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A few years ago, I attended a Devops Days conference in Minneapolis. For one of the afternoon unconference sessions, I let some fellow attendees try to use my white cane. We were in a big room and there was a wide space with no furniture. I asked the volunteers to close their eyes and set off across the room doing the cane sweeping technique I had shown them. They all set off confidently but slowed after a few paces as they started to lose their orientation and their confidence with it. I would then start to talk to them and ask them to turn around and come back by following the sound of my voice. After a few volunteers, we all sat down and I asked them to describe how they felt. They all agreed that they quickly started to feel lost and adrift. I then shared with them that unlike sighted people who navigate my missing things, blind people use touch as a tool to orient them selves. To put it bluntly, by hitting things, you know where you are. ...

I am constantly amazed and amused by the ever pervasive notion that the way to be a successful company is to do what everyone else does, or to copy another. When it comes to running an organization, there is a constant drum-beat of guidance that is based on either what the most successful organizations did, or what everyone else is doing. Then there are leaders and managers who blindly follow the advice, or implement the changes expecting to be more successful. Then they read the next book and a year or so later, they have moved on. I have so many problems with this thinking. In this article I will talk about one of them. ...

I am not too proud to admit that our backyard is looking a bit neglected. The grass is patchy and brown in parts, while other parts are overgrown. Something should be done about it. We did get some things done this last summer. We did start to clear up some of the overgrown parts. These things need to be done but they are not solving the real problem with our yard. The cause for all this mess is me. ...

Simon Wardley, the creator of the always useful “Wardley Maps” has a quip he shared a few years ago about the speed that the IT departments of large enterprises react to technological change. A graph showing that enterprise technology is adopted much slower than everyone else The Enterprise IT Adoption Cycle. Simon Wardley, CC 3.0 BY-SA While funny, the humor is pretty close to how we all see enterprise computing. Many would argue that government is the same. It is a common litany that government is slow and unresponsive. We often hear comments about how government workers are lazy, or that governments should be run like a business. In this article, I will use a pace layer model to push back against this argument, and then offer a more nuanced point of view. ...

In Goldratt’s classic The Goal, there is a scene where the hero, Alex Rogo, is sitting in his car on the hill overlooking his factory. He is eating pizza and drinking beer while thinking about the question his mentor, Jonah, posed. What is the goal of your company? Alex considers the question and eventually concludes that the goal is to make money. One of the features of the chapter is that his internal dialog forms the initial thinking of what eventually becomes a quantitative and qualitative framework for measuring and improving the performance of the factory. The frameworks are Theory of Constraints and Throughput Accounting.s ...

Whether it be one-stop-shop call centers or unified intake through a shiny website, without dealing with the core issues of throughput and quality, all your customer experience efforts make no difference. Those of you who have spent a little time reading John Seddon will know that he likes to rail against call-centers. He explains how they did not achieve what they were designed to do, and that most of the increase in usage by customers is “failure demand”, customers having to call again because they were not satisfactorily served the first time. What Seddon is weak on is why the service centers do not accomplish their goal. In this article, I will give my explanation using the Theory of Constraints. ...

When the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread across the globe, many of us were sent home by our employers. A considerable proportion of us will remain there for at least the next year. Moving home took a lot of effort, but I do not think the transition is over. In this article, I will explain why. Before we get to the main argument, let’s first think about a couple of theories that I will tie together to make my point. ...