I was reading an article the other day about the dangers of making one-sided judgements about risk (tl;dr: always consider risk and reward together) and in the comments underneath someone … Continue reading Goals that show success, but don’t define it
I’m due to have a conversation with someone about an ambitious startup-type idea they’re seeking to run within an established company. They have an idea—it might be a great one–and … Continue reading The bell curve of project versus business
I’ve never been able to appreciate cricket as much as I’d like (I do feel affinity with the writer who described it as “sunbathing with rules”) but I do like … Continue reading Learning by doing… a cricket match
Last week I recalled a disussion I had about understanding the quality of a software architecture. As part of that conversation the head of the company was interested in flexibility: … Continue reading Considering a flexible architecture
Normally I’m very wary of “investigation” or “research” cards in a delivery team. Sometimes there are pieces of development work that are difficult, but I usually find that when a … Continue reading One good approach to development “research”
[I held onto a draft of this post for some time, as I felt it was never the right time to publish it. But today, although the details seem to … Continue reading Taking responsibility amid uncertainty
Recently I was speaking to a friend about choosing business ideas for innovation. He described an exercise in which three teams in the same organisation were tasked with brainstorming and … Continue reading For real innovation, take your second best idea
In many development teams I work with there is a “definition of done”. This a checklist (explicit or implicit) of things that need to have happened before we can say … Continue reading “Definition of enough” for discovery work
Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of measuring things and I talk a lot about making goals measurable. But I hope that doesn’t mean I’m a slave … Continue reading Not all opportunities follow from the numbers
In the course of some conversation, a friend pointed me to a page by Amazon explaining their internal cultural principles. While I have some dislike of Amazon as a whole … Continue reading A clearly-stated bias for action
