Johnny D. Morgan

morgan_johnnyPaper: Balancing the Speed of Agility with Technical Quality

Abstract: The goal of project management is the timely delivery of capabilities that delivers value-add to its customer. Difficult challenges of software intensive projects include:

  1. Capturing the requirements and translating them into a value-added solution
  2. Estimating the time and effort required to deliver the value-added solution
  3. Accurately measuring the amount of work completed, and estimating the remaining work

This paper will identify a series of warning signs of projects under stress and concludes that a normal human tendency is to subconsciously reduce technical quality. It describes how agile practices assess technical progress daily and promotes rapid feedback and adjustments.

Requirements and solutions will change and the paper will identify this as a fact of life as there are many unknowns at the start of the project. A Project Manager’s responsibility is to identify, assess and manage change in a timely manner. The paper will then identify multiple technical mechanisms for identifying, assessing and accommodating change. It will define technical concepts for developing service based architectures to isolate, encapsulate, and decouple those areas of the system that are subject to high rates of change. It will discuss how cloud technologies enhance the speed and technical quality of delivering new capabilities.

The paper will then introduce the concept of technical debt and discuss how poor implementation of 6 agile principles could result in creating a large amount of technical debt. Each principle will be discussed and examples provided of various implementation practices.

Biography: Dr. Morgan has 37 years of systems engineering and program management experience. While serving in the United States Navy and then employed with IBM, Lockheed Martin and Vencore, he has assisted numerous Department of Defense and Intelligence Community customers in the management and execution for their information technology portfolios. Supplementing his experience, he has received a Bachelor’s degree in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of Florida, a Master’s degree in Systems Management from the University of Southern California, and a Doctorate degree in System Engineering from the George Washington University. Dr. Morgan has also earned numerous industry certifications including the Project Management Institute’s Project Management Professional and the International Council on Systems Engineering Expert System Engineering Professional certifications.