There is a peculiar phenomenon that I seem to be identifying in the research for the #sharingorg project - something that I'm provisionally calling the "Instant Messaging tipping point of functional uselessness". It goes a little something like this... A new tool or service is developed to address a particular need or niche. That tool is then … Continue reading Less is more
Category: Technology
About ten years ago I found myself running a team building session for a software development team that was building online telephone directories for a telecoms company. For those of you under 23 a telephone directory was a... oh, forget it. It was a "sit and talk about how we work" type of session, rather … Continue reading The solution to solve all solutions
The Pivot is a concept well beloved in the Lean Startup community. Always be looking for the way in which your product or service can be changed to adapt to new markets, new customers and/or new applications. To hear the Lean Startupers go on about it, sometimes you'd think they'd invented the concept. But the … Continue reading Pivot and pass
I'm not generally a big fan of sporting metaphors in business, as they tend to be overly reductive, but the one that has been adapted from a quote Canadian ice hockey-player Wayne Gretzky is interesting and something that I'm hearing quite a bit these days: I skate to where the puck is going to be, … Continue reading Run to where the ball will be passed…
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
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
My wife’s smartphone went into overdrive last night. Some poor schmuck had managed to send a trivial service request to mailing lists that meant that everyone in the 30,000+ company received a copy. Madness ensued of the thousands of “PLEASE DON’T REPLY TO ALL” replied to all type, interspersed with wry, witty or just downright … Continue reading Chain mail
A few years ago I found myself teaching some of the skills of project management to a group of people who worked at a shipping insurance company. There was a module about risk management, and I was somewhat daunted by presenting it to a group of people whose professional life revolved around the assessment of … Continue reading Risk, hacking, internet fridges and bad journalism
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