Tag: Culture

There’s something problematic about planning for resilience. On the one hand, we know it’s necessary. If the COVID pandemic taught us nothing else, we learned that unexpected major disruptions can and will occur. And those disruptions will involve not just technology but, in some cases, business processes, personnel, communication, and even the fundamental market characteristics […]

Never waste your time; it is too precious. There are never any guarantees we will have tomorrow. —Catherine Pulsifer, Author “I don’t have enough (fill in the blank)” is a common refrain in the face of new demands. It’s normally followed by that much-loved phrase “We need to prioritise.” I’ve observed that the challenge is […]

Assume with me that the digital world is a world of fast change. Organizations need to excel at responding quickly to those changes—that’s what we call agility or nimbleness. When it comes to technology, we have well-understood ways of increasing agility and making technology delivery processes lean. Organizations worldwide and in all industries are moving […]

Many of my conversations with AWS customers are about their attempts to build developer experience platforms that simplify software development and operations, automate deployments, improve software quality, reduce costs, and ensure security and compliance. Unfortunately, not all platforms live up to their expectations. The most frequently cited problem is development teams rejecting the platform that […]

“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist & philosopher Thinking is hard; energy intensive even. Perhaps that’s the reason we obsess about food. One estimate indicates we make over 200 food-related decisions a day. Another popular internet statistic boldly states that the average human makes […]

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. —”The 12 Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto” In the early days of my career, the success of my IT projects was measured by delivering on time, within budget, and with sufficiently good quality. “Sufficient” often meant that hundreds of […]

Become a high-performing software organization How do you become a high-performing software organization? It is more than just putting new tools in place to manage your CI/CD/CT pipeline. Doing so is like taking the skills you learned from riding a bike and applying them to Formula 1: it will not work. You need to apply […]

Powering transformations with real-time data How much of your company’s resources are spent searching for answers to day-to-day operational issues and writing reports, looking inwards rather than focusing on your customers’ needs? While technology has dramatically changed our world in many ways, the way organizations work has not always kept pace. This was illustrated in […]

In the first blog post, René Schneider and Andrea Sturm described the why and how of DB Systel’s transformation journey. Here they dive into how their organisation is now structured and some of the steps taken to achieve this state. It’s not a pattern that can be cut-and-pasted, but I find inspiration and insights in […]

Pick an organisation to transform into a modern, agile, and self-organised equivalent. Would you pick one of the biggest transportation companies in the world which happens to be a German state-owned, 150-year-old railway organisation with Works Councils? Probably not, and yet DB Systel, part of Deutsche Bahn, shows us that any organisation given the right […]