Project Management

Forget Bimodal IT

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Nickel sitting on its edgeThere has been a LOT about bimodal IT being written and everyone is chiming in on how to manage bimodal teams. Bimodal IT is something Gartner keeps pushing, claiming 75% of IT departments will be operating bimodally in 2017 (pdf). They also claim that half of them will make a mess of it.

Why is that? It’s simple really.

Going bimodal is an unnatural way to run a team, group, or product.

If I’m an aging business in danger of being disrupted then sure, I’ll spin off a newer, more agile team to try and disrupt myself. Better to disrupt myself than to let it happen to me. Let the new team innovate and create new things while I try and get as much revenue as I can from the pre-disruption market.

Running a more rapid, innovative set of teams alongside separate teams that are essentially keeping the lights just doesn’t work long term in a healthy organization.

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Selecting Software and an Implementation Partner

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When I was in the UK last week, I availed myself of the opportunity to catch-up with some friends in the industry. There were both product and delivery people in the crowd and we had a good time.

At some point, we hit the topic of Partners delivering software and how organizations should go about the process. We agreed on the right ways to use Partners and promptly celebrated with another round. As a rule of thumb, when that crowd agrees as a group, it is usually accepted knowledge. Even so, we all could readily recall multiple stories of people doing it poorly.

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