A short time ago I wrote that productive conversations come from intellectual honesty and engaging positively. But intellectual honesty is important for organisational culture, too. Without this things can go … Continue reading Intellectual honesty for sustainable progress
This week I was writing a business case, and for a moment caught myself wondering why I was spending so much time fiddling around with the paragraph spacing. But very … Continue reading The value of presentational details
When we want to make a time-saving investment we often have to create a formal business justification. When I say “time-saving investment” I’m thinking about addressing tech debt, buying and … Continue reading Three financial benefits of time-saving investments
Fairly early in my career I needed to make a change in my team—I needed to make a couple of people line managers, because the number of direct reports I … Continue reading Ask the people impacted
Most people I know want to improve things, and many have ideas about how to do that. In presenting these ideas it’s easy to become possessive of them, however, and … Continue reading Keeping ideas open
Some time ago I got talking to a colleague about “ownership” of risks. Now I don’t like the idea of a risk as a tangible thing that can be counted … Continue reading Owning cyber risk
The other day I was talking to a friend about the pandemic (some topics are evergreen), and we were marvelling how, up until then, so many organisations were adamant that … Continue reading Never say never
Great people can compensate for poor technology, but great technology can’t fix poor people. Great people can work round, improve and replace poor technology. Great technology just sits there being … Continue reading Choosing between people and technology skills
I only write software recreationally, but I write documents as part of my professional work. This can be time-consuming—too much so—and I’ve often thought about “agile writing”. If such a … Continue reading Agile writing
Marty Cagan introduced the distinction between feature teams and product teams, and over the last few months I’ve had quite a few conversations with people about this—how their teams compare, … Continue reading Product teams, feature teams, and responsibility
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