Reflecting With Gratitude On A Great Year

One of my goals for this year was to write a weekly blog post as a means to share my experiences, learnings and insights with a broader community in the hope that my efforts can help accelerate our evolution towards a digitalized, connected future. Although I don’t want to get into a long discussion about … Read more

Systems Engineering in a Service-Driven World

In an earlier post, I have brought up some of my frustrations with traditional approaches to systems engineering. That led to quite a bit of discussion and emailing back and forth with various folks. For those that did not read the post, my problem with traditional system engineering include at least the following concerns: (1) … Read more

How to Define the Scope of Feature Teams

One of the discussions that comes up in many of the companies that I work with is the scope of feature teams. Although most  companies are still struggling with moving from component teams to feature teams, the increasing prevalence of continuous integration infrastructures makes it easier to move to shared code ownership and teams that … Read more

Structure Eats Strategy

Again and again, I run into situations in which change agents in organizations that I work with run into organizational boundaries that stop them from moving forward in a way that makes perfect sense from a business and innovation perspective. For various reasons, within the current organization, agreements have been reached where some functions have … Read more

Why Failure Is The Only Option

During the last weeks, I’ve spent time with or close to the innovation units of otherwise traditional and conventional companies. As I wrote in another post earlier this year, it seems that every company has some kind of innovation initiative ongoing. As I had a bit of time to discuss with the people responsible for … Read more

When Did You Last Talk To A Customer?

Several of the companies that I work with have change initiatives ongoing. Some of these initiatives are more technology oriented, others affect the business strategy and yet others seek to re-position the company in the ecosystem it is part of. However, all these initiatives have one thing in common: customers will be affected by the … Read more

Stop Trying to Change Your Company!

(image credit: pexels.com) As I work a lot with driving change in software-intensive companies, the people that I work with typically have already an idea of what needs to happen. However, many of them struggle with organizations that are incredibly resistant to change. In fact, someone recently shared his view with me that organizations are … Read more

The End of Reorgs

The CEO of one company that I work with lamented that his leadership team was discussing a reorganization again. And that although he was not again reorganizing in itself, the last reorganization had not really solved any of the issues the company struggled with. Consequently, he was concerned that this new reorg would throw up … Read more