Project management — particularly project management in the context of agile development — remains an area of interest as well as an area where clear guidelines and direction are still severely lacking."

— Gabriele Piccoli, Editor

In this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review, we turn to a topic discussed previously in November 2008 (Vol. 8, No. 11) and July 2007 (Vol. 7, No. 7): project management. As readers of CBR know, we get our inspiration and ideas for topics from two sources. First, we get inspiration from current events, new trends, new technologies, and generally from being aware and plugged into what is going on in the world of IT. At the same time, we maintain a constant ear to the ground and stick with a reality check by being attentive and responsive to the Cutter Consortium client base. We pay close attention to the kinds of jobs that Cutter Consortium Senior Consultants are bidding for and working on. We also monitor the types of requests that Cutter clients make and we apply firsthand research at Cutter Summits held across the globe.

Project management — particularly project management in the context of agile development — remains an area of interest as well as an area where clear guidelines and direction are still severely lacking. As a consequence, we at CBR find it cyclically interesting and valuable to engage experts from the academy and from practice to contribute to the debate and to the development of sound approaches to agile project management. We normally do so within the standard format of CBR. That is, we typically engage experts from academia and from the Cutter community of Senior Consultants and ask them to craft an agile (no pun intended) questionnaire to which our readership can respond. On the basis of these surveys, we then ask our contributors to comment on the findings and abstract some tangible guidelines.

With this issue, we are inaugurating a new format for CBR, one that will complement — not substitute — our standard design. This more agile (again, no pun intended) format provides us with several advantages. First, it allows us to discuss issues that may be more innovative and emergent, issues that have yet to gain enough attention to support a large-scale survey. For example, in our February 2009 issue on digital data genesis (Vol. 9, No. 2), we encountered difficulties in getting qualified answers due to the novelty of the idea. Second, a nimbler approach to CBR enables us to be selective with our surveys. While I am a great proponent of data-driven inference, after four years of my editorial reign at CBR, I can recognize a bit of "survey fatigue" in our readership. The number of respondents has been decreasing, and we believe this is partly due to an abundance in the survey process.

Our new format has many of the features of the standard design: a cohesive topic, contributors from academia and practice, and an applied focus with tangible guidelines. The innovation of change, however, consists in producing shorter, more focused pieces. We think that, for particular topics, this new format will not only be more appropriate for our writers but also, more importantly, be easier and more immediate for our readers to "consume." In sum, we now have a tool in the Cutter Consortium arsenal of publications to more easily address the need for short-focused, forward-looking treatment of emerging topics in the IT management sphere.

We deploy this new tool this month on an issue that, while perhaps neither emerging nor innovative, is indeed replete with positions and beliefs — very often in contrast with one another. Consequently, we give our two contributors an opportunity to distill their best thinking about project management and its challenges in an efficient and direct way.

Helping us inaugurate the new CBR on the academic side is one of my favorite writers: Jo Ellen Moore. Jo Ellen is currently a Professor of Computer Management and Information Systems at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (USA) and, beyond her quality writing style, she is also a formidable executive education faculty member with successful programs in project scope and integration, project communications management, project HR management, earned value analysis, and solving the real project mystery — people. Complementing Jo Ellen's view, from the practice side, is David Spann. Dave is a Senior Consultant with Cutter's Agile Product & Project Management practice. With a focus on agility, his consulting work is devoted to helping organizations transition to a higher level of agility and adaptability.

With her trademark engaging writing style, Jo Ellen focuses her contribution on one of the elephants that everyone knows is in the room, but we often don't discuss: the role of reality in project management reporting and decision making. She breaks her piece in two halves, with one focused on the "reality-based plan" and the other on "reality-based status reporting." As with all CBR articles, whether survey-based or not, Jo Ellen distills the essence of her argument by concluding with tangible guidelines.

Dave's contribution is based on an interesting premise that he uses to open his piece: what is often not clear when switching to an agile methodology is that "leaders can't just plug in the new methodology and expect the firm to perform miracles on its own." His piece tackles this thorny issue by addressing the role of clear vision and purpose, prioritization, candid conversations, and emergence. As with Jo Ellen, Dave also keeps his thoughts focused on tangible behaviors that lead to improved performance.

We hope you will enjoy the new look of Cutter Benchmark Review and that you will continue to get a good "return on reading" from this publication -- whether through our standard or novel approach.