The Decision Points of Visual Studio Team System
Decision Points: the perfect term to describe a lot of what organizations do in Team System implementation planning.
I was speaking with a potential client today about their plans on a move into the Visual Studio Team System space. It was the standard discussion about where they are now, where they wish to go, how quickly they wish to get there. In speaking with clients I generally stress this is often an exercise in change management. Today the client used an interesting phrase that was perfectly succinct. They stated that there were a number of decision points for them to deal with during the implementation. A light bulb went off.
Of Course!
This is MBA 101 - not that I have an MBA. Decision points are exactly what I am often using to help a client determine the best path of action in their implementation. Adopters are always asking for more prescriptive guidance on how to make choices. Perhaps there exists a happy medium between prescriptive guidance, which is nearly impossible in most circumstances, and experiential guidance. Perhaps this middle ground is in the form of a relaxed decision tree.
My experiential guidance is just an abstraction of my own cognitive decision tree and thus I should be able to process my experience into something more tangible. Something that adds insight to the body of knowledge we as a community have published as guidance. Something just a bit more easily moved into the tangible realm and a step closer to prescriptive but still so very open as to allow the adopter to see the potential outcomes of choices and thus make choices. These outcomes would be the pros and cons of specific adoption choices. Such a set of decision points would be especially well suited for right sizing Team Projects or determining an appropriate branching strategy, both of which are usually a set of significant decision points.
What are the inventory of these specific decision points? I think it's time to pull out Visio and Mind Manager and see what the tree/diagrams look like.