During the second world war the US army would fly their cargo planes onto small remote islands in the Pacific. On these islands the US army had built runways, controls towers and radar to ensure a smooth operation and enable them to supply their war effort with food, water, ammunition…
I'm several months in to my time working in tech for GlaxoSmithKline, a pharmaceutical company. The reason I joined was the ability to work in a field where I have the potential to contribute to impacting peoples lives for the better. OK, I'm not directly working in a laboratory analysing…
It's easy for conversations on Agile methodologies to quickly turn into religious debates, to which everyone has an opinion, and the reason for that is that adopting a methodology wholesale very rarely works for everyone. Very similar to the reason why adopting the Spotify model for every organisation very rarely…
Our methodology obsession The primary, and sometimes only, focus of most engineering organizations is product throughput. Typically the leading questions from executives are “when can we start?” and “how long will it take?”. We breakdown deliverables into smaller work streams that form a backlog of work that we can prioritize…
Speed wins in software development. It sounds wrong but it’s true. When people hear this they just can’t see why. They confuse speed with rushing or a reduction in quality. As a result of this fallacy they optimize for perceived quality. Adding process ensues. It’s usually reactionary…
Building and running an effective engineering organisation is not an easy task. In fact, it's very very hard. It's easy to evolve into an organisational structure and for the process to be iterative but, hands down, it's the most important part of any effective tech business. Over the years I've…