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  • Agile Initiative Planning with Roadmaps

    Most “agile” initiatives fail to meet their value, time and budget goals despite spending ½ their time and 1⁄3 of their budget designing and planning upfront. Agile Initiative Roadmaps add product, project, architecture and UX planning to initiatives so that you can take a longer view with a small amount of time and effort, which means that you can deliver benefits much sooner at a lower cost.

  • Q&A on the Book AI Crash Course

    The book AI Crash Course by Hadelin de Ponteves contains a toolkit of four different AI models: Thompson Sampling, Q-Learning, Deep Q-Learning and Deep Convolutional Q-learning. It teaches the theory of these AI models and provides coding examples for solving industry cases based on these models.

  • The Selfish Meme: How Organisational Memes Define Culture

    The Selfish Meme is a mental model that allows us to build a framework around some tools and techniques that might help us to guide positive cultural change within an organisation. Frequently, we have to battle against the organisation itself and the “Corporate Immune System”. Sometimes we managed to “win” the battles and the war and effect positive and lasting change.

  • Functional UI - a Model-Based Approach

    Functional UI techniques rely on the functional relation between events processed by the user interface and the actions performed by the interface. If the user interface has discrete modes in which its behavior can be expressed simply, a modelization with state machines is an advantageous functional UI technique. This article explains the technique, its benefits and how it is used in the industry.

  • Application Models as Working Software

    Discusses using an application model in an iterative time-bounded development approach. Employ user flows to create easily comprehended stories that contain sufficient detail. Get closer involvement from UX design and product owners to create solutions prior to the first coding iteration. Incorporate as-built decisions back into the model to ensure its relevance in an ongoing product lifecycle.

  • Q&A on the Book Righting Software

    The book Righting Software by Juval Löwy provides a structured way to design a software system and the project to build it. Löwy proposes to use volatility-based decomposition to encapsulate changes inside the system’s building blocks, and explains how to design the project in order to provide decision makers with several viable options trading schedule, cost, and risk.

  • 5 IT Operations Cost Traps and How to Avoid Them

    Decisions during the initial development or integration phase for new solutions impact future operations and maintenance costs heavily, no matter whether your organisation follows an DevOps, #noprojects, or project vs. operations philosophy. Explore cost pitfalls related to wrong funding expectations or tensions between stakeholders - and why you waste money without a simplistic cost model.

  • On Uncertainty, Prediction, and Planning

    This article describes the software industry’s dismal history with predictions and planning in the face of uncertainty. It details some of the reasons why we fail to learn from our repeated mistakes. It suggests alternative approaches that are based on learning and include the strategy of hypothesis testing (Hypothesis-Driven Development) for deciding which features to deliver.

  • Agile and Late! End-to-End Delivery Metrics to Improve Your Predictability

    Agile teams may need to deliver milestones expected at a certain time, so will need to forecast or risk being accused of being “Agile and late”. There are metrics that relate to the “Logical Six” potential sources of delay which are key to improve forecasting accuracy. The metrics can used to create a Root Cause RAG Progress Report – to share a more accurate forecast and clear mitigations.

  • Author Q&A on the Book Software Estimation Without Guessing

    George Dinwiddie has written a book titled Software Estimation without Guessing: Effective Planning in an Imperfect World. The book discusses different approaches to estimation for software products, the ways they can go wrong and be misused, and when to use them

  • The Magic of Organizing around Customer Journeys - and How to do it

    Organizing around the value delivered to the customer requires maturity in the organization that needs to be built up over time. This article describes eight typical steps that companies are taking in order to mature towards the end goal of becoming a true enterprise agile organization, and explains how to move up the ladder.

  • Data Analytics in the World of Agility

    Is it all about customer-centric business, or is there any data left? Can we integrate data analytics and customer empathy? This article explores how we can move towards a more customer-centric business and what information we require in order to understand the most valuable thing we have: our customer.

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