Online Events

Due to time zones, events presented by American speakers will be spread over more days, and will take place in the afternoon from 2 pm to 6 pm Italian time

Business Architecture

ONLINE LIVE STREAMING

May 29 - Jun 01, 2023

By: Roger Burlton

Graph Machine Learning

ONLINE LIVE STREAMING

Jun 05 - Jun 09, 2023

By: Russell Jurney

Incorporating Big Data, Hadoop and NoSQL in DW and BI System

ONLINE LIVE STREAMING

Jun 12 - Jun 13, 2023

By: Rick van der Lans

Lean Data Architectures to Minimize Data Copying

ONLINE LIVE STREAMING

Jun 14, 2023

By: Rick van der Lans

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Management

ONLINE LIVE STREAMING

Jun 15 - Jun 16, 2023

By: Derek Strauss

Centralised Data Governance of a Distributed Data Landscape

ONLINE LIVE STREAMING

Jun 22 - Jun 23, 2023

By: Mike Ferguson

Modern Application Architectures

ONLINE LIVE STREAMING

Jun 26 - Jun 27, 2023

By: Jesse Anderson

Building Data Architecture Roadmaps to Align with Business Needs

ONLINE LIVE STREAMING

Jun 28, 2023

By: John O'Brien

Real-Time Big Data Systems with Spark Streaming and Kafka

ONLINE LIVE STREAMING

Oct 19 - Oct 20, 2023

By: Jesse Anderson

Free article of the month

Adrian_Reed
May 2023

Upcoming events by this speaker:

May 22-23, 2023 Online live streaming:
Pre-Project Problem Analysis

Avoid “Scope Creep”!

A common problem that affects projects is that of scope creep.  It’s very easy for a situation to occur where features and changes are suggested that are beyond the original view of the scope. Each change, individually, might seem small and insignificant, yet when they are added up they might result in a significant increase in cost and time. This is likely to have a knock-on impact on the benefits that are realised.

There are many causes of scope creep, and sometimes changes to scope are necessary for very good reasons. However uncontrolled or frivolous changes can be problematic. One particularly problematic issue is when different stakeholders have different perspectives on what the scope is. This can lead to different expectations over:

 

  • Why the change is necessary in the first place
  • What is being delivered
  • How the delivery will take place

If there isn’t a shared understanding over the why, what and how, then it is very likely that problems will occur.  Yet, in the understandable rush to ‘kick off’ a project, it is very tempting to curtail or cut down on the initial analysis work which creates this shared understanding.

The Dangers Of “Superficial Agreement”

When insufficient initial analysis work takes place, stakeholders might fall into a trap of appearing to agree. At a surface level they might actually agree, but the agreement is based on a tacit misunderstanding of each others’ views.

This is particularly the case when the driving factors behind a project sound really simple. “Our aim is to have a fully digital customer journey” or “we need to comply with this new law” sound like relatively simple statements. Yet unpack them and we find a whole range of ambiguities. 

Let’s take the first statement “Our aim is to have a fully digital customer journey” and imagine we ask for different stakeholders’ interpretations. It’s likely they’d have very different views, some possible examples are shown below.

Continued to read…

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