The world of software productivity and collaboration has, over the past five years, been heading distinctly cloud-wards. Over the past six years quite a bit of my time has been involved in projects involving both Google Apps and Office 365, and here are a few reflections on that experience and the current state of play … Continue reading Seven things I’ve learned from using Office 365 and Google Apps
Category: Management
From a parallel universe somewhere in the future... The trouble started back in 2017 with the launch of the #noProjects Manifesto. Agile and DevOps had become the norm, and so a group of bright engineers put two and two together and declared that the age of software projects was dead. Sometimes the logic of engineers … Continue reading Waterfall 2.0
In all of the recent hubbub of coverage amounting from the New York Times' expose of how Amazon works, one aspect I haven't seen much comment on is how all of this comment might actually be in Amazon's interest. The "revelations" shouldn't come as any great surprise to anyone - especially anyone who has read … Continue reading Kate Moss syndrome
There was a great article by Horace Dediu on his Asymco blog on Monday looking at some of the causes of how big organisations went from being early adopters of information technology to be late, or even laggards, in the past 10 years. My paraphrased take is that whilst the tech world has shifted from … Continue reading Insourcing
A few weeks back I did a little experiment. Bored with the usual annual challenge of being bamboozled by the complexities of telecoms company charging models, and the feeling of exploitation that was aroused by the end of "12 month introductory" deals, I issued a challenge to five of the main broadband providers (BT, Virgin, Sky, PlusNet … Continue reading The social consumer – a curious coda
Back in the days before social networks, us Gen Xers used to do most of the stuff that we do today on Facebook and Twitter using email. Pictures of cats existed before the era of the social networks; email was social without the like buttons. Every so often I would send a joke of my … Continue reading Going viral
Part of my week last week found me with a group of project delivery people from across the organisation of one of my clients. The discussion revolved for much of the day around a thorny challenge: the group has been tasked with forming a broader community of practice around project management, but how do you … Continue reading Side projects
Sitting on the train this morning reading this week's Economist briefing on Silicon Valley made me think one thing above all else. If the techno-utopian vision of a virtual, Artificial Intelligence world is so close, why the heck is so much of the world of technology development focused in such a small and relatively remote … Continue reading The triumph of the PostIts
I have written in the past about how the language that we attach to failing is part of the fundamental challenge of organisations dealing with the ambiguity of the world we are in. Failure is pejorative, so it's no wonder that people find it so hard to embrace. The lessons from the world of agile … Continue reading Happy mistakes
The more I read about the field of Behavioural Economics the more I think that maybe the entire discipline is an increasingly complex set of workarounds to address the more fundamental issue that the science of economics is failing us. It takes a lot to shift an entire academic discipline's mindset, and the period leading … Continue reading Copernicus
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