Welcome to the 10th Episode of Coffee Conversations with Stephen Hayward of Project X. Join me in welcoming for the first time Mike Lemmon a Sr Project Manager, who is here to join me in a brief discussion on Project Management and more specifically some of the things you need to do a

So last week I started a stream of posts that was going to discuss the various alternatives to sourcing strategy. Before we get started though, I wanted to do some level-setting on a variety of fronts.  Today, let’s talk about organizational structure in support of Data War

Welcome to the 7th Episode of Coffee Conversations with Stephen Hayward of Project X. It’s the first Tuesday of April, we all made it through April fools day.  Today I have with me Mark Dymond, Director of Application Services at IBM who is responsible for one of their largest C

It reminds me of a saying "Dogs and Cats living together … mass hysteria".  It seems that Claudia Imhoff has written an article proclaiming that there is a role.  I read this in Teradata Magazine, but Tim Matthews over at iPEDO did a great job in a post over

One of the things consultants struggle with is how much one should be involved in the clients problems.  Should one simply collect data, analyse and report or should you get involve in making it happen?   In discussion with one of my partners who wanted to be actively i

Project X was invited into a conversation last week with some senior folks at various organizations on the topic of software develpoment productivity.  First, thank you Mark for including Project X in the conversation.  It has sparked some interesting debate of which I would

In a previous post we discussed Fixed Price vs Time and Materials today I would like to add two other options to the discussion. Service Level Agreements and Transaction Based Model. In a Service Level Agreement (SLA) or sometimes referred to as service level objectives, you are desig

The more Project X is involved in conversations in regards to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the more governance becomes important.  In the past we have talked about guiding principles and registries. So as one would expect, IBM is preparing to jump into this in a big way.&

In some conversations that Project X has had with vendors as well as customers over the past couple of months, I have found some interesting insights as a result of Service Oriented Architecture and it’s import on good data access governance and some of the opportunities that pr

I ran across this great image overviewing Agile development by Dion Hinchcliffe and thought I would share it as this methodology aligns very nicely with innovation, time-boxing and Project X thinks this will emerge as one of the standard SOA development methodologies and are working t