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Showing posts from April, 2019

28 April 2019 - Is Agile affecting deep thinking?

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Some years ago I wrote a blog titled, Agile is a dirty word. I talked about how businesses approached project delivery, where clients feared Agile as a slap dashed route. I mentioned how marrying the governing powers of Prince 2 can help clients improve Agile delivery method. As long as they remember the business case of the project and the success criteria, then iterative delivery of the product, in the style of Agile can benefit everyone. Since that post, the term Agile has become more prolific within the realms of business transformation. What I wonder about is if  businesses have really progressed to really understand the term and how it can impact on them.  The term Agile is banded about by companies almost to show that they are on trend, so they may attract the talent they desperately need. Agile delivery suggests that teams can produce technical outputs to end users quicker than traditional waterfall methodology. This is factually correct. The beauty of Agile is that you

23 April 2019 - Are we losing the ability to commit?

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Once upon a time, many decades ago, before the internet and mobile phones were created, we lived simpler times. We had to plan and be organised. We also had to stick with the plan too as making changes were much harder to do.  For example, I would leave the cinema, walk to a phone box which had a working phone in it. I would insert a 2 pence piece (yes, really) and manually dial a number. The call would engage and start to ring. I would let it ring 3 times and then hang up. My 2 pence coin was returned to me.  This was the signal for my dad to get into the car and drive to a predefined location to pick my friends and me up and take us home.  I know that there is a generation who will not understand this concept. They have been born into a more technological society where we have solutions at our fingertips.  The way they organise themselves and communicate are very different. Plans are more fluid.  For those of us also old enough to remember, in the UK, once upon a time we had

15 April 2019 - Becoming - Michelle Obama

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I finished reading the book, Becoming by Michelle Obama on Friday. I had given myself the challenge to complete it in time for the book tour talk that happened in London last night to an intimate audience of 15,000.  Back last December I saw that tickets where going up for sale for this book tour so suggested to my fellow Salesforce ladies in our WhatsApp group whether we fancied attending. Some of us had been lucky to see her speak at Dreamforce in 2017. Michelle Obama came over so well, warm and genuine that I was eager to hear her speak again. When the tickets went live we scrambled to make the purchases, managing to buy 10 in all. We were set.  Let me tell you a bit about the book first, which by the way has already sold over 10m copies. Its produced in 3 sections; Becoming - which talks of Michelle growing up in her Chicago neighbourhood, her family, going to an Ivy League College and first major job as a Lawyer. She meets a hot shot intern who over time becomes her future