Jan Bosch
In his book “Slow productivity”, the author, Cal Newport, provides an analysis of the history of performance management. He starts in the manufacturing era where productivity was easy to measure: in practice, it was the number of widgets per hour a factory worker could produce, using all the equipment available. When knowledge work became the … Read more
In the Radical framework, we’ve now arrived at the second A in the acronym: being “aligned” on business goals. This seems like such an obvious statement as most companies claim to have a clear business strategy and associated goals. And I still have to meet the first serious and engaged employee who claims to not … Read more
As someone who works with the bits, ie software, data and AI, I’m often annoyed by the constraints that atoms enforce on products. Whereas it’s easy, or at least doable, to adopt DevOps, DataOps and AIOps, achieving the same for the mechanical and electronics parts of our systems often proves to be impossible or prohibitively … Read more
Many of the companies I work with have a continuous discussion concerning organizing teams around the architecture, i.e. component teams, or organizing teams around features. Many factors play into deciding on the preferred model. My general advice is to focus on where the highest degree of complexity and challenge is. If specific components contain highly … Read more
Some years ago, Frederic Laloux published a book called “Reinventing organizations,” which received quite a bit of attention in the media and industry. The basic premise was that organizations don’t need hierarchies, managers and bosses but should instead rely on other mechanisms. Mechanisms such as the advice process, agreements and roles. Others had published works … Read more
After more than three weeks of amazing vacation, I am now gearing up to get back to work again. And that, of course, means returning to posting on my blog as well. This summer was really good for me in that I completely disconnected from work, email, paper reviews, writing, PhD student supervision, research center … Read more
Few topics are as hotly debated in companies as the question of how to organize people into teams and departments. All kinds of arguments are thrown around, ranging from span of control for managers to optimal professional and personal development for frontline people. Of course, not all of these discussions are genuine and only focused … Read more
One of the worst misconceptions in software engineering is the assumption that if we build software based on a requirement specification, test it according to the spec and deliver it to our customers, we’ve delivered value to these customers. This may be the case when a small team of consultants develops software for a single, … Read more
One of the topics many people fail to understand is the intimate relationship between business strategy and system and software architecture. This is the case for folks on the business side as well as many engineers. To illustrate this, one company I work with is involved in standardization in the context of home automation. It … Read more
In Swedish, there’s a saying that claims that there’s a fundamental difference between giving up and moving on. Giving up is to simply stop the fight even if it’s still worthwhile to continue to pursue a difficult goal. Moving on is concerned with realizing that the goal you’re pursuing is no longer relevant. The world … Read more
