If you are one of those who started programming 2 decades back, at that time project management was easy and there were hardly any collaboration & process challenges -- ofcourse the programming was the only difficult task. Fast forward.... I was pondering today that how do people see software lifecycle management now? Heard the Disney Song: "It's a whole new world"? Read a few interesting articles on ComputerWorld by Mitch betts. Here are the highlights:

1."Project team members would be thousands of miles away because the business is forcing the organizations to get the best talent, wherever it resides. It is resulting in nightmare in managing the project without the right tools and processes in place."

2. "Time to market is the key to success for business managers but my team that is executing the projects are fretting about the extra 15-20% time they spend on compliance/process related work."

3. "IT would focus on end-to-end processes rather than functional stovepipes, application development would turn into business process delivery. IT would collaborate with the business to design improved business processes, capture the process in metadata that would drive the design and operation of composite applications. Composite would pull together SOA-based business services and modular user interfaces to meet the specific needs and workflow of each business process, giving users integrated, contextual, multichannel access to transactions, content, collaboration, and communications. Business intelligences would close the loop, using process metadata to report process metrics, driving analysis for the next round of business process improvement." -- Randy Heffner, analyst, Forrester Research Inc., Cambridge, Mass.

4. "As application development deals with the pressure of cost reduction and productivity improvement and grapples with compliance issues, development shops will focus more on development planning and process management. They will look at establishing and automating predictable processes and enhancing project management capabilities. As more application development shops fine-tune and improve processes, they will focus on effectiveness factors that impact development projects like communications. In globally sourced development projects there will be an emphasis on global project management like developing cultural intelligence to deal with different cultural, language and communication challenges; and requirements and relationship management skills that will impact project productivity." -- Jack Duggal, managing principal, Projectize Group LLC, Simsbury, Conn.

5. "True globally distributed development shops will require teams to use agile processes to remain competitive. Within the next two years, large corporate IT shops will turn to agile development processes as a means to deliver value to the business and be more responsive to their customers. Drawing largely on experiences from open-source projects, corporate IT managers realize that their traditional approaches aren't cutting it, and that they need to make some pretty significant changes if they are to keep pace with competitive demands. One interesting twist: Outsourcers, and offshore firms in particular, will be pressured to adapt to agile processes as well -- a huge challenge for firms that have made their money on highly productive waterfall processes that meet CMM Level 4 and 5 requirements. Not all will be able to make this transition." -- Liz Barnett, vice president, Forrester Research Inc.

6. "Pressure for increased agility and faster time-to-market will drive the continued focus on agile methods -- though IT organizations will struggle with the shift in development, project management and operational management practices. Rapid, incremental and test-driven development to reduce delivery cycles, with refinement/refactoring, over time will predominate in successful organizations. Integration of agile methods with distributed teams will further force the hard conversations regarding how best to accomplish both." -- David Moore, director of North American branch operations services, Keane Inc., Boston

I also wanted to take this opportunity to comment on my earlier post Perception and results of the Indian IT success story has a gap. Despite all the perception gaps, the success of Indian Services players are primarily because they have understood the above mentioned 6 points very early and very clearly, which indeed is giving them an edge over their contemporaries (ESPs) -- setting up the right tool in their organization that would take care of their collaboration challenges, process standardization, reduced cycle time, and have multiple readymade process templates on various methodologies (waterfall or agile). Digité surely is playing a key role in this business transformation for some of the Indian IT services companies.