Corporate Taxonomy

Not everyone sees or thinks of things in the same way, and this has become alarmingly obvious when a group of colleagues and others discuss the Agile umbrella of IT methodologies. This is a fundamental risk we need to deal with in order to demonstrate our corporate culture, professional excellence, consistent project approach, and platform for marketing to clients.

In this case, Agile Development, not only are we talking about a set of methodologies under an overarching set of principles, each method has its respective theoretical pros and cons as well as what the professional and individual experiences of our staff have been, with any one or more approaches. No doubt there will be divergent opinions, but that is why we need a core position that we can then at least tweak on a project basis. In our business, experience is everything.

One avenue to aid this problem, might be to have a corporate taxonomy for our company that we all agree on. This would include the definition of terms, how techniques/process relate to one another (or not), and any crossovers. The natural extension would then to be to draw out the "best practices" or some working model that we believe would form the core approach for our company, given the type of projects we typcially undertake in Capital Markets.

Based on other feedback, it sounds like we need a hybrid model that also factors in real client needs as well as the best blended approach that might have a chance of *actually* working on client sites. Either way, we need to have a common language and "corporate view"that we can all adhere to before, during and after client projects. Perhaps a corporate Wiki is what we need.