Today I want to talk with you about energising
the Agile Way of Working brand.
Sadly, the Agile Way of Working movement
seems to be temporarily on the wane. The adoption rate of AWOW has not risen in
line with expectations. It’s stuck in the doldrums between Scylla and Charybdis.
Which makes for frowns all around.
But, me being me, I didn’t leave it at
that. That’s a challenge, right there! Let’s go for it! Let’s turn those frowns
upside-down
As result, I searched for a way to help the
Agile@Scale crowd out, and I eventually came up with ten amazing pieces of incredible
advice on how to easily make ‘Agile Way of Working’ truly something worth
having around.
So, here we have it:
First, change its name from the Agile Way of Working to the Agile Way of Whacking Off (Agile WOWO), you know, a touchy-feely way to “sex up” requirements. Bush and Blair style.
Epics will be referred to as Dodgy Dossiers, User Stories will become Curated Jokes and Sprints will become Streaks.
People working on Streaks will be known as Streakers, chapter members will be known as Schleppers and guild members will be known as Schmucks, everyone else will be referred to as Bernie or Helen.
Every morning Dodgy Dossier Owners must repeat the term “Agile Operating Model” until they puke their guts out.
All Scrum and Kanban boards are be replaced with life-sized wack-a-mole models.
Only those kitted out as My Little Pony or Princess Line can use coloured post-it notes.
Anyone caught using the names Google, Spotify, Netflix or Zappos.com will be denied the oxygen of publicity.
Anyone evidenced repeating the terms “by design”, “learning journey” and “minimum viable product” will be denied the oxygen of oxygen.
Anyone caught using comic images of rockets, astronauts or planets (including the sun) anywhere in their “content” will be forever referred to as a feckin space-cadet.
If you can’t defecate rainbows on demand then you have no right being involved in Agile at Scale or the Agile Way of Whacking Off.
There you have it. Ten jolly and sensible
policies for a happy world of Agile at Scale and Agile WOWO.
Many thanks for reading,
This is Martyn Jones of goodstrat.com – THE
GOOD STRATEGY COMPANY
Until next time.
Contact me at martyn dot jones at goodstrat
dot com
This is the first in a series of management talking points. The name Leadership 7s has been influenced by the great game of rugby, which is was the emblematic game of my youth and a passion of the home country of my Mom and Dad, Wales.
In fact, much of what I learned about
leadership in my formative years came from fundamentally social influences such
as rugby union.
So, today I want to address seven talking
points that deal with aspects of leadership, coaching and management.
Just because it’s there, it doesn’t mean it has to be done. Just because you can, it doesn’t mean that you should. Just because you believe you are right, doesn’t mean that you are not wrong.
The prevailing conventional wisdom is that innovative technologies and their novel use are having an effect on many peoples’ lives. Indeed, the fascination with the possibilities offered by social media, the internet and the age of data is becoming all pervasive. Of course, not all is goodness and light. Some aspects, such as Denial of Service attacks, phishing without a permit and creatively-ambiguous chimping, mark the down side of this story. Continue reading →
If anyone can turn data into knowledge then that person is me.
Let me explain.
I am a data architecture and management professional. For more than three decades I have been acquiring knowledge and experience in the design and delivery of effective data and solutions architectures for a wide range of projects and in a wide range of (mainly large global or regional) enterprise clients.
Therefore I think I can reasonably presume to have built up quite a good personal body of knowledge when it comes to applied data architecture and management.
As well as being a professional in the management and architecture of data, I have also considerable knowledge and experience in the areas of information management, artificial intelligence and knowledge management (structured intellectual capital).
So, what about turning data or information into knowledge? Continue reading →
I’m British by accident of birth. It’s not a bad accident. In fact it is fortunate. But, that is by the by.
I was born in a very welsh Wales of tightly knit communities, close harmony choral singing, coal of Saudi Arabian proportions, heavy industry, agriculture and larger-than-life legends.
“Knowledge is the capacity to give correct answers to questions.”
“There is no well trodden path that takes a straight line from symbols, through data to knowledge and wisdom. This is just some nonsense invented by the IT industry.” – Martyn Jones
We may define data as being the symbolic representation of value or conversely of something which has no attached value. Data may represent, among other things, time, money, resources or worldly objects.
“Our discreditable secret is that we don’t know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don’t care that we don’t.”
― Dylan Thomas
Let me explain
I read a poster the other, it read “How To Turn Internal User Data Into Revenue”. It was one of those Facebook or LinkedIn hooks, you know, the ones used to get people to spend precious time on useless pursuits.
It reminded me of a book that my mother-in-law bought for my partner, many, many moons ago. “How to make a mint whilst you snooze”, or some such wacky title.
Relief from all of this is just be around the corner, in the shape of the next revolutionary inflection point in IT. Yes, as you might have guessed it by now. I am talking about data-less apps. Continue reading →
In this week’s episode of ‘Putin the Bootin…’ Big Data Gurus…! Yep! Hold this thought…
There are no Big Data gurus.
THERE ARE NO BIG DATA GURUS!
T H E R E . . . A R E . . . N O . . . B I G . . . D A T A . . . G U R U S !
Call these unscrupulous wide-boys what you like, but, in any reasonable sense, when it comes to the Big Data enchilada, the unhelpful clowns who flog fake news, vulgar hype and vain-glorious exaggeration, are not gurus, of any way, shape or form. Continue reading →
Listen up Team Leaders, Test Managers, Project Managers, Programme Managers, Portfolio Managers and PMOs.
You have just made the most perfect project plan in the entire history of project planning, and naturally you want to share your baby with the rest of the world.
But, you can’t.
Your perfectly designed, crafted and honed project plan is locked in a box that only you have access to.
Because none of your target audience has Microsoft Project. Continue reading →
I think Agile has its place, especially in the world of software application development, especially in building the kind of software that businesses frequently use in the peripheral aspects of their day-to-day operations.
Done right, Agile can make the difference between a great success and a painful failure. Done badly, and you might suffer a worse fate than a badly applied Software Development Life Cycle such as Waterfall. Done well, and Agile will oil the wheels of the machine that gets things done.
It’s Easter in Baile Átha Cliath, and thoughts naturally turn to purple-shrouded, sombre-shadowed and mystical aspects of bereavement, resurrection and bunnies.
Which may go some way to explain why people come up to me in the street, and apropos of nothing, ask me about what is the biggest reason why Data Warehousing projects fail.
Try as I might, I cannot convince people that the reasons I give have any validity. It’s as if the mundaneness of the stupidity involved in these failures is just too frivolous, banal and immature as to be believable or even worth listening to.
This is a second collection of snippets; ideas and occurrences that are aimed to provoke critical thought and engagement.
As I stated in the first of these articles, “Most people who know me, at least in a professional capacity, will know that I am no unconditional supporter of Data Warehousing, never mind the more plague ridden swamps inhabited by Big Data, Data Lakes, Travelling IoT, Dodgy Data Science, Instant Data Scientists (just add water) and New-Age Machine Learning. So, many will not be surprised by this heterogeneous post-modern pastiche of ideas, impressions and bagatelles.”
I have extended the original scope of these posts to include any thought on themes of strategy, data, technology, process, business and humanity. Continue reading →
post-truth – ADJECTIVE – Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
fake news – a type of hoax or deliberate spread of misinformation in social media or traditional news media with the intent to mislead in order to gain financially or politically.
Big data – a term for data sets that are so large or complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate to deal with them.
If we believe the presses, and who wouldn’t, we are living in an age of post-truth, fake-news and Big Data.
Actually, none of this is new, not even the amazing volumes, varieties and velocities of boloney that surrounds the Big Data bandwagon. In fact, the big porky technique (a.k.a. the big lie) was invented when Anglo-Saxon cynicism was in its infancy.
This article is the first in a series of articles that discuss aspects of the use of architectural patterns in the Cambriano Information Supply Framework 3.0
The term architectural pattern may sound grand, misleading or daunting, but it’s really quite a simple concept. It’s like writing a function in a programming language to log in to a database, check that the connection is alive and working and report back the success of the connection request. If that function can be reused either in the same application development, in the same IT shop or in IT in general (e.g. Java code to connect and test the connection to SQL Server) then it’s well on its way to becoming an architectural pattern. Of course, there are much more sophisticated architectural patterns. But generally a pattern is a simplified and generic template for address a generally occurring problem. But as with much in architecture, less usually turns out to be more.
Few outside of the big intelligence agencies of the USA, Russia and Andorra know this, but a big part of the success of Operational Excellence at ISIS can be put down to their judicious use of Big Data and Data Science. Or, so say the experts[i].
This will probably come as no surprise to big-gun Big Data gurus such as Bernard Marr, Rab C. Nesbitt or Alan Latchley, or indeed will it appear unusual to the more peripheral and intellectual areas of Big Data ‘guruship’ and Data Scientology, where we may find the likes of Shapiro, Kobielus and Podge and Rodge O’Leprosy.
Big data has arrived. Big Data is here for keeps. Big Data is the future.
Despite some of the malicious, mendacious and malodorous words of naysayers, sceptics and contrarians, the world of big data and big data analytics is replete with totally amazing and fabulous success stories.
Big Data gurus are often accused of not delivering coherent, cohesive and verifiable accounts of Big Data successes. Which is understandable but at the same time a pity. So here, to illustrate this miraculous and remarkable turnaround, I give you not three but seven of the many Big Data success stories that I could have casually grabbed out of the ether.
First, we take a trip to Glasgow to discover the leveraging of Big Data in alternative investments. Then we pass over to Boston to explore the magic of Big Data at Universal Legal. We venture through Switzerland and innovative marketing. Explore the heights of Dongalong Creek. Have a word with the good folks at Heisenberg Labs. Then round it off with a quick in-depth summary of Big Data at Choppers. So, here we go…
Once upon a time, there was a mountain known as Peak 15. Very little was known about it. Then in 1852, surveyors found it was the highest in the world, and they named it Everest.
As with other significant challenges that we can identify in life, many people have been driven by a passionate desire to conquer peaks all around the world. This is just one illustration of those of us who can identify their significant challenges and rise to them. This sharp focus, determination and courage turns ordinary citizens into people who are invariably on a mission. People who know what they want. Continue reading →
Most of us who have more than a cursory knowledge of the English language have heard of the phrase ‘too much information’. We know what it means, even if we don’t always know when to apply it.
For those who don’t know, or are unsure, the Urban Dictionary describes ‘too much information’ as “An expression of exasperation and disgust when a person is divulging personal details of his sex life, toilet habits, or anything the listener finds disgusting, uninteresting, and unwelcome.”[1]
Sum, sum. Just because we know it, doesn’t mean we should share it or even try and remember it, never mind go about analysing the hell out of it.
When you have read this, if indeed you read it all, will I have failed to convey the essence of what I am trying to get at? Will a confusion of entropy win the battle? Will the wheel of fortune turn in my favour, or will I fail to connect and communicate effectively?
Martyn Rhisiart Jones
Martyn Richard Jones
Martyn Richard Jones
If anyone can turn data into knowledge then that person is me.
Martyn Richard Jones
Martyn Richard Jones
Martyn Richard Jones
Martyn Richard Jones
This article is the first in a series of articles that discuss aspects of the use of architectural patterns in the Cambriano Information Supply Framework 3.0
Martyn Richard Jones
Big Data is all pervasive, all seeing and all knowing.
Martyn Richard Jones
Martyn Richard Jones