Jan Bosch
Jan Bosch This week I was in Madrid to present a keynote at a workshop around variability management (VAMOS 2018). It was a fun event and to some extent a trip down memory lane as I was part of the early research community that systematically started to work on software variability management in the early 2000s. We … Read more
While I am blessed to work with many people that really enjoy their jobs, I still meet way too many people in positions that they are really not enjoying anymore. If they ever did enjoy their job. For a long time, I thought that these folks were just exceptions and that most people loved or … Read more
All companies have a strategy. Often captured in a nicely designed PowerPoint deck and summarized on a piece of plastified paper so that everyone can look at it and share how much they are in support of the business strategy. These strategies allow everyone to sing kumbaya, sitting around the campfire, even if they secretly, … Read more
Every company is part of an business ecosystem. In the ecosystem, we find the partners, the suppliers, the customers, competitors, complementors as well as other stakeholders. A business ecosystem was more formally defined in the early 1990s by Moore as an economic community with three key characteristics. First, there is a symbiotic relationship between the … Read more
Driving change is hard when you’re working bottom-up, we all know that. You constantly feel you need to ask for approval, get air cover and ensure that you’re not creating enemies that will come out with sharpened knives at the worst possible time. During the occasions that I was in that situation or where I … Read more
As the saying goes, change is the only constant. All the companies that I work with want the change, either because of fear of being disrupted or because of the opportunities that disrupting their industry bring. This is at least what companies and their employees tell me. In practice, however, I run into situation after … Read more
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
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
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
The traditional form of coordination in organizations is meetings. The challenge is that most meetings are incredibly ineffective and a waste of time for everyone involved. All of us have perfected the behavior of pretending to pay attention while working on other things at the same time. The problem is of course that during meetings, … Read more
