System People Practices Partners Things
The old mantra "People Process Technology" is a good one for taking a balanced view of all considerations in any initiative. Let's improve it a little.
I wrote before about how I prefer the wording "People, Practices, Things" or even "Community, Activity, Environment".
It is essential to take a balanced view across all these aspects of any plan, project, change... In fact I contend that the main source of IT project failure is our failure to do so.
I never used to like the addition of "Partners" to the list. Once you extend it to four, there are other things that could be thrown in there too: Governance, Information, Resources... But the modern world of XaaS (everything as a service) and service aggregation means Partners really should be top four.
Lately the DevOps movement has convinced me that systems thinking is an essential aspect: the mantra should be "A System, made up of People, Practices, Partners, Things": if we don't consider the system as a whole then we are still making local optima in each of these other areas. Lean IT does this,as do other principles and methodologies for systems thinking.
[Moreover it is essential that we understand that we are usually dealing with complex systems these days, and there is a whole body of knowledge to understand about their behaviour. One key element is that their future state is unpredictable]
What have you seen or found?
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