ALM?

[UPSIEGuy]

As a special assignment guy from a district, the ALM process confuses me. Basically, as near as I can tell, it involves translating English into a special language which means absolutely nothing. Clarity is replaced with a lot of meaningless words and vague diagrams. The 'business" analysts don't understand the business and couldn't analyze their way out of a paper bag...I know the business because I LIVED the business.

If this is how we build systems, I am very worried about our future...we are spending a lot of money for zero value.

 

[whiskeyagogo]

The ALM & ITIL are ways to justify jobs for certain people the company is unwilling to get rid of who have no real skills. Few. if any, of the 'business analysts' have real world experience and thus help to produce underwhelming products. The resulting product is then outsourced overseas putting UPSers out of work. The cycle starts again and repeats, an ever smaller circle of people who can 'do' replaced by those who can 'translate' things into fancy ALM & ITIL diagrams.

Just my .02.

 

[DS]

What does IE stand for?
It used to mean industrial engineering.

 

[Catatonic]

What does IE stand for?
It used to mean industrial engineering.

Still does DS.

IE guy in this case appears to be on special assignment to provide User representation to the development side so the applications meet the needs of the intended audience.
Sounds like maybe he does not understand his role which is to bring the operations specific knowledge and input to the process.

 

[grgrcr88]

Still does DS.

IE guy in this case appears to be on special assignment to provide User representation to the development side so the applications meet the needs of the intended audience.
Sounds like maybe he does not understand his role which is to bring the operations specific knowledge and input to the process.

Huh! Come on man, I'm just a truck driver!!

 

[virtualpro]

I would not lump the ITIL into the same category as ALM. ITIL is an IT industry standard which is proven to make an organization more efficient and cut costs, unfortunately while we keep saying we are doing ITIL there are still some major gaps between what we follow and what the methodology calls for. A large part of that is management understanding and trying to implement just within Shared Services when it should be across the whole organization and all of our processes including Application Lifecycle (ALM). As far as ALM goes - agreed. We apparently paid outside consultants for a bloated process and then twisted for our own use and then incorporated the SDM which was already a challenge but now provides a lot of disjointed duplication with ALM.

 

[packageguy]

Huh! Come on man, I'm just a truck driver!!

No, not a truck driver, We have a title- package car driver, lol

 

[operation zero]

I would not lump the ITIL into the same category as ALM. ITIL is an IT industry standard which is proven to make an organization more efficient and cut costs, unfortunately while we keep saying we are doing ITIL there are still some major gaps between what we follow and what the methodology calls for. A large part of that is management understanding and trying to implement just within Shared Services when it should be across the whole organization and all of our processes including Application Lifecycle (ALM). As far as ALM goes - agreed. We apparently paid outside consultants for a bloated process and then twisted for our own use and then incorporated the SDM which was already a challenge but now provides a lot of disjointed duplication with ALM.

I would agree that ALM at UPS is a bloated version of the SDM. Remember when we actually developed code using SDM and ANSI standards and naming conventions. Hech, once upon a time we actually had enough time to review code. I think a number of things have led to where we are today between going public, lack of talent, too much to do in less amount of time, economogy, etc. So there's little value in fixing ALM. I think that ALM serves a purpose to some extent because it does force us to document the work and that's better than writing designs on a white board or paper napkin, but there has to be a fine line between what you document and what you simply do because a lot of what we document gets outdated too quickly and has very little value.

 

[cachsux]

ALM at UPS that is not working AOK turns into a CF PDQ and would need to to be fixed ASAP or the system would go STH.