When Did You Last Talk To A Customer?

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

Stop Trying to Change Your Company!

(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

The End of Reorgs

The CEO of one company that I work with lamented that his leadership team was discussing a reorganization again. And that although he was not again reorganizing in itself, the last reorganization had not really solved any of the issues the company struggled with. Consequently, he was concerned that this new reorg would throw up … Read more

Why Bad Business Habits Kill R&D Effectiveness

Since the summer, I’ve been working with well over a dozen companies in different capacities and in several of these companies, there is a challenge on the R&D front that actually is caused by bad business habits. When I’m asked to spend some time with a company, it very often is because there is some … Read more

The End Of System Architects

The majority of companies that I work with provide products, systems and solutions to the market that include mechanical, electronic (hardware) and software parts. In order to design these systems, companies appoint system architects that are supposed to manage the system design, realization and evolution. Over the last couple of months, I have run into … Read more

The End Of Product Teams

In the age of continuous deployment, B2B and B2C customers expect that the software in their product or system is updated frequently throughout its economic life. As a minimum, security updates need to be deployed, but also bug fixes and improvements or even entirely new functionality is expected to be added to products and systems … Read more

The End of Planning

Over the last years, I have time and again run into the conflict that many companies experience between long term planning and continuous (agile) practices. In an embedded systems context, where the system contains mechanics and electronics in addition to software, the organization needs long term planning for “the atoms” because of manufacturing processes, ordering … Read more

Towards Data-Driven Decision Making

This week I worked with two very different companies on what started out as very different topics, but that ended up at the same place: bad decision making due to the reliance on experience, beliefs, customer insights sometimes decades old, etc. So, the discussion turned towards decision making and how to develop processes where data … Read more