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Welcome to the pages of Softheme company blog. During years of successful work in the sphere of software outsourcing we have accumulated the rich experience of project development of various complexity levels. We believe that it is time to share our knowledge base with the IT-community. |
This blog will contain constantly updated articles covering the topics of programming, website development, project management, and legal side of operation of an outsourcing company in Ukraine. We hope that our solutions and examples will prove to be useful to other participants of the IT outsourcing market. |
Archive for the ‘Scope management’ CategoryThe increased role of AgileWednesday, January 4th, 2012
Agile has become more than just one of the software development methodologies. Now it is the most common way of self-organization, that definitely dominates in IT-related professions. We decided to share some of our knowledge about Agile and offer our vision on implementing Agile into practice. (more…) Bookmark/Search this post with:
      65% firms offshore IT jobs - SIM SurveyWednesday, October 5th, 2011 IT outsourcing Seems like IT offshoring has become a usual thing for the majotiry of busnesses. The annual survey of IT budgets and technology trends by the Society of Information Management (SIM) found that 65% of companies use it for some aspects of their business. The survey covers CIOs and senior IT leaders at 275 companies mainly from the USA. The main outsourcing destinations are: India (58% ot those who use outsourcing), China (10%), Mexico (7%), Western Europe (6%), Eastern Europe (4%), Philippines and the Caribbean (4%), Russia and Brazil (both 3%), the survey said. Another good news is that IT spendings are not being cut. This year 83% of respondents claim that their IT budgets were equal or greater than the preveious year, and 85% have respective plans for the next year 2012. According to the survey, cost reduction is the last among the CIOs’ priorities. The reason is simple - companies want to leverage IT to reduce overall costs, instead of cutting it to achieve relatively insignificant saving. The top priorities for IT managers are: business agility, business process management, IT strategic planning, IT reliability and efficiency, enterprise architecture, security and revenue-generating IT innovations. The figures provided by SIM survey once again acknowledged that IT outsourcing is a good way to cope with the challenges facing IT leaders. We believe that in the future the percentage of those who outsource will become even greater and reach 80% in the next few years. You can learn more about other findings of SIM survey on Computerworld. Bookmark/Search this post with:
Project Management: Cost ‘n’ Price RelationshipFriday, June 12th, 2009One of the things that we believe to be important for project management is the proper understanding of the relationship between cost and price. In this post we will try to clarify the meanings for these two words. Price is the amount of money or something valuable that a customer is ready to pay or give in order to receive something valuable from you. In terms of software project management, the thing that the stakeholder receives is the project being done, and the things that the customer and stakeholders receive are the results of the project – be it either goods or services. Money is what usually paid for doing the project. At the same time, Cost is the amount of resources (equipment, materials, money, people, etc) that are utilized in order to produce goods or services, the deliverables of the project. Bookmark/Search this post with:
Defining Stakeholders for a ProjectFriday, April 24th, 2009Whether you are in outsourcing or any other kind of business, when doing a project, it is very important to understand who the main stakeholders for the project are. First of all, we need to clarify that the stakeholders are the people who are going to benefit from or lose something in the project. The project team, among others, should also be included in the list of stakeholders by this definition. However, if we take all of the extensive effects of doing nearly any project into account, we will understand that there actually may be a lot of stakeholders. Our main concern is connected with the “key” stakeholders and their identification. The most prevailing technique that can be used is to get seven to ten members of the project team together and then using one of the group dynamics techniques define the names of all the stakeholders for the project. There is one more technique for stakeholders’ identification that recently gets more and more popularity. It is called the Crawford slip. Under this technique, each person in the group receives ten pieces of paper. Then the facilitator asks the question, “Who is the most important stakeholder in this project?” Each of the group participants must come up with the best response he or she can think of. After a one minute pause the facilitator asks the same question again and so on. Each time the question is asked, the participants must answer the question writing down more and more variants. Each participant cannot use the answer more than once. Bookmark/Search this post with:
Project Scope Management: Softheme ViewWednesday, April 8th, 2009In the next several posts we would like to discuss the basics of scope management since it is one of the most important parts of project management which we at Softheme pay special attention to. Due to proper application of scope management approaches to the projects of our clients, Softheme is so successful and productive in delivering projects of various complexity levels. So we believe it would be useful to share our experience regarding this matter. Scope management is a starting point for any projectHowever, with web being a more dynamic sphere of development, we believe that scope management is better applicable to application development which usually requires a more thorough approach. It is needless to say that the most common reason behind project failures is poor scope definition. This means that the expectations of the stakeholders, mainly of the client or sponsor, and the expectations of the project team are quite different. Being a most difficult problem, it is nevertheless critical to the success of the project. Projects fail due to many reasons, and understanding them does a good job in helping to avoid failures. Bookmark/Search this post with:
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