Requirements-driven development
Requirements-driven development
Attention to details
Throughout my career, I have observed that different people are often attentive to and focused on different levels of conceptual refinement. These perspectives vary according to their roles on a project, their individual personalities, and their experience. I have tended to mentally categorize these individuals into one of two different types of individuals at the top and bottom of this granularity perception universe: a "Roughly right" personality type, and a "Precisely right" type. Read more »
Wise decision-making
Decision-making requires us to understand a situation and accurately weigh the alternatives which present themselves to us. To gain such an understanding, we need to do far more than just collect facts and information. Our understanding is subject to all kinds of flaws and biases in our perceptions of reality. As John Sterman describes it:
Decision-making processes are also unfortunately prone to political influences and increasing bureaucracy. These factors can combine to delay conclusions and dilute our focus on achieving desirable outcomes. Fred Brooks describes these distractions as follows:
In How Decision-making can be improved, authors Milkman, Chugh, and Bazerman summarize the primary challenges of decision-makers: Read more »
Soundbites and substance
An associate once suggested that in his experience, nearly all problems he had experienced in engineering complex systems were the result of communications breakdowns. This assertion reminds me of a high school teacher who had a sign which read: Eschew Obfuscation. For those who don't get the irony immediately, this message directs us to avoid confusing your audience, yet rarely is understood, because the audience doesn't understand the message.
Don Reinertsen describes some of the mistakes teams make in trying to address these communications breakdowns: Read more »
Confronting the constraints of synergy initiatives
General Motors was first founded in 1908, and grew through mergers and acquisitions of separate Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Cadillac, Buick, GMC, and Chevrolet businesses. On Jan. 21, 1988, a senior General Motors executive, Elmer Johnson, wrote a memo which accurately anticipated GM's key challenge in transforming the company: “We have vastly underestimated how deeply ingrained are the organizational and cultural rigidities that hamper our ability to execute.” After 80 years, those businesses still struggled to work together. Read more »
Translating abstract needs into concrete actions
The leadership and team members on development projects often use language whose meaning is ambiguous. Unraveling the possibilities underneath their different concepts can be quite challenging. But if you don't confront and solve those challenges, it can cause considerably more pain later, as these misunderstandings must eventually be reconciled.
Success in development endeavors relies upon effective communications. Such communications involves developing and agreeing on a common, foundational understanding of the underlying key concepts that are threaded through such projects. Achieving such understanding usually requires careful listening, disciplined and coherent integration, and reconciliation of the ideas being expressed by different stakeholders over time. It also requires clear and thorough probing into the implications behind their emerging meaning(s) and reasoning(s), in multiple situations, and under different scenarios. Read more »