Tag: Systems Thinking

Culture, Technology and Decay

In Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Satis House (from the latin for “enough”) is a wonderful metaphor for technology in organisations today. So often, what you hope will satisfy you and be “enough”, quickly decays into dashed dreams and bitter disappointment. Why? Mostly culture, and a paradigm that’s completely broken, unsuited for the context and the…
Part Two – “Velocity” needs to die. Alternative measures?

So, we’ve briefly looked at Velocity, what it is, how it gets abused and what the typical result of that is – and therefore the need for an alternative. Now we’re going to look what “agility” means, with the intention of figuring out some measures that are better aligned with that. What does Agile really…
How to Find Gun Owners Fast

This is a wonderful piece by Jeanne Marie Laskas, writing for GQ magazine. It’s about a strange little federal agency in the US that runs traces on guns that are associated with a crime, trying to figure out who bought it. It’s long, but well worth reading in it’s entirety. There’s a few parts worth highlighting and looking into a…
How to create perfect teams

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 how to go about creating the perfect team, Forsgren cites a study undertaken by Google in 2012 called Project Aristotle, which set out to do…
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 the malaise we see in I.T. is difficult to improve because of this. Addressing this requires a viable alternative though. It’s not enough to just point…
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 the waiting? Not laziness: lots of Work-In-Process; Demand > Supply The reason for all the waiting is not that anyone is sitting around staring out the window…
Tribal Leadership

Interested in culture, and introducing change in organisations? Özlem Yüce has a great intro to the Tribal Leadership stages that is well worth a read. I want to expand on a couple of things, but you really should go read her thing first (and share your view in the poll) otherwise what I’m about to say won’t make…
Sailboat: what’s holding your organisation back?

You may have heard of, or even played the speedboat innovation game to help identify what customers don’t like about your product or service. I’ve used a slightly tweaked version of this game a number of times with different organisations when looking at how they innovate. It helps to very quickly get to a positive…
Systems Thinking and I.T.

Everywhere we look in the system for delivering value with software there are opportunities to make improvements that might work well for one part, but have a negative effect on the whole. Systems Thinking is about understanding the purpose of the whole and making improvements with the whole in mind. To quote Wikipedia: “Systems thinking…