- Today’s rapidly scaling and increasingly complex products create mounting pressure on delivery teams to release new features and changes quickly and with sufficient quality.
- Many organizations lack the critical management capabilities to balance maintenance with new development and ensure high product value.
- Application management is often viewed as a support function rather than an enabler of business growth. Focus and investments are only placed on management when it becomes a problem.
- The lack of governance and practice accountability leaves application management in a chaotic state: politics take over, resources are not strategically allocated, and customers are frustrated.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- New features, fixes, and enhancements are all treated the same and managed in a single backlog. Teams need to focus on prioritizing their efforts on what is valuable to the organization, not to a single department.
- Business integration is not optional. The business (i.e. product owners) must be represented in guiding delivery efforts and performing ongoing validation and verification of new features and changes.
Impact and Result
- Justify the necessity to optimize application management. Gain a grounded understanding of stakeholder objectives and validate their achievability against the current maturity of application management.
- Strengthen backlog management practices. Obtain a holistic picture of the business and technical impacts, risks, value, complexity, and urgency of each backlog item in order to justify its priority and relevance. Apply the appropriate management approach to each software product according to its criticality and value to the business.
- Establish and govern a repeatable process. Develop a management process with well-defined steps, quality controls, and roles and responsibilities, and instill good practices to improve the success of delivery.
Streamline Application Management Research & Tools
Start here – read the Executive Brief
Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should sustain your application management practice, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:
- Streamline Application Management – Phases 1-3
1. Define your priorities
State the success criteria of your application management practice through defined objectives and metrics. Assess your maturity.
- Streamline Application Management – Phase 1: Define Your Priorities
- Application Management Strategy Template
- Application Management Maturity Assessment Tool
2. Govern application management
Structure your application management governance model with the right process and roles. Inject product ownership into your practice.
- Streamline Application Management – Phase 2: Govern Application Management
3. Build your optimization roadmap
Build your application management optimization roadmap to achieve your target state.
- Streamline Application Management – Phase 3: Build Your Optimization Roadmap
Workshop: Streamline Application Management
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
1 Define Your Priorities
The Purpose
State the success criteria of your application management practice through defined objectives and metrics.
Assess your maturity.
Key Benefits Achieved
Grounded stakeholder expectations
Application management maturity and identification of optimization opportunities
Activities
1.1 Set your objectives.
1.2 Assess your maturity.
Outputs
Application management objectives and metrics
Application management maturity and optimization opportunities
2 Govern Application Management
The Purpose
Structure your application management governance model with the right process and roles.
Inject product ownership into your practice.
Key Benefits Achieved
Management approach aligned to product value and criticality
Management techniques to govern the product backlog
Target-state application management process and roles
Activities
2.1 Select your management approach.
2.2 Manage your single product backlog.
2.3 Optimize your management process.
2.4 Define your management roles.
Outputs
Application management approach for each application
Product backlog management practices
Application management process
Application management roles and responsibilities and communication flow
3 Build Your Optimization Roadmap
The Purpose
Build your application management optimization roadmap to achieve your target state.
Key Benefits Achieved
Optimization opportunities
Application management optimization roadmap
Activities
3.1 Build your optimization roadmap.
Outputs
Application management optimization roadmap