When an organization is planning on a major change that will incur significant cost, risk, time and engagement of resources along with organizational impact, it is best practice to initiate this activity through the Service Portfolio process.  Before this new or significantly changed service is chartered, it is important that it be reviewed for how it may impact the short, medium and long term support of other services currently being delivered, the pool of limited resources that will be utilized for this undertaking and on the change schedule itself. The Change Proposal is used to communicate a high level description of the change and is normally submitted to Change Management for authorization.  Authorization, however, is not an approval for implementation, but is a measure to allow the service to be chartered so design activity on the service can begin. In some cases the proposal may be created by someone other than Portfolio Management, such as the PMO or SMO. This high le

A developer recently asked me “What is the real difference between Cadence and Velocity?   Aren’t they both just talking about speed?”   Hmmm…  Good Questions. Cadence Generally thinking cadence can be tied to rhythm.  One thing to remember is that the DevOps value stream is much broader in scope than just Dev and Ops.  So what are we looking at here?  The rhythm of code integration, and how we align with that things like integrated testing?  Yes, but also consider that the code development integration and deployment has to be in rhythm with the demand that is coming from your Customer and Business side.  If we are not in sync or have the same cadence as the business demand all other measurements may not be beneficial.     Alright, now let’s consider that your design and development teams work diligently to implement Agile Software Development principles to align and sync with the business.  If the cadence in test and deployment is not in sync then you have a potential bottlen