On Motivation
Thinking about the way to maximize people’s involvement in your project, and full-heartedly follow you and push forward your project. How do you motivate them? There is nothing really new on this topic, people studied this area long and thoroughly. David J. Schwartz spoke about it in the The Magic of Thinking Big, illustrated by taking some largely ignored routes, like treating people the human way: “What’s the human approach?” Listening to opinions, never criticize but always praise publicly, using the sandwich approach to feedback … Recent research on human...
read more“I will try ..” is a path to failure
If the Pygmalion effect describes the dynamic in which an individual lives up to great expectations, the set-up-to-fail syndrome explains the opposite. It is the Golem effect. But I’d like to see it here from an own personal perspective: an internal view. Why are we so afraid to fail? I think that a great cause of failure is one’s mindset, right from the beginning. We can sabotage ourselves before we even begin, afraid of failure or embarrassment. We are not sure of ourselves, exterior factors, the very conjuncture we can expect, it’s a new / unknown path, close to the...
read moreWhy Am I Doing This Thinking Online
In the last couple of days I had some debate with my wife on why writing everything down. This can be an annoying habit sometimes, I admit. Though, there is a long way towards I could say I’m exaggerating Only trying to get out the best of me, and the situation at hand. Then I took some time for really thinking about it. All my big ideas implementation followed through to completion and all accomplishments came like this. Cause what good is a god given strike of genius that only happens into your head, when it dies being forgotten the second day, never having the chance of being...
read moreWhat’s a System Engineer
There is still an active discussion of what System Engineering and the system engineer is all about. I found a very interesting post on the matter here. The historical roots have created some of the differences in these definitions of “systems engineering.” For example, the INCOSE definition comes from its roots in electrical engineering and its early application in places like Bell Labs, the defense industry, and space programs.[1] All systems engineering definitions and all industrial engineering programs share a focus on a set of methods and techniques, although the particular methods and...
read moreHow to: Handling Open Items Files
We are living in an ocean of information. Always on the edge, laying out new stuff, still having to consider everything for the end result to be in the realm of real, useful and reliable. But how do you cope with that afflux of information, how do you grasp all it’s its intricacies and interconnection. How do you fund out what’s conflicting or missing? Can you hold everything inside your head? I cannot! And that’s why I need a tool to help. Something that can help organizing and managing every finding of the entire team, and self. Why I found to be very helpful and...
read moreManaging the Customer – Training Notes
Out there, in the working field you sometime find yourself facing or handling all kinds of customers. When you have to deliver “bad news”, say “no” to customers or to people in power, you are often tempted to placate with a “yes”. It is indeed a challenge trying to balance the need to be customer-oriented and the need to deliver difficult messages to our customers. You always want to provide exceptional service to both your internal and external customers. However, in the real world, things might go wrong and mistakes are made. Nevertheless, your goal is to have a happy customer...
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To futureproof your job against robots and AI, you should learn how to code, brush up on your math skills and crack open an engineering textbook, right? Wrong. In this surprisingly comforting talk, tech journalist Kevin Roose makes the case that rather than trying to compete with the machines, we should instead focus on what makes us uniquely human. [...]
Corporations and big business have wrecked the environment, but disadvantaged communities living in "sacrifice zones" -- urban areas heavily polluted and poisoned by industry -- are paying the price, says climate justice leader Angela Mahecha Adrar. Explaining why racial and economic justice must be at the center of climate action, she takes us to the frontline communities that are leading the world to clean, innovative and just climate solutions -- like Cooperativa Tierra y Libertad, a local farm co-op in Washington that's disrupting the multibillion-dollar berry business. [...]
In the grand scheme of history, modern reality is a bizarre exception when compared to the worlds of ancient, precolonial and Indigenous civilizations, where myths ruled and gods roamed, says historian Greg Anderson. So why do Westerners today think they're right about reality and everybody else is wrong? Anderson tears into the fabric of objective reality to reveal the many universes that lie beyond -- and encourages a healthy reimagining of what other possible ways of being human could look like. [...]
Aliens have invaded ancient history: they've cropped up in humanity's past through popular television and movies, displacing facts with absurd yet commonplace beliefs like "aliens built the pyramids." Archaeologist Sarah Kurnick illustrates why these misconceptions perpetuate racist and xenophobic notions of history and culture -- and demonstrates how you can help debunk these dangerous, outlandish myths. [...]
On his first day as president, Joe Biden signed a letter of acceptance that set in motion the 30-day process for the United States to re-join the Paris Agreement on climate. On the day the US returns to the accord, John Kerry, the US Special Envoy for Climate, sits down with Nobel Laureate Al Gore to discuss the make-or-break decade ahead of us. Listen as Kerry lays out how the US fits into the global plan to get to net-zero emissions, explains why the COP26 UN climate conference could be humanity's "last best hope" to build international momentum and explores the role of business and youth activists in promoting environmental justice. (This interview features an introduction from Christiana Figueres, the principal architect of the Paris Agreement.) [...]
The whole of enterprises’ endeavors and behaviors cannot be coerced into models lest they inhibit their ability to navigate ill defined and shifting business environments. Enterprises immersion in digital environments is making limits all the more explicit: On the environment side, facts, once like manna from heaven ready to be picked and interpreted, have turned … Continue reading "Facts, Categories, Concepts" [...]
Compared to its bricks and mortar counterpart, enterprises architecture is a work in progress to be carried out all along enterprises life cycle; hence the need of actionable representations of environments, organization, assets, and processes. As any artifact, actual or symbolic, models must serve some purposes which for systems architectures can be of two kind, … Continue reading "Actionable Enterprise Architectures" [...]
When push comes to shove, deciding on a development process is to decide between instant or delayed returns, namely focusing on users needs with agile development, or taking extended features into consideration and weighting the benefits of reuse against additional costs, e.g.: Designs to be reused as patterns. Profiling configurations. Structuring business process models so … Continue reading "EA in the Loops" [...]
As far as enterprise architecture is concerned, the issue of scale is fogged by two confusions: one between processes and structures, the other between space and time. That square is at the core of the discipline. The Matter of Time Even before the digital unfolding of environments, everybody was to agree that business is all … Continue reading "About Scales & Times" [...]
Preamble Beyond varying names, requirements have often been classified into four basic categories: Process requirements deal with organization and business processes independently of the part played by supporting systems. Application requirements deal with the part played by supporting systems in the realization of processes requirements.. Quality of Service requirements deal with users experience independently of … Continue reading "Requirements in Digital Environments" [...]
Note: this blog builds upon a previous blog published several years ago on allocation and traceability. We were recently asked the following question: “I’m trying to improve the way our requirements are leveled and allocated. One nuance that we have … Read More The post Blog first appeared on Requirements Experts. [...]
On May 11, 2019 we presented our 1-day Scope Definition seminar for the INCOSE ChicagoLand Chapter Spring Seminar offering to their membership. This was a natural follow on seminar to the Writing Good Requirements seminar we presented at the 2018 … Read More The post Blog first appeared on Requirements Experts. [...]
Hi all, I will be giving a 1-day seminar on scope definition for the ChicagoLand INCOSE Chapter on May 11, 2019 for their Spring Tutorial. Last year I gave our 1-day Writing Good Requirements seminar which was very popular and … Read More The post Blog first appeared on Requirements Experts. [...]
A special thanks to all that attended the RWG sessions at IW2019 along with those that volunteered to give a presentation and lead a discussion on their topic – without your active involvement and dedication, IW2019 would not have been … Read More The post Blog first appeared on Requirements Experts. [...]
The RWG has a full agenda planned for IW 2019, Jan 26-29, 2019 in Torrance, CA. Planned Activities for IW2019 Welcome new members Overview to the RWG “Guide for Writing Requirements” for new members and the whitepaper “Integrated Data as a Foundation of … Read More The post Blog first appeared on Requirements Experts. [...]
In my book "The Manager's Guide for Effective Leadership" I stress the importance of giving people control over the processes they are responsible for in order to increase productivity. Of course it’s necessary to train people in the management of processes and to establish boundaries for what they can control before they are set free to control their own processes. There is another parameter that management controls that can increase or stifle productivity. That is the work space of the workers. The December 2013/January 2014 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek has an excellent article by Joshua Brustein on the modern workplace that is worth reading. This post borrows from that article and from my own personal experience as a worker. Brustein’s article is questions posed by Burstein and answered by several experts on work place issues. I will quote some of… [...]
We last addressed your leadership action plan at the end of the review of lectures 11-16. If you are a diligent student you have been very busy working on the actions you defined for yourself up to that point. That is why you have not been asked to update your plan as you studied lectures 17 – 29. Now it is time to go back to your plan.First, conduct an assessment of how well you are doing implementing your action plan. Are you making reasonable progress on every item? If so, you deserve a pat on the back. Are there planed actions that you have found difficult to implement? If there are, go back to the lecture that gave rise to the difficult actions and review the lecture to see if you are missing anything in your implementation efforts. Are… [...]
The first 22 lectures deal with the management functions of staffing, communicating and motivating. The remainder of the lectures deals with selected aspects of control. It is assumed that the student understands methods of cost and schedule control appropriate to the student’s organization. If not, references for self-study are provided in lecture 23. It is critical to understand how to apply the principles of control to different organization types because these principles must be tailored to the organization type and applying them inappropriately results in significant inefficiencies. It is also necessary to understand management accounting, which differs from standard financial accounting, in order to make sound decisions relating to costs of products or services. The three aspects of control discussed in lectures 23-28 relate to processes involved in the day to day work of any organization. These three are risk… [...]
Everything discussed up to this point is supportive of the manager’s main function, which is leading the organization in accomplishing its strategic objectives. I have discussed several times how implementing the methods discussed eventually frees the manager from daily firefighting activities thereby making time for more strategic work. An organization of highly motivated workers that are trained and empowered to control their processes will conduct the organization’s normal activities with little oversight from the manager. However, accomplishing an organization’s strategic objectives almost always involves doing some things differently or some new things. The success of the organization depends on accomplishing these different or new things successfully. Ensuring that the organization has the highest probability of success in achieving strategic objectives is the responsibility of the leader. In this lecture I describe a process that helps both the leader and the… [...]
In most cases the largest cause in a Pareto chart is the first target for improving a process. However, in this example the students aren’t complaining about the time they spend in the stacks. The students’ primary complaint is about the second shortest step in the overall process. Based on these observations the process improvement team decides to divide the problem into two pieces. First they will determine if they can reduce the amount of data required for the checkout process, thereby addressing the main complain of the students, and second they will analyze the process in more detail to see if the overall time can be shortened without major investments in new equipment or facilities.Examining the rational for requiring the student’s local and home addresses for checking out books determined that this policy traces to the era before the… [...]
When people think of code reviews, they usually think in terms of an explicit step in a development team's workflow. These days the Pre-Integration Review, carried out on a Pull Request is the most common mechanism for a code review, to the point that many people witlessly consider that not using pull requests removes all opportunities for doing code review. Such a narrow view of code reviews doesn't just ignore a host of explicit mechanisms for review, it more importantly neglects probably the most powerful code review technique - that of perpetual refinement done by the entire team. One of the most pervasive perspectives in software is the notion that it's something we build and complete - hence the endless metaphor of building construction and architecture. Yet the key property of software is that it is soft, and can be… [...]
Pull Requests are a mechanism popularized by github, used to help facilitate merging of work, particularly in the context of open-source projects. A contributor works on their contribution in a fork (clone) of the central repository. Once their contribution is finished they create a pull request to notify the owner of the central repository that their work is ready to be merged into the mainline. Tooling supports and encourages code review of the contribution before accepting the request. Pull requests have become widely used in software development, but critics are concerned by the addition of integration friction which can prevent continuous integration. Pull requests essentially provide convenient tooling for a development workflow that existed in many open-source projects, particularly those using a distributed source-control system (such as git). This workflow begins with a contributor creating a new logical branch, either… [...]
Clients send requests to servers but might not get a response. It's impossible for clients to know if the response was lost or the server crashed before processing the request. To make sure that the request is processed, the client has to re-send the request. If the server had already processed the request and crashed after that, servers will get duplicate requests when the client retries. more… [...]
Tim finishes his article by looking at how highly effective organizations design their engineering organization to optimize for effectiveness and feedback loops. He illustrates what this looks like by the example of Etsy, who actively measures their ability to put valuable products into production quickly and safely, adjusting their technical investments to fix any blockers or slowness. more… [...]
Clients are interested in changes to the specific values on the server. It's difficult for clients to structure their logic if they need to poll the server continuously to look for changes. If clients open too many connections to the server for watching changes, it can overwhelm the server. more… [...]
The windmills aren’t the problem, it’s the tilting. In Cervantes’ day, ’tilting’ was a word for jousting. You tilted your lance at an enemy and attacked. Don Quijote was noted for believing that the windmills in the distance were giants, and he spent his days on attack. Change can look like a windmill. When we […] [...]
If you put the jelly on before the peanut butter, the sandwich will fail. And if you try to spread the peanut butter on the plate and then add the bread, it will fail even worse. Like so many things, the order is not optional. And yet, we often do the least-scary or easiest parts […] [...]
We might be settling scores or we might be opening doors. It’s up to us. Grievance and possibility have confusing roots. Grievance isn’t about grieving. In fact, it’s the opposite. Grievance is the narrative of getting even. Possibility doesn’t itemize everything that’s possible. Instead, it focuses on the side effects that come from acting as […] [...]
Weight is a useful measure. 10 pounds is twice as much as 5 pounds. Measuring things and then ranking them effectively enables us to make better choices and to scale up our operations. Sometimes, though, in our rush to standardize and process a complicated world, we begin to measure things that can’t be easily measured, […] [...]
For most products and services, we rate them on a curve. Of course the seat on the discount airline was cramped, but that’s okay because it was cheap. Of course this Camry doesn’t look or ride like a Porsche, don’t be stupid… But, the opposite is true in the high end. When luxury goods are […] [...]