Author: Mike

Strategy needs a sacrifice

1 September 2021

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 definition...

Delegation is a skill

31 August 2021

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.

29 July 2021

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

5 July 2021

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...

The real divide

1 July 2021

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: people...

A little less talking

8 April 2021

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

30 March 2021

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

26 February 2021

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 always met...

Strategic Virtualisation

25 February 2021

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…

25 February 2021

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 "greenfield"...