Compliance as a competitive weapon

For decades, regulatory compliance has been treated as a necessary burden. It sits adjacent to engineering rather than inside it. Teams build products and, at some later point, documentation is assembled, controls are reviewed and auditors are invited in to determine whether the organization meets the relevant standards. Compliance becomes an event, a checkpoint on … Read more

User feedback as code: virtual users in AI-driven value loops

One of the defining shifts in modern software development has been the gradual automation of feedback. We no longer wait for quarterly reviews to understand performance; we instrument systems, collect telemetry, run experiments and close loops continuously. Yet, one feedback loop has remained stubbornly manual: user feedback. From a Radical and continuous value delivery perspective, … Read more

Toward continuous value delivery

The history of industry is littered with failed projects. Projects where a team was asked to build a product based on a specification, a budget and a timeline. And failed. According to the research I’ve conducted, 60-80 percent of all IT projects are considered failures in some sense, either because they failed completely or failed … Read more

The AI-driven company: AI system generators

After the business process maturity ladder and the first three steps on the R&D maturity ladder, ie AI assistants, AI compensators and AI superchargers, we discuss the fourth level: the AI system generator. Here, the intent is to go through a fundamental shift from augmenting humans in their roles to fully autonomous end-to-end creation of … Read more

From Agile to Radical: customers don’t want DevOps

As companies seek to adopt continuous practices, one of the claims I run into a lot is that customers don’t want DevOps. This argument is often used as a way to cut off the discussion as we obviously shouldn’t do what customers don’t want. Instead, we should keep things as they are as customers are … Read more

From Agile to Radical: experiment

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

2023: prediction is hard, but …

The baseball player, Yogi Berra, famously said “Prediction is hard. Especially about the future.” That is of course entirely correct. Who of us predicted the COVID pandemic or the way the stock market tanked in 2022? Of course, there are always doomsayers who continuously predict these things, but they are right in the way a … Read more

Boost Your Digitalization: DevOps

One of the models that I use frequently in my consulting assignments is the 10 types of innovation model by Doblin/Monitor Group. As the name suggests, the model identifies 10 different forms of innovation arranged around the business ecosystem, the offering and the customer experience. This model is important as most people think about improving … Read more