The Agile Manager

A few years ago, I felt I had enough experience - and had put enough thought into the subject - to write a book on governance in software de...

Multiple layers of authority overlap both horizontally (different people and committees engage with the same issue) and vertically (many dec...

Integrating businesses is no small task.  Established workflows, systems and tools are vigorously defended yet poorly understood.  Fearing f...

"It is hard not to be cynical about this. M&A is a great process for creating fees for bankers, and for destroying the value held b...

Tech utilities - things that automate administration, enable communication or improve employee productivity - started as a labor expense, be...

In the 1970s, the predominant business strategy was vertical integration: own the value chain from raw materials to retail outlets. The rese...

"We value customer collaboration over contract negotiation." -- The Agile Manifesto Contracts for software development have hist...

When a business or a profession grows faster than the labor market it draws from , it suffers a capability deficiency: there simply aren...

Everybody wins when somebody is put in a stretch role. Whoever does the hiring - a manager naming a first time tech lead or a board hiring ...

Technical debt is a useful metaphor for explaining why some code is faster to complete but more expensive to maintain. It is also helpful i...

Corporate IT has long been a paradox: as a source of competitiveness it is expected to be responsive and flexible; as a cost center it is ke...

"Increasing numbers of people who had formerly been self-employed in workshops and cottage industry, often on a subcontracting basis, a...

I had intended this month's blog to be about how industrialization would expand the secondary labor market and subsequently be a lost op...

The growth in demand for software has consistently outpaced the growth in the supply of software developers. This has been the case for wel...