The Curse of Technical Competence

by Charl Dreyer on August 11, 2009 · 0 comments

in Working Software

It cuts both ways: Technical competence. Having highly competent people on your Team can make or break your project.

Genius, geek, propeller-head – just some of the labels we place on people who are gifted in technical insight and skills. And it’s great when they come through for the project, solving a difficult problem that’s been holding the Team back.

Yet you must also be familiar with this scene: You’re meeting with the Team explaining your vision for a new product or feature, and as you’re talking you glance across at the major brain in the room. His eyes are glassy; he has that distant look about him. [click to continue…]

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Get Your Own Way

by Charl Dreyer on July 14, 2009 · 0 comments

in Agile.tv, Customer Collaboration

If you had to say to your Team that fewer than 8 out of 100 people know the difference between a search engine and a browser, would they believe you? Would it make a difference to how you built software? You know, those geeky bits that express technical prowess, but user ignorance?

“How do you get your boss to approve something, the customer service people to understand the pain a system is causing, or the folks in engineering to see things your way?” asks Seth Godin in a recent blog. [click to continue…]

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Six Faithful Serving Men

by Charl DreyerJune 30, 2009 Documents
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Many business cases I’ve read are framed in the solution domain, which should concern us because the business case may propose solving the wrong problem. As technology derives its value from the underlying business problem solved, solving the wrong problem will result in a sub-optimal ROI. And solving the wrong problem means the solution will fail because it’s implemented in the wrong context.

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Hire Your Next Boss

by Charl DreyerJune 25, 2009 Jobs
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If you’re thinking of moving on, using the traditional recruitment agency method, might just find you having to introduce Agile all over again at a new company. When you’re looking for a new position, you need to innovate: The traditional way of doing it has a good chance of giving you a bad result. Why not you make the market? Your creativity changes the rules of the game.

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10+ Deploys Per Day At Flickr

by Charl DreyerJune 24, 2009 Agile.tv
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Communications and cooperation between development and operations isn’t optional, it’s mandatory. Flickr takes the idea of ‘release early, release often’ to an extreme: On a normal day there are 10 full deployments of the site to their servers. This session discusses why this rate of change works so well, and the culture and technology at Flickr needed to make it possible.

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Software Garagistes

by Charl DreyerMay 16, 2009 Individuals and Interactions
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Big-thinking entrepreneurs are a threat to corporate software producers. Countering them may mean becoming as agile and entrepreneurial as you dare.

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