Jan Bosch
Jan Bosch Many of the companies that I work with are embedded systems companies, meaning that the products, systems and solutions sold by these companies consist of mechanical, electronic and software parts. Traditionally, software was only a small part of these systems, which resulted in the system engineering process to be driven by the mechanical and to … Read more
The term “agile” has received vast amounts of attention and adoption in the software industry and the term is now used in business contexts as well. Everyone understands the notion of sprints, but I notice that many do not really think about or understand why speed is so important. Although there are many reasons why … Read more
Digitalization is the most impactful development in society. Everything in our lives these days is driven by software. Ranging from software enabled toothbrush ecosystems to self-driving cars and from quantified self movements to factory 4.0 initiatives, it’s clear that we’re in the early days of the 4th industrial revolution. In the words of Marc Andreessen, … Read more
After running my consulting business over the last years, I’ve started to see a pattern in the engagements with large companies. The engagement often starts with senior R&D management, one or more lead architects and perhaps a couple of experienced engineers. The focus is some major transformation, platform effort or other topic that starts off … Read more
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
This week I spent a few days at the OOP 2017 conference in Munich, Germany. Before, during and after my talk there (click here for the slides) the topic of innovation came up frequently. It seems like every company has its own garage, lab and open innovation initiative. They all have read the Lean Startup … Read more
This week I ran a workshop at a large well-known company applying the three layer product model (3LPM). The 3LPM is a conceptual approach to categorizing the functionality in your product, platform or portfolio. As the name suggests, the functionality in the system is put into three boxes, i.e. commodity, differentiating or innovative. The model … Read more
This week I stepped down as general chair for the 2017 International Conference on Software Architecture. It was a very difficult decision and not one frequently made by a general chair. So, what happened? It all started an honest misunderstanding on my part. When I was asked to act as general chair as the proposal … Read more
One of the ongoing questions in my mind is why large companies have such a difficult time managing disruptions and, as a consequence, why the average tenure of companies on the Fortune 500 has now decreased to 10-12 years. My thinking around this question got triggered recently, when I received an email in response to … Read more
Over the last years, I periodically visited a company that I have really admired for a long time for their focus on autonomous agile teams. These teams have a lot of freedom within their area of responsibility and can choose virtually anything from the platforms to use, the tools to use, when to release, what … Read more
