Protagonist rule #15: Memento mori

When I was young (or younger), time had little meaning for me. It felt like you’re going to live forever and because you have all this time, there’s no need to prioritize and make things happen now. There’s always tomorrow to do the things you’d like to get done. When taking a job in industry, … Read more

Boost your digitalization: process orchestration

There’s little doubt in anyone’s mind, I hope, that automation lies at the heart of all the progress in human well-being and economic development. It started with outsourcing physical labor to machines, initially through watermills and windmills and later through the use of internal combustion engines and electric motors. Later on, also “white collar” work … Read more

How To Deliver Proven Business Value

As companies adopt data-driven development, there is an interesting pattern that is concerned with selecting the factors that we’re optimizing for. The goal, in the end, is to influence business level key performance indicators (KPIs) such as revenue, margins, net promoter score, etc. However, these KPIs tend to change very slowly and are lagging indicators. … Read more

Towards Self-Improving Systems

As the beginning of a new year often is concerned with looking forward, I thought I’d spend this article (and perhaps some more) on discussing some of the trends that I believe are happening. One of these trends, I believe, is self-improving systems. Traditional software intensive systems are typically static after deployment. The performance levels … Read more

Stop The Busyness And Get To Work

As I am involved in several startups, I often get invited to join their Slack channels. For those of you that don’t know the tool, it basically provides real-time group chat functionality combined with record keeping functionality. Several times I have tried to use the tool, but I never managed to make it stick. Reflecting … Read more

DevOps is NOT about DevOps

This week we held the reporting workshop for sprint 15 of Software Center. The event was, with 150+ participants, the largest and most successful workshop we have had so far and it was great to have it at the fabulous HQ facilities of AB Volvo. Although we had quite a broad set of topics and … Read more

Towards Dataism

Over the last months, one of the books that I’ve been reading is Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s a really worthwhile read and I can warmly recommend it. One of the key ideas that he brings up in the last part of the book is the evolution of religions that mankind seems to … Read more

Half The Features You Build Are Waste

Over the last two decades or so, I have worked with companies on their R&D efficiency. R&D efficiency, to me, is concerned with creating as much value as possible for every unit of R&D effort (person hours, currency, etc.). Value can be created in many ways, but a pretty good approximation is the frequency of … Read more