Value Articles

We’re curious people by nature. And we love to teach others what we’ve learned. So explore our blog to gain fresh insights from our expertise in areas ranging from culture to AI.

SEP Named a Best Places to Work Company for 14th Consecutive Year

SEP has once again been recognized as one of Indiana’s Best Places to Work for the 14th year consecutive year.  The statewide survey and award program evaluates participating organizations and honors those with the highest levels of employee satisfaction and…
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Value Driven Development

When it comes to developing software, you can play buzzword bingo with the processes and methodologies thrown around:  Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Acceptance Test Driven Development, Feature Driven Development, etc.  Some seem more vetted than others. But at the end of the day, you are the person that needs to know what’s right for you and […]
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Making and Changing Plans

We all make plans everyday. Small plans, big plans, short term plans and long term plans. We plan for retirement; we plan for the weekend and we plan for our next meal. We make plans for everything and hope nothing changes. But inevitably our best laid schemes gang aft agley. Gang’ing Aft Agley So what […]
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Walking the Talk – Part 2

Back on the “trend” of applying Agile/Lean practices SEP learned from software development to “management” I submit another example. SEP is working on significant updates to its risk management, project management and status reporting. These areas deal a lot with communication and like everything else…people. It really impressed me to find out our managers were […]
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Is your IT project portfolio feeling Bloated?

We all live in a world of scarce and limited development resources. (If you don’t call me.) At the same time the pressure to deliver more, and faster is increasing. We jam ideas into the pipeline looking for resources to perform and often the items all look the same. There is uncertainty. Everything gets back […]
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Extending Discovery into Business Value

This post is a follow up from a previous post, is Software Development REALLY Expensive – part Two. To summarize, I will quote from the previous blog. Our industry often sets its context too small to address the question of why software is so expensive. While addressing costs, we missed optimizing the other side of the […]
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Is Developing Software REALLY expensive – Part Two

The Lean Software and Systems Consortium conference in Atlanta left me with a lot to think about. My main reason to go was to learn more about becoming a more agile enterprise but that is a topic for another day. To summarize my previous post, software projects are often categorized as “too expensive”.  However, it […]
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