Author Archive

am often asked, "What is Agile?" The word is used a variety of ways, often to denote specific activities teams use to develop software. Agile is actually a philosophy for which there are a variety of practices that often reflect that philosophy. While this can be discussed in a purely intellectual or academic fashion, I prefer to "let the ...

ndoubtedly Steve Jobs is inked into history with the greats - Thomas Edison, Ben Franklin and other inventors. But just as much, he also successfully turned around two major businesses and built two from the ground up, which is overshadowed by his product brilliance. How did he do both - he lived his own life and was not afraid ...

recent client engagement focused on a pivot strategy based on a 5 year product and service launch history. Through mapping services and their resulting characteristics to an adoption quadrant, we were able to clearly see certain trends in market selection, success rates, revenue and profit results which the client had previously not realized. How can this be an ...

With a significantly reduced cost of doing business, compared to traditional brick and mortar upstarts, the software as a service business has leveraged the "free" model of doing business. While powerful in its ability to create service exposure, this model is also the death knell of startups that miss that "free customers" are not, in fact, customers but rather beneficiaries.

Emergent business initiatives are steeped in continuous learning and discovery. The traditional business plan focuses more on planning with conventional models, where a well defined and executed plan is the key to success. If you’re thinking of writing a business plan, stop and consider from where success may come. ot only did I experience the traditional business school classes, but furthermore wrote at least two significant (and traditional) business plans ...

As part of my formal education, root cause analysis was not only taught but also stressed throughout the technical phase of my career. When I began grappling with organizational issues I discovered that the root causes of issues were not necessarily the focal point of decision making. “Don’t confuse the facts with reality” was a frequent experience. Why does management often forgo root cause analysis? What are the consequences? The ...

During a recent interview over at Tech Crunch, Michael Arrington exclaimed, “Old People Suck at Startups”. The backdrop - a conversation on startup myths - had interesting data on the age and entrepreneur experience which drew from startups at $25M+ and $500M+ actual or potential exit values. The breakpoint for “old” was age 30. If you’re over 30 (or 40 or 50 … or …) you might take ...

Today many companies focus on cost containment, risk management, productivity and outsourcing as their "best practices" approach to their IT1 software portfolio. These approaches diminish the essence of the software craft - they achieve goals in the short term: cost containment focused on spend reduction instead of value opportunity, "productivity" on a false panacea of measurement metrics, and the ultimate savings through outsourcing - a complete denial ...

As many of us know, last week Oracle filed suit against Google regarding what it believes to be a series of patent infringements by the search and mobile phone giant. While many are angry at Oracle, sensing an attack of the open source community, I’d like to take a different look at what has gone on. A bit of history and what the lesson could be for open ...

Hiring the right people is one of the most challenging parts of the work environment. I was fortunate enough to be part of an agile team in 1988, at the age of 22, which hired by consensus. Since then and for the last 20+ years I've been heavily involved in finding and hiring people. Hazarding a guess, I've read 3,000+ resumes and probably interviewed about 500 people. My roles ...

The Second of Two Articles In the first article I briefly discussed some core factors around practice based organizations and introduced the first four key benefits of such organizations. Four other benefits are valuable, especially when considering some of the challenges seen in Organizational Design (OD) for larger organizations ... hen I worked ...

The First of Two Articles - Matrix management is not uncommon in larger organizations. Most of us have experienced its negative use - namely confused accountability and frequent moving of people from project to project resulting from poor management planning. Practice based organizations employ matrix management, yet the key focus leads mostly to improving the quality and capability of project teams. ...

It seems so simple, but in my experience the #1 reason why groups do not advance or improve is because the environment that a company's leaders create does not foster a culture of improvement. Next to the issues of recruiting talent and discerning what an organization really needs to focus on to achieve its goals, the lack of the following five substances impedes team improvement for which the ultimate ...

For the last twelve years, I have been the titular shepherd of the BMW E30 M3 Special Interest Group (the SIG, as we call it). The E30 M3 was the winningest car in the history of Touring Car racing. This incredibly unique car was conjured up in 1985 by then BMW M czar Paul Rosche and a team of crack engineers. It is the Shelby ...

While any computer scientist would quickly agree to the benefits of representing financial terms as a software program, lawyers having seen the value of such an idea at the SEC deserves kudos. A new SEC proposal calls for Asset Back Securities (ABS) registration in EDGAR to include data in XML markup with the waterfall model implemented as Python code. This is a great idea for transparency. It ...

Imagine a team as an organic jigsaw puzzle. Teams are fractal in nature - they are thematic but variation abounds. They are ever-changing. When building or augmenting teams, the goal is not to hire the best people in a vacuum, but rather the best people that fit into the theme one is trying to achieve. This changes the nature of an interview. If you wanted to hire the most ...

Over the last dozen years of my career I've had to spend significant time hiring talent building teams. I'm often asked how I make determinations about people and decide who to pursue. Obviously the answer is complex, as people are complex. But the second order harmonic is key to seeing through the complexity. tend to frame topics in analogy - this helps shed the lesser relevant details and focus ...

"A's hire A's. B's Hire C's" - Steve Jobs Let's face it - "A" players are high maintenance. They have ideas. Even worse, they have ideologies. They don't like to sit still. They struggle to suffer fools. If you're managing "A" player's you've got your hands full. So why on earth would you want them?! magine you're the general contractor, having a house built. One carpentry crew manages to put ...

The conversation started with, "Is J2EE appropriate for Web Applications?" I ended up thinking about the data model. Here's the video which spawned the ensuing observations: Better Web Application from Didiet Noor on Vimeo. had some issues with the representation, though it probably has some reasonably accurate observations in spirit. First of all, the setup - the project at NOAA was a ...

The other day I was having lunch with a friend who runs a professional services company. He asked me a pretty simple and typical question which we've all been asked before - "So what are you looking for in a work opportunity?" My answer started where most do, but it just might have ended somewhere unexpected ... henever someone asks that question, akin to "what do you want to do ...

When people talk about what agile looks like, why it's effective and that agile is no more than a formalizing name to a collection of methods that were being practiced well before the practices had a name, what does that mean? t's 1988. I'm a freshout, having been minted with a CS degree from William & Mary. During college I spent 2 years with an elite group of hackers (in ...

twitter /'twit-er/ (n.) Opt-in instant messaging spam. (v.) To make oft inconsequential chatter. he buzz around

Coincidence has different meaning depending on the context of its usage. To tell a mathematician that two points on a plane coincide is a simple matter of fact - both points represent the same place on the plane. No big deal. Should you and I meet at a coffee shop and through conversation discover we were both born on ...