The Trusted Advisor by David H. Maister, Robert Galford, and Charles Green What’s the point? A friend of my boss recommended this book as “the bible of the professional service firm.” I have to admit it’s the first time I thought of my company that way. After reading it, I heartily agree. The book talks […]
The Logic of Failure by Dietrich Dorner What’s the point? The premise of the book is that humans are notoriously bad at thinking through complex systems. We can’t plan or predict well and we don’t manage them well once we’re entangled in them. He presents a number of studies (real life and experiments) to explore […]
I really hate opening a blog post and seeing that it’s five pages long, 7 point font, dense text. Even if the author is awesome, it’s asking me to make a relatively big commitment. I’ll try not to be part of the problem … from now on, I’m going to do any book reviews in […]
In our recent training, Jeff Patton presented a structured discovery process centered around the story map and personas, neatly packaged into about a week of time. Some people in the training were worried that their clients wouldn’t be willing to commit this. Let’s tackle this from two angles: how to get a client to the […]
I’ve known about this for a couple months, but it’s still pretty awesome now that it is happening. As of March 31, SEP now has an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. This means that over the next 15+ years, ownership of the company will slowly transition to the employees. We will not buy the stock … […]
We recently completed several days of training with the fabulous Jeff Patton. At a 10,000 foot level, the techniques he talked about focus on getting the whole story on a project you are considering doing. Most agile and lean techniques are all about building better software faster, rather than building the right software. This is […]
@panozzoaj righteously smited new years resolutions on twitter: Do you do New Year’s Resolutions? I view them as a retrospective instead of kaizen. So inclined to not do them and instead make changes throughout the year instead. Ok, maybe not quite a righteous smite, but he should have. If you wanted to change something, why […]
Agile 2009 Session Info Presenter: Mary Poppendieck Mary is well known as a lean software engineering leader, but gave this session talking about the idea of deliberate practice and our field. She referenced studies by Anders Ericsson about what it takes to be truly world class at something (she particularly focused on a juvenile music […]
Agile 2009 Session Info Presenter: David Anderson in an "open jam" session. Liquidity is the ability to easily turn one asset into another (not just money!). Anderson’s idea on liquidity in a software organization relates to the skills of the people on the team and how we assign them to roles/tasks. Let’s say we have […]
