This year's must-attend conference. http://www.waterfall2006.com/

Thursday, January 26, 2006 | Permalink | 0 Comments

According to The Register, UK's High Tech Industry are preparing themselves for another spectacular failure to deliver a government project - this time it is ID cards and the excuses are being made before the project has started.

It seems that what should happen is this: define things clearly up front; set them in stone. Yes, well that's going to work. I wonder why nobody thought of that before.

(They did; they tried it; it didn't work; they still keep trying it. Idiots.)

Saturday, January 21, 2006 | Permalink | 0 Comments

Do you ever hear a concept and agree in principle, but don't really grasp the implicatations until much later? I suppose that is what Tim Lister was alluding to in his recent London XP Day keynote: "people only hear what they are prepared to hear."

Last March Ali Law from Vision Consulting gave us a talk at Agile Scotland on Trust. At the time I thought "yeah, but Agile is partly about establishing trust, isn't it? We all knew that."

Recently it has hit me that mistrust is the root cause of a massive amount of wasted resources in organisations. How much organisational bureaucracy is about checking up on employees and back covering; how much money is thrown at expensive consultants because managers don't trust the views of their employees?

Rather than concentrating on reducing travel expenses or electronic storage costs, perhaps an organisation could benefit more from an explicit programme of building trust.

Friday, January 13, 2006 | Permalink | 0 Comments

Last month I went to Clarke's introduction to Agile talk at the IEEE in Glasgow. It's an excellent presentation, but I'm never sure if anyone ever gets converted; I suppose it is all about planting ideas. The questions at the end were predictable:

Question:That all sounds very good, but how can we be Agile when we do XXX.

Answer:Stop doing XXX.

Thursday, January 05, 2006 | Permalink | 0 Comments