Strategy needs a sacrifice
Strategy is one of those words that mean something different to different people. There is no one perfect definition, but we generally feel the difference between tactics and strategy. The…
Delegation is a skill
Early in my PM career, I was working for a marketing agency. I was responsible for a newsletter that went out every Friday morning. It was consistently late. They needed…
Solutioning is a tragedy.
A few years back I worked with a customer who ran a WordPress-based e-commerce site. As a way of boosting sales, the Marketing department had come up with a coupon…
Why the Hybrid Model will fail
Software developers love distributed teams. Poll after poll shows this and while you will find the odd exception, the trend seems clear. It's not that the pandemic has shown developers…
The real divide
Years ago, I was visiting a prospective client and was invited to meet the team at a farewell drink at the office. The CIO told me about their remote policy:…
A little less talking
Communication is the core of software development. We shape our solutions through conversations with customers, stakeholders and colleagues. We evolve architecture through debate and discussions. We write code to talk…
Making a business case for legacy systems
Before we invest, we make a business case. We put costs versus benefits, project it over time and when the value exceeds the costs in a relatively short period, we…
Quality isn’t good enough
A professional software developer needs to balance quality and deadlines. That shouldn't be a controversial statement, but these days, it seems to be one. Whenever I discuss this topic, I'm…
Strategic Virtualisation
You can't really treat a patient without a diagnosis. Your doctor can brush you off with aspirin or antibiotics a few times, but if the symptoms persist, it's time for…
If you don’t know where you are…
We design strategies to get us to a position of advantage. Our AS-IS situation has some problems that we'd like to solve in our TO-BE design. In the case of…