Category: Change
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Why are teams twelve times faster?
In my writing about team effectiveness, and in other prominent places too, something like the following quote might appear: How bad is backlog coupling? At an Australian telecommunications company, my colleagues did a study of hundreds of pieces of work or tasks passing through a delivery centre. Some tasks could be completed by a single…
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The life-changing magic of tidying your data
After tackling data waste for some years now, I thought it would be fun to revisit the Marie Kondo approach to tidying up work in large organisations (from 10 years ago), and apply it to data too… Surprise! Managing work data in a large organisation is a lot like keeping your belongings in check at…
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GenAI stone soup
GenAI (typically as an LLM) is pretty amazing, and you can use it to help with tasks or rapidly build all kinds of things that previously weren’t feasible. Things that work some of the time. The soup But do you find yourself reworking large chunks of generated content, or face major hurdles in getting a…
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What to expect when you weren’t expecting an R&D project
This was supposed to be a regular digital project that consistently made progress towards the objective… right? Problem statement, some analysis, build a solution bit by bit, deploy, …, nice linear progression… but no… we were wrong! It turned out to be an R&D project. Often R&D projects change direction and sometimes seem to go…
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Dealing with data inventory
Data held by businesses is often described as an asset, but there are cases where this can be misleading or even incorrect. In any case, data managed inappropriately leaves value on the table, inflates cost, reduces responsiveness, and creates risk. Some data held by businesses would better be described as inventory. It might one day…
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Data Mesh Radio
I joined Scott Hirleman for an episode (#95) of the Data Mesh Radio podcast. Scott does great work connecting and educating the data mesh community, and we had fun talking about: Fitness functions to define “what good looks like” for data mesh and guide the evolution of analytic data architecture and operating model Team topologies…
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Data-Driven Responses to Changing Behaviour, auf Deutsch
I’m pleased to see the German translation of the article I wrote with Sue Visic now live on Digitale Welt magazine: Mit Datenanalyse schnell auf Nachfragewandel reagieren. This is translated from the original article Data-driven responses to new patterns of customer behaviour, published on ThoughtWorks Insights, 16 April 2020.
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Scaling Change
Once upon a time, scaling production may have been enough to be competitive. Now, the most competitive organisations scale change to continually improve customer experience. How can we use what we’ve learned scaling production to scale change? I recently presented a talk titled “Scaling Change”. In the talk I explore the connections between scaling production, sustaining…
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Scaling Change Spoiler
When software engineers think about scaling, they think in terms of the order of complexity, or “Big-O“, of a process or system. Whereas production is O(N) and can be scaled by shifting variable costs to fixed, I contend that change is O(N2) due to the interaction of each new change with all previous changes. We could…
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No Smooth Path to Good Design
The path to good design is bumpy, as we will demonstrate with four teapots. (Yes, teapots. Teapots are a staple of computer science and philosophy.) The path to good design matters, because if you are trying to build a design capability, the journey will be smoother if you understand that the path is bumpy. Leaders…