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Michael Harris

Michael Harris
David Consulting Group

Michael Harris has more than thirty years of broad management experience in the IT field—in R&D, development, production, business, and academia—and held numerous senior executive positions in Fortune 500 companies. An author and speaker on a range of topics related to the value visualization of IT, Michael is considered a leader in the software development industry. He became president, CEO, and majority owner of David Consulting Group (DCG) in 2006. Michael is a co-author of The Business Value of IT: Managing Risks, Optimizing Performance, and Measuring Results. Read more at valuevisualization.com.

Speaker Presentations
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 2:45pm
Projects & Teams
Visualization to Improve Value Delivery

Small organizations usually lack the time and money to make mistakes in what they work on next, so prioritizing by business value is a survival skill. In large organizations, work is organized into projects to which resources are assigned to maximize their utilization. Lean product development flow theory suggests that this strategy of assigning resources to projects and optimizing their utilization is a poorer—and sometimes catastrophic—strategy for delivering economic value. Instead, the flow of work through small teams of expert resources is preferred. Mike Harris gives an overview of the key elements of flow theory and shares five simple but essential metrics—value visualization—for defining and tracking business value. These metrics optimize the flow of economic value and bring economic value metrics into tactical decision making in the software development process. Mike explains how these metrics require more involvement from the business and represent more accountability for the business and IT.