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 to it - I’d strongly recommend this conference.
I’ve been nervous about my presentation at JAOO for a while, mainly because the audience is filled with hard-core programmers and I tend to talk about more of the management aspects of IT. It turns out that the there is definitely an audience for my work here though; from the feedback I’m guessing somewhere around 150 people attended my talk and the response has been very positive so far.
My talk is brand new and has the title ‘The IT Division. Refactored’. I’ve just uploaded it the the presentations page of the site. The theme of the talk is built around IT divisions having a systemic problem - if we look at the numbers it’s clear that we can change the people, the country, the industry, the market etc. and still get the same repeatably poor results. I then start to introduce systems management theory and talk about how that can be used to rebuild IT divisions to work in fundamentally different ways. I look at organisational structure, processes, culture and people capabilities and walk through the approaches I’m taking to move towards more systems based operating models for IT. If you take a look at the deck then let me know your thoughts…
October 9th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Hi Richard,
Interesting presentation so far.
The first big thing that jumps out at me when going through it is the list of 25 items in slides 36 and 37. It is just too much, reading through it they start running together. Perhaps pick out a handful that are important and summarize the rest verbally.
Slide 38, consider saying Bad smells for System Thinking… The way it reads now, I don’t know if the thinking goes with the bad smells or with the system. Alternately, System Thinking bad smells…. would work ok, but still sounds odd to me.
Slide 44, center the text more, the content text is way on the left, and there is nothing else there.
Overall, interesting presentation. As I start to grow Sampi, I’ll certainly keep these in mind and see how to integrate it.
November 13th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
Is there a link/recording/MP3 of the presentation itself? This would make the pdf a bit more accessible.