Tag: Agility

The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved. —C. Northcote Parkinson: Parkinson’s Law of Triviality   In my last blog post I covered issues inherent in freeing up time to become more agile. In this post I’ll get into some ways of eliminating […]

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. ― Ernest Hemingway At a discussion on the characteristics of modern agile organisations, a chief people officer asked how psychological safety could be created in the workplace. In the moment an answer eluded me. The topic came up again as […]

It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change. —Charles Darwin From childhood, our amazing brain trains itself to recognise patterns. We use this capability to accelerate decision-making, saving us addressing every problem as if new. To apply patterns we ingest, filter, and interpret data using […]

My detailed project plan won the war. — said no military commander, ever. In the chaos of battle, it is accepted military doctrine that highly centralised decision-making fails. Information cannot be rapidly assimilated from the front line and turned into timely decisions. To address this, a commander’s intent is communicated, guiding each platoon in their […]

With a bucket of Legos, you can tell any story. You can build an airplane or a dragon or a pirate ship—it’s whatever you can imagine. Christopher Miller One of the hallmarks of any digital transformation is increased speed and agility. Decisions need to be made more quickly using data and algorithms. Digital services need […]

I am often asked a question along these lines: Mark, I get that Agile and DevOps approaches favor learning and adjusting over rigidly following a plan. But our budgeting process locks in our spending (and therefore our annual plan) in advance, and our investment management process necessarily locks in spending levels and schedules for each […]

I believe the fear that led to the deployment of large amounts of resources and budgets to remediate Y2K, followed by the dot-com bubble bust, had an unintended consequence. Many enterprises became extremely conservative when it came to building products, and defaulted to buying off the shelf wherever possible. Today, many enterprise IT teams are […]

Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and big data technologies enable organizations to harness the troves of data being captured (or which were previously thrown away), bringing new insights, automating processes, and even creating new products, services, and businesses. AI, ML, and the associated data (powered by the AWS cloud) is a critical […]

Over the last two decades, the IT profession has developed new ways of working that are intended to deliver better business value more quickly and at lower risk. Or as Jonathan Smart of Barclay’s likes to say, “Better, Faster, Safer, Happier.”[1] There are buzzwords associated with these techniques, of course, as with everything in IT—in this […]

Jonathon Dixon, Global Head of Mining & Resources, Amazon Web Services Introduction by Thomas Blood, AWS Enterprise Strategist and Evangelist Until the 1930s, my family owned and operated gold, silver, and copper mines in Colorado. I have a fondness for mining, based on the stories my father shared with me about the people who extract […]