Main Subcommittee Category: Policy, Standards, Management, and Acquisition

How would you label your submission?: Industry

Abstract:

A key performance predictor for a development organization is how well they manage their digital assets. The intuitive goal is to eliminate redundancy and maintain the minimum assets that satisfy the portfolio needs. Taken to a logical extreme, this would mean that any need should be satisfied by only one solution. Organizations have succeeded in achieving extremely lean asset portfolios by embracing a culture of relentless sharing and employing technical solutions that enable variation without duplication. But even with the best culture, modular architectures, and advanced Product Line engineering (PLE) approaches there are still times when allowing redundancy may be a reasonable decision. However, allowing teams to self-justify redundancy will quickly undermine the digital asset management objectives.

This paper provides a set of parameters to determine the organizational value of redundant solutions in a portfolio from 1(one for all) to N(one for each). These organizational value metrics are applied to common governance decision points including initialization, new effort startup, sustainment, and merging existing products into the portfolio. Practical examples are provided using the Live Training Transformation (LT2) product line as a historical baseline. With over a decade of history managing a diverse product portfolio, LT2 allows us to assess these organizational value calculations using real events and witness long-term effects. This paper will discuss new data based recommendations for decision making to effectively manage rapid modernization programs for live training and explain how decision criteria could be used to inform other organization management strategies.

This unique perspective on organizational value offers practical solutions for instituting decision-making guidelines for digital asset management. These findings will be of particular interest to organizations sustaining, evolving, and consolidating large portfolios who are looking to provide rigor and accountability into their decision-making processes.

Keywords: MODULARITY

Additional Keywords not in the list above: Modularity, Consolidation, Governance, Digital Assets, Product Line Engineering, PLE

Rowland Darbin

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When to Embrace Redundancy: Practical Guidance for Managing Digital Assets