From this article by Cath Everett about some of the rather desperate tactics some companies in Silicon Valley are experimenting with to get more out of their people: “As to …
Comparing Cost of Delay approaches
There are many different ways to approach Cost of Delay. It ranges from very simple categorisation or qualitative assessments, to more rigorous quantification of Cost of Delay. None of these is inherently “wrong”. (Rarely are …
Fund the teams, not the project
One of the first articles I published highlights the problems created by doing funding and approval in large batches. Unfortunately, this is the status quo in most organisations and a lot of …
SAFe & Cost of Delay: a suggested improvement
I have previously shared my view on the way SAFe teaches Cost of Delay. It’s possible that the feedback came in too large a batch, so maybe I can break it down and suggest some incremental improvements. I’ll start …
#Agile2016
Less than a month to go! Agile2016 is on July 25-29 in Atlanta, GA, USA. Widely regarded as the premier Agile conference in the world, Agile2016 offers an unprecedented opportunity to learn …
Managing Queues in Product Development
“Blindness to queues” is one of the cardinal sins of product development. Why? Well, here is a typical value stream map for a feature being delivered by a software team. Notice all …
Scheduling Algorithms – Elevator Edition
This Popular Mechanics article about Elevator Scheduling Algorithms is well worth a read. This part in particular struck me: With the elevators directing themselves, engineers had to spell out rules for when …
#NoProjects
I’m going to break the first rule of #NoProjects (again), to collect a few artefacts in one place, mostly for reference purposes. I’ve been learning about the limitations of and …
I Have a dream: (about Product Development)
From a while back, but still as relevant today as back then. Feel free to join in… #iHaveADream that Project Managers are incentivised to kill projects early, by exposing assumptions …
Time and people are the scarce resources – not capital!
In a comment on another post, Chris Matts pointed towards a video that I think every manager should watch. The video is of Clay Christensen at the Drucker Forum outlining …
The problem with Projects: Temporary Organisations
Charlton Ogburn, an Officer during World War II wrote this in 1957: We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we …
Bezos preaching on Black Swan Farming
From Amazon’s “2015 Letter to Shareholders“: To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations …
Qualitative Cost of Delay
If you want to make better Product Development decisions, it really helps if you quantify the Cost of Delay. But what if you’re allergic to numbers? Perhaps a qualitative assessment of …
Challenges with Cost of Delay and CD3: Duration
A couple of week’s ago I received an email asking how for help with applying Cost of Delay and CD3 to some potentially difficult cases. I enjoy these challenges. For an idea to …
Standing Up Doesn’t Scale
You hear a lot of people talking about “Scaling” Software Delivery. Like it or not, it is something many large organisations spend a lot of energy struggling with. What I …
5 key elements of a Digital Transformation
Having been involved in a number of “Digital Transformations” I’ve observed some useful patterns of both failure and success that you might want to consider. I hesitate to use the …
Six things you should expect of a modern PMO
When it comes to software, in many organisations the PMO – Project Management Office – is part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Part of the reason for this …
The HiPPO effect
The Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. If you’ve spent any reasonable length of time in a large corporate environment you will probably have seen something a bit like this first hand. It …
The intersection of humanity and technology
This, from a great piece by @tcarmody on the film Alien, and what it teaches us about ourselves and technology: That’s what technology is. It’s the world of things, some …
Ten To Talk To
A while back, I floated the idea of a conference where all of the speakers were women… @pawelbrodzinski i quite like the idea of a conference with women-only speakers — and …