At last years Agile Australia conference, an Australian branch of the Agile Alliance was proposed and created. Local branch meetings of the Agile Alliance Australia (AAA*) have been organised over the next few weeks. If you’d like to attend (all are welcome) you’ll need to register at the respective meetup events for Melbourne and Sydney. […]

I’m in Aarhus, Denmark at the moment for this years JAOO conference. I got here on Tuesday after 36 hours travel from Melbourne. Urgh. The conference has been great; there are some amazing speakers here (Mary Poppendieck, Dave Thomas, Michael Feathers, Linda Rising, Martin Fowler, Bob Martin) and the whole place has an amazing buzz […]

Recently I’ve been doing a number of assignments that involve a significant amount of organisational design. I think that the conventional thinking in this space is completely broken and only a view that breaks the existing convention will help.The work I’m doing seems to start from this problem statement: “I’m a CIO and I believe […]

Command and Control Management
Managers create the system and set the targets for the workers. The initial focus of failure is on the people. Managers manage the people.
Systems Management Theory
Managers and the people in the process create the system and define the system performance measures. The initial focus of failure is the system. Managers manage the […]

I’m spending a lot of time at the moment working with governance groups, steering committee’s and PMO’s to introduce Lean ideas. There’s a common challenge that I keep coming across. First up, size matters. I was going through the 2009 Standish CHAOS report today to gather some data for a presentation. Here’s what they have […]

I just made Jurgen Appelo’s list of ‘Top 200 Blogs for Developers’. I’m sneaking in there at number 198, apparently down from 150 when Jurgen last published the list. It’s my own fault for not blogging for almost three months!
There are some great blogs in the list that I’m already aware of and a heap […]

This post was inspired by a comment from Andy Marks in a joint presentation he delivered with Martin Fowler to an audience in Melbourne yesterday. The presentation was on how to fail with Agile.
Andy asked the audience to put their hands in the air if they had ever read an e-mail from a manager within […]

The first ever Agile conference in Australia has just been announced: Agile Australia 2009.
The event is going to be held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Sydney on the 15th and 16th October.
If you’re looking for a good reason to come to Australia then this is it! The event promises to be great and I […]

I just got around to watching my colleague, Ross Pettit, present on Restructuring IT. The presentation lasts about 30 mins and is worth a watch.
Ross has an interesting history as he has worked as a COO, CIO and CTO prior to becoming a consultant. In my opinion he’s one of the few people in the […]

Owen Berkeley-Hill sent me this clip of an interview with Japan Airline’s CEO, Haruka Nishimatsu. I think it’s a great insight into Japanese management thinking; I love Nishimatsu’s response to the interviewers comment on US executives earning tens of millions of dollars. Priceless.
Enjoy.