliverables should we commit to our customers in say the next two weeks? An intriguing question asked by many agile teams at the beginning of every iteration. The answer to this question depends largely on the team’s thinking, philosophy and skills – which unfortunately cannot be measured. Then how do we forecast the…
