2023: prediction is hard, but …

The baseball player, Yogi Berra, famously said “Prediction is hard. Especially about the future.” That is of course entirely correct. Who of us predicted the COVID pandemic or the way the stock market tanked in 2022? Of course, there are always doomsayers who continuously predict these things, but they are right in the way a … Read more

Boost Your Digitalization: DevOps

One of the models that I use frequently in my consulting assignments is the 10 types of innovation model by Doblin/Monitor Group. As the name suggests, the model identifies 10 different forms of innovation arranged around the business ecosystem, the offering and the customer experience. This model is important as most people think about improving … Read more

Boost your digitalization: build and test infrastructure

The traditional way of software development is to first agree on what to build, then build the functionality and finally commence testing and fixing defects until the quality is at an acceptable level. As anyone who has spent any time in this field knows, no software is ever flawless, but the concept is to get … Read more

Boost your digitalization: Agile for real

Every company I meet claims that they’re agile. When I push a little bit and ask for details, typically the conclusion is that this is only true at the team level. The rest of the organization is stuck in traditional, slow cycles. The defense that I get is that the company is fast enough in … Read more

Platform lesson #1: Platforms should focus on speed, not efficiency

Traditional thinking is that platforms are about efficiency through reuse. Product teams get a bunch of functionality for free from the platform and only have to build the remaining product-specific functionality. The interesting thing about software reuse is that it’s been extremely successful at the inter-company level. The amount of software that’s being reused through … Read more

Outdated belief #1: Requirements are instrumental

Building software-intensive systems from scratch is far from trivial. One of the main reasons is that it’s hard to capture concisely and precisely what the system should look like in terms of functionality. Even if all stakeholders individually have a clear understanding of what they want, it doesn’t mean that the expectations are aligned. In … Read more

Towards business agility 2.0

Soon after the introduction of agility in software development, the notion of business agility was introduced as well. The basic idea was to scale the concepts behind agile software development to larger scopes, with the ambition to reach the entire organization, including R&D and IT. In practice, however, for many organizations, it proved difficult to … Read more

Beyond Agile

Some decades after the term “Agile” was introduced in software development, one would expect that – assuming it was a good idea (which it is) – the concept should have been fully embedded in industry and we’re busy with other things. Still, and this never fails to surprise me, everyone is talking about “beyond Agile.” … Read more