Jan Bosch
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
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
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
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
(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
