A few weeks ago I looked up “agility” on wikipedia to help with a marketing piece. I wanted to explain how our company’s philosophies on agile software development also applied to our entire operation.
My presumption was that the concept of agile software development is still relatively unknown, so I would need to define the concept in an easily digestable way.
So your organization needs a website? Maybe a content management system (CMS)? With a little smattering of customer relationship management (CRM)? Oh wait, you need some Web 2.0… you know, some cool stuff! Better not forget analytics. And do you want some fries with that?
Picking features for your organization’s website can sometimes feel like you’re ordering from the drive through at Burger King. But at Burger King you know exactly what you’re getting and exactly how much it will cost. But have you thought about the costs after you scarf down that double Whopper with cheese? The indigestion, the big butt, the extra 30 minutes you’ll need on the elliptical at the gym? Okay, so I’m being silly, but I’m trying to make a point. That’s kind of the way websites are.
What could be so dangerous about planning, you ask?
Most project managers see planning as the first and most helpful step they can take towards getting their projects off on the right foot.
Yet, in the process of planning, PMs often miss the forest for the trees. Forgetting to re-plan your project, missing the business case, or building a project plan that is too complicated for the effort it is meant to support can doom your plans to failure.
In this blog entry, I’ll talk a bit about each of these risks, and how to avoid them.
Amazon Web Service (AWS) are a set of services hosted by Amazon that can be used to build and host your web applications at (potentially) a fraction of the cost of traditional hosting arrangements. I wont get into all the specifics of what AWS is, you can read that here. Basically, amazon setup an enormous amount of infrastructure and have services like S3 (Simple Storage Service) for remote distributed storage and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) for resizable virtual computing (hosting).
