I've previously written about management. While dwelling on W. Edwards Deming's ideas about the system of profound knowledge I can't help but conclude that management is the art of improving a system by coordinating the activities of a team towards continous improvement. One of the elements of the system of …
According to W. Edwards Deming, for an organisation to succeed it needs to incorporate a system of profound knowledge consisting of:Appreciation for a systemA theory of knowledge Understanding of variationPsychologyThis system of profound knowledge is a means for acquiring knowledge external to the organisation to become …
Design has to do with human requirements. Engineering has to do with technological possibilities.
Competitionis for losers - Peter Thielnobody wins in a price warwhen producers are forced to compete the divert attention from innovation to survival is pessimistic is a zero-sum game Cooperation makes for a bigger pie - better a smaller piece of a bigger pie than a big …
Everyone had great ideas. But great ideas are really not worth much on their own. True value lies in the capacity to exploit great ideas. Great countries are those that live on the cutting edge by executing on great ideas. Great companies are those that harness great ideas, either internally …
We all want happy customers but more than that we want high quality even when the customers are yet to beat down our door. There are two avenues where quality lives: front office and back office. Your customers never see your back office but they feel its effects through the …
In The Software Studio: A Software Production Process, I proposed the idea that we should think of the software production process in much the same way that movies are produced: with distinct phases through which the production proceeds. The more I think about it the more I realise how …
It is possible to be too intelligent for your own good. When one is too intelligent they tend to be deployed where others can make the best use of them. This typically means that they will end up working in isolation on things that others are incapable of working on …
Yes, DDD! It stands for documentation-driven design. The goal is to have the documentation capture the domain usage for the respective users. Typically, documentation is written for the end, development and administrative users. Therefore, if the respective users find the documentation meaningful in the absence of running code then …
I've always assumed that software should be written for two principal users:the end user in the domain, andthe programming user writing applications for the domain. But it's just occurred to me that in numerous cases there is a third implied user: the administrative user. In many cases …
The purpose of analysis is to discover the right design. It is possible to successfully execute the wrong design. When this happens, any success will have an expiry date on it because the inevitability of change will expose the inadequacy of the design. Design really is a life and death …