There’s a lot of hand wringing going on over the impact of AI in software development. Depending on who you ask, AI (a) will eliminate the need for junior developers; (b) will make highly skilled developers an order of magnitude more productive; or (c) will never level up to a human developer, capable only at best at providing suggestions, at worst putting a developer in a premature debug cycle…
In the early 1980s, W. Edwards Deming laid out a treatise for (primarily manufacturing) companies that boiled down to this: obsessive commitment to efficient production of customer-relevant products made to high standards of quality yields an economic juggernaut. The secret sauce of Dr. Deming’s hypothesis was continuous improvement: all of the key verbs and nouns are evolutionary. What is…
When I started my career in technology consulting, most of the experienced consultants I encountered were technology people with a head for business. More than a few had MBAs, most had lots of experience in a specific industry. The rate of technology change was low, so the knowledge tended to be very long-lived. With a few exceptions, the top dollar consultants had broad based knowledge in…
Consulting is an episodic line of work. That’s great for the individual consultant because of the sheer variety it provides: different industries, companies, people, jobs and problems to solve. You get to see not only how many unique ways companies do similar things, but (if you’re paying attention) you’ll understand why. Plus, every problem calls for different sets of knowledge and skills,…
Technology services firms are going heavy on AI in delivery of services. This is motivated by need: services have been a tough market for a couple of years now, and AI is one of the few things every potential client is interested in. But it’s been difficult for services firms to get a lot of AI gigs. It’s a crowded field with not enough case studies to go around; this makes it difficult for…
American manufacturing struggled with quality problems in the 1970s and 1980s. Manufacturers got their house in order with the help of W. Edwards Deming, applying statistical quality control and total quality management throughout the manufacturing process, from raw materials, to work in process, to finished goods. The quality of American made products improved significantly as a result. Once…
In the not too distant past, software development was notorious for taking too long, costing too much, and having a high rate of cancellation. Companies spent months doing up-front analysis and design before a line of code was written. The entire solution was coded before being deemed ready to test. Users only got a glimpse of the software shortly before the go-live date. No surprise that there…
The 20th century company acquired capital assets (property, plant and equipment); employed a large, low skilled secondary workforce to produce things with that PPE; and employed a small, high skilled primary workforce to manage both the secondary workforce and administrate the PPE. By comparison, the 21st century company rents infrastructure - commercial space, cloud services, computers - and both…
News media have been trying to interpret the economic and commercial ramifications that will come about as a result of the US elections earlier this month. How will tariffs be used in policy and what will that mean to consumer goods prices and manufacturing supply chains? What are the risks to industrial contractors of anticipated cuts in federal government spending? How will regulations change in…
The headlines are heavy with iconic companies that have hit the skids recently, from Starbucks, to Boeing, to Intel. All have relatively new CEOs, each of whom has said that their respective company's path to salvation lies in returning to their roots, to once again be a coffee shop or an engineering firm. The assertion is that by going back to basics, they can regain the crown of leadership in…
Return-to-office mandates continue to trickle in, and every now and again a prominent employer makes a headline-grabbing decision that all employees must be back in office. The news articles focus on the obvious impact of RTO mandates: the threat to dual income families successfully managing school and daycare with career-advancing employment; loss of quality of life to nonproductive commute time.…
In the years immediately following the dot-com meltdown, there was more tech labor than there were tech jobs. That didn’t last long. By 2005, the tech economy had bounced back on its own. After that, the emergence of mobile (a new and lucrative category of tech) plus low interest rate policy by central banks fueled demand for tech. Before the first decade of the century was out, “tech labor…
Four years ago today, I blogged about the difficulty automakers faced in transitioning to electric vehicles , specifically that there were consequences to transitioning too soon or too late. Here we are, four years later, and US automakers are in a tight place. Manufacturers invested heavily in the factories, only for sales to stall right when OEMs need them to soar. EV product discounts are…
The business of custom software development is, at its core, an asset business. Software development is the business of converting cash to intangible assets by way of human effort. Plenty of people opine about how important human labor is to software, and of course it is. Good development practices reduce time to delivery and create low-maintenance, easy-to-evolve software. What labor does and…
I’ve given my share of presentations over the years. I am under no illusions that I am anything more than a marginal presenter. My presentations are information dense, a function of how I learn. Many years ago, I realized that I learn when I’m drinking from the fire hose, not when content is spoon fed to me. I am focused and engaged with the prior; I become disinterested and disengaged with the…
Interest rates have been climbing for two years now. The Wall Street Journal ran an article yesterday with the headline the days of ultra low interest rates are over. Tech will have to adjust. It’s going to be painful. When capital is expensive, we measure investments against the hurdle rate: the rate of return an investment must satisfy to exceed to be a demonstrably good use of capital. When…
I’ve mentioned before that one of my hobbies is lapidary work. I hunt for stone, cut it, shape it, sand it, polish it, and turn it into artistic things. I enjoy doing this work for a lot of reasons, not least of which being I approach it every day not with an expectation of “what am I going to complete” but “what am I going to learn.” As a learning exercise, it is fantastic. I keep a record of…
As I mentioned last month, many years ago I was toying around with a governance maturity model. Hold your groans, please. Turns out there are such things. I’m sure they’re valuable. I’m equally sure we don’t need another. But as I wrote last month there seemed to be something in my scribbles. Over time, I’ve come to recognize it not as maturity, but more as different patterns of bad governance.…
I’ve been writing about IT governance for many years now. At the time I started writing about governance, the subject did not attract much attention in IT, particularly in software development. This was a bit surprising given the poor track record of software delivery: year after year the Standish CHAOS reports drew attention to the fact that the majority of IT software development investments…
Organizational change, whether digital transformation or simple process improvement, spawns resistance; this is a natural human reaction. Middle managers are the agents of change, the people through whom change is operationalized. The larger the organization, the larger the ranks of middle management. It has become commonplace among management consultants to target middle management as the cradle…
I’ve been writing about Agile Management for over 15 years. Along the way, I’ve written (as have many others) how to get Agile practices into a business, how to scale them, how to overcome obstacles to them, and so forth. I’ve also written about how Agile gets co-opted, and a few months ago I wrote about how Agile erodes through workforce attrition and lowered expectations. I’ve never written…
The ultimate state for any team is self-determination: they lead their own discovery of work, self-prioritize that work, self-organize their roles and self-direct the delivery. Self-determination requires meta awareness. The team knows the problem space - the motivations of different actors (buyers, users, influencers), the guiding policies (regulatory and commercial preference), the tech in…
Eighteen months ago, I wrote that there is a good case to be made that the tech cycle is more economically significant than the credit cycle . By way of example, customer-facing tech and corporate collaboration technology contributed far more to robust S&P 500 earnings during the pandemic than the Fed’s bond buying and money supply expansion. Having access to capital is great; it doesn’t do a bit…
The captive corporate IT department was a relatively early adopter of Agile management practices, largely out of desperation. Years of expensive overshoots, canceled projects, and poor quality solutions gave IT not just a bad reputation, but a confrontational relationship with its host business. The bet on Agile was successful and, within a few years, the IT organization had transformed itself…
Last month, Rana Foroohar argued in the FT that worker productivity is declining in no small part because of shadow work . Shadow work is unpaid work done in an economy. Historically, this referred to things like parenting and cleaning the house. The definition has expanded in recent years to include tasks that used to be done by other people that most of us now do for ourselves, largely through…