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Michael Hugos has a great post on agility where he makes the following point:

“Experience shows me (again and again) that agility is not about working fast but about finding elegantly simple solutions to business problems. You’ll know you’ve found an elegantly simple solution when the business people agree it solves their most important and immediate problems and when the developers know the solution can be built and tested in 30 days or less.

Unless you find a solution that meets these two criteria, it’s not possible to be agile. And often, because people can’t find these simple solutions, they mistakenly claim that agility itself doesn’t work. They come to this conclusion because they attempt to be agile by cramming complex solutions into short development cycles through working harder, longer, and faster.

That attempt has as much chance of success as trying to cram ten pounds of you-know-what into a five pound bag. Inevitably, the bag breaks, and then there is a mess to clean up.

An elegantly simple solution (a robust 80% solution) doesn’t do everything (there isn’t time for that), just the most important things. Finding this solution is not easy; it’s the creative part. It requires business people to figure out what tasks out of all the tasks they perform are the most important ones and what system features they need to handle those tasks. Then developers have to figure out how to build and test a system to deliver those features in the short amount of time available.”

We spend too much time complicating our lives by trying to do too much, too fast! There seems to never be enough time to do something correctly, but always enough time to do it over again! Given to complexity of managing technology, we’re prone to think that complex solutions, are better solutions. Instead we need to focus on implementing good enough solutions, solution that bring about small wins. Small wins, if continually applied, in a thoughtful and strategic manner, quickly add up to significant results. Small wins are more manageable and have less of an impact if they fail. Seeking big wins are extremely difficult, prone to failure and require significant political will! Focus on the small wins…. simple things done well!

Technorati Tags: Agile, Agility, Simple, Small Wins, GTD, IT, Project, Management, Business, Technology, Architecture, Good Enough, Execution

Simplicity is critical to the effective execution of IT strategy. Raj Sheelvant’s discusses on importance of simplicity in his post "Simplicity Minded Management".  He refers to Ron Ashkenas’s HBR article “Simplicity Minded Management”, where the author provides the following checklist as a guide to help to reduce complexity:

Make simplification a goal, not a virtue

• Include simplicity as a theme of the organization’s strategy
• Set specific targets for reducing complexity
• Create performance incentives that reward simplicity

Simplify the organizational structure

• Reduce levels and layers
• Increase spans of controls
• Consolidate similar functions

Prune and simplify products and services

• Employ product portfolio strategy
• Eliminate, phase out, or sell low-value products
• Counter feature creep

Discipline business and governance processes

• Create well-defined decision structures (councils, committees)
• Streamline operating processes (planning, budgeting, and so on)
• Involve employees at the grassroots level

Simplify personal patterns

• Counter communication overload
• Manage meeting time
• Facilitate collaboration across organizational boundaries

I thought this a great checklist to help reduce the complexity. Given the nature of enterprise simplicity should be critical part of an enterprise architect’s goals. Simple strategies and architectures are easier to communicate, easier to execute and easier to manage. What component of your strategy or enterprise architecture can you focus on simplifying this week?

Technorati Tags: Simple, Simplicity, EA, Enterprise Architecture, Strategy, Architecture, Goal, Objective

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