The Application Lifecycle Management process is made up of many disciplines and best practices which define the rules of conduct for successful organizations. As your people become more experienced with ALM practices they will be able to deliver more consistently. However, more important than recognizing and adopting these disciplines as silos, a successful ALM strategy will allow you to maximize success by integrating planning, tracking and communication between disciplines.
Within the scope of Application Lifecycle Management, the following disciplines are frequently recognized:
Project Portfolio Management: Project Portfolio Management (PPM) helps organizations select projects that best meet their business objectives. Using predefined business rules, projects are rated and ranked to ensure that the focus of the business is maintained. This allows executives to make sure that projects align with the long and short term strategic objectives and helps to maximize the value of project spend.
Project Management: While Project Portfolio Management is concerned with selecting the right projects, Project Management focuses on planning and tracking the projects that the organization is undertaking. Project Management gives the organization the visibility and control needed to accurately gauge project status and make course corrections as needed. Project Management is not solely based on the traditional PMP project management methodologies, but also encompasses the emerging agile management and governance practices.
Requirements Management: Requirements management is focused on collecting, vetting and adjusting product features. Requirements are a tool that bridges that gap between the wants of the business and the understanding of the project team. Well written requirements are one of the keys to predictability. Requirements management is not restricted to the traditional waterfall techniques but includes many of the new agile methods as well such as user stories and scenarios. Effective requirements management makes requirements specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time boxed.
Application Development: Application development is focused on translation of business needs into software products. Application development can be a strategic asset for an organization or can simply be a cost of doing business. Today's companies have a vast array of development techniques and methodologies ranging from traditional waterfall to agile. Teams have become more diverse and geographically dispersed and off-shoring is becoming more and more of a reality.
Quality Assurance: Quality Assurance is focused on monitoring the quality of requirements and software product. Software quality can often be difficult to measure, but best practices have evolved to make this not only possible, but repeatable. Good Quality Assurance practices help your organization make sure that the correct business functionality is being delivered thus reducing the cost of development and maintenance.
Change Management: Change Management (also known as Configuration Management) is focused on tracking changes in the software over time. Change Management techniques are used to create and store revisions of software and also can be used to reproduce a version of the software at any point in its evolution. Good change management practices allow you to control and recreate versions of both complex and simple applications.
Operations Management: Operations Management is focused on managing the organization's software and hardware assets. A solid strategy will include mechanisms and processes for help desk support, hardware provisioning and infrastructure management. Good Operations Management practices will reduce response time and allow the business to adapt quickly to changes in the market.
Adopting best practices tailored to your organizational needs in any of these disciplines can improve your success in delivering IT solutions. If you have a specific need any any of these areas, Notion Solutions can coach you in appropriate adoption of individual disciplines, processes and best practices.