Asif Gill Blogs

Agile processes are often considered challenging to adopt in larger and formal project development and management environments. It may not be possible and need for an organisation to adopt a pure agile process for a large project. How can organizations adopt agile planning and estimation best practices within their formal and generic process lifecycle (GPL)? This article presents an agile planning and estimation model that can be used for large projects as a guide. Agile Process The core of the agile process is a collection of sprints or small increments. The agile process can be classified into three key categories or stages: ·        Pre-Sprint – focus on the analysis activities of the GPL ·        Sprint – focus on the planning and development activities of the GPL ·        Post-Sprint – focus on the sprint post-mortem and release activities of the GPL.   The agile process has ...

Enterprise Architecture (EA) could be considered a descriptive and/or prescriptive design of an enterprise. Traditional approaches to EA heavily  focus on the modelling and documentation aspects and tend to overlook the actual stakeholders and their needs, in particular, when dealing with complex and large digital innovation and transformation. This calls  for the need of an adaptive EA. Based on ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010:2011, an adaptive EA is the fundamental concepts or properties of an adaptive enterprise service system or ecosystem: situated in its environment (e.g. political, economic, sociological, technological, legal and environmental),  embodied in its elements (e.g. interaction, human, technology, facility),  relationships (e.g. type and strength) to each other and its environment, and  in the adaptive principles of its secure design and evolution. The Gill Framework ® V4.0 Adaptive EA requires a fundamental shift the way currently organ...

Designing an adaptive enterprise or business requires fundamental design principles. This post discusses the six broad six categories of adaptive design principles (agility, design thinking, model thinking, resiliency, service thinking and systems thinking) as outlined in the adaptive design principles catalog from  The Gill Framework® . These principles can be tailored and applied in a particular context. For instance, these principles can guide the design of the adaptive enterprise capabilities, teams, processes, services, systems etc. Agility ·          Flexibility: built-in flexible response to changes ·          Leanness: built-in quality with optimal or minimal resources ·          Learning: built-in analytics-information for continuous learning ·          Responsiveness: design for (response) change · ...

Adaptive or agile architecture design [artifact] and practice [activity of design] involves storytelling. In this post, I would like to share some of my experience from recent projects in the form of a following Architecture Storytelling Viewpoint template. Context : Policies, Principles, Strategies, Environment, Business Model, Operating Model ... 1. [Stakeholders] It starts with subject or area of interest [ Who ]  i.e. Person, Role, Organisation, Department, Division. Here focus is on identifying, understanding, prioritizing, estimating, planing and classifying the [Who] stakeholders (the most important part of the architecture) with certain area of interest (e.g. Marketing, Sales, People and Culture, Finance). You can design stakeholders map and empathy map to elicit "Who" for a certain area of interest . This is really about stakeholders or customer-centric architecture as opposed to an IT centric architecture. AS a Stakeholder..... 2. [Concerns] This ...

Leadership is hard and success is even harder. It depends how you define leadership and success for your personal context? Over a period of last two decades , I worked with and mentored by a number of intelligent people. This post shares my personal reflections and learnings  so far in 5 principles, which are part of my persona and still evolving. Personalisation  Persuasiveness  Patience  Persistence Progressive Personalisation  Personal respect, recognition and  individualisation of interactions or dealings or transactions rather being rude or vague or too generic. Persuasiveness Being able to influence through reasoning and demonstration rather imposing or enforcing decisions. Patience Being able to tolerate, listen and facilitate rather being harsh and unhelpful while others are catching up. Persistence Being able to stay calm, steadfast and steady the ship in response to difficult or challenging situation.Roll the ball everyday. Pr...

Sharing some thoughts about roles in information economy Information Minister Information Secretory Information Commissioner Information Governor Information Manger Information Strategist Information Economist Information Architect  Information Analyst Information Engineer Information Administrator Information Auditor Information Broker Information Provider Information Creator Information Consumer Your thoughts?

In my last post, I discussed about the customer-centric value proposition oriented adaptive architecture for enabling business sustainment, optimisation, innovation and transformation. This post further expands on the role of an adaptive architect. An adaptive architect needs to be embedded in the business to understand the stakeholders' concerns and viewpoints from within the internal business and external business operating environment perspectives. An adaptive architect can assume different roles to address different stakeholders' concerns. Analyst and Synthesist Collaborator Co-creator Coach Consultant  Doctor (Business Health Checks & Surgery for Sustainment, Improvement and Transformations ) Innovator  Servant Leader  Thought Leader  Trusted Advisor  Trainer Transition Manager More.... What are your thoughts? Thanks.