In the last year, I’ve heard the phrase “Smoke Testing,” used by many teams that I’ve worked with. It is used to cover a nebulous…
Surely You Can’t Mean That?
I regularly talk with business people about improving their software and product development, and their businesses as a whole, more and more dependent as these businesses are on these capabilities. The reaction I see far more often than most others is – incredulity.
“Surely you can’t mean that??”
Constraints On Effective Product Development
What company wouldn’t love to have its product development efforts be more effective? Be able to release new products and product updates with fewer delays and overruns, with higher quality and at lower cost? And be sure of the product-market fit, too?
Many companies spend inordinate amounts of time, effort and management attention on just this. And yet reap little in the way of benefits from that investment.
Why is this? What are the blockers (constraints) frustrating these ambitions?
Rightshifting In A Nutshell
The Agile approach to software and product development has been around for something like fifteen years now. Its roots go back at least another fifteen years before that. In all that time, more and more folks have tried it out, and more and more of those folks have found it wanting in some degree. This presentation explains where Agile fits in the broader scope of organisation-wide effectiveness, and suggests what needs to change to move on from the Agile approach.
What If Agile Never Happened
he Agile approach to software development, although neither conceived nor born at Snowbird in 2001, coalesced and started to gain traction from around then.
What if the Snowbird gathering had never happened? What if the seeds which led to Snowbird had not been planted, or had fallen on barren ground?
Here’s a few hypotheses, or scenarios, to consider.
Why The Future of Humanity Depends On Organisational Psychotherapy
The future of work is collaborative knowledge work. Most, if not all, brawn (pink muscle) will be supplied by machines, robots and other mechanical automation, augmented by software to control the mechanical parts.
Increasingly, software will also subsume the work of individual specialists, experts and other single knowledge workers.
Only collaborative knowledge work – non-repetitive brain (grey muscle) work done by groups or teams of people – remains the domain of the human.
Helping Folks Find Their Own Answers
I remember when I used to call myself a consultant. And others used to happily pay me for “consulting”, too. Not that the outcomes were ever anything to write home about.
I’ve come round to the belief that consulting, predicated as it is, largely, on telling people “answers”, doesn’t work too well. It’s not well-aligned with how people learn, change, and grow.
Unilateralism – And What To Do About It
Unilateralism abounds in the workplace: individuals or groups taking decisions without regard to the needs, feelings or concerns of others. Unilateralism often contributes to disengagement, pique, frustration, low morale and learned helplessness.
The Future Of Software-Intensive Product Development
In a nutshell, the issues that plague SIPD seem obvious. They’re mostly the same issues that plague all forms of collaborative knowledge work. Issues compounded by the gulf between conventional or traditional work and the new world of work (i.e. the world of collaborative knowledge work) – a new world distinctly unfamiliar to most in the world of work today.
Collaborative Change
If we believe in the Myth of Leadership, we may leave it up to “the leaders” to lead change. Incollaborative organisations, where leadership is more distributed and diffuse, this can be a recipe for frustration, inaction and diffusion of effort.
For some clues on how to procede with collaborative change, how about we take a look at Schein’s culture change actions though the lens of fellowship.
