Everybody's favourite economics lesson.
Posted with BlogsyFrom my vault of old files.
This is very much a beginners edition – filled with my own personal opinion.
1. Having a “signed off design” is useless. In the rare scenario that the client has agreed that any change in the design will be a change request, congratulations you win! Your project will never finish.
2. Data quality will have an impact even when it’s “not in scope”. If when you mention data quality your project manager says “that’s not in scope”, sack them. Only if the business sponsor agrees that the solution doesn’t need to be tested, and that the integration or reporting components are allowed to fail without any explanatory error message if one potential explanation is that they have encountered unexpected data, is data quality “out of scope”. You need to answer the question “how do we detect and / or handle bad data?” and even if the answer is “we don’t” it’s still in scope.
3. Sometimes data isn’t available. If you want to scope your product at all you at least need to constrain the source systems. As soon as you do this – I.e. Limit you scope to less than all of the data in the world – there is a risk that the required data isn’t available. You should assign ownership of this risk and understand how the scenario will be funded.
4. There are only 8 types of products you are building: interfaces, one data acquisition frameworks, one “consolidated” data store, reports, cubes or equivalent, derived data logic, and data-marts, process support frameworks. The whole project team needs to know what these are (feel free to use more precise language to the point that the whole project team can still relate to it). The project manager is part of the project team.
5. If you don’t know how many of the above products you expect to build or update when you estimate your product you will fail. If you don’t know specially the names of each during each phase gate, status report, or iteration kick-off – you will fail. It is however, okay for these to change – in a controlled way. It’s likely that sometimes building an additional report doesn’t change the scope of the project. In fact, sometimes it’s a compromise you have to sell.
6. By the way, a “process support framework” is a framework that supports a process. These include meta-data management framework, data quality framework, semantic layer, business glossary, etc. If you have any of these in your solution, and don’t have equivalent business owners for the process components of each, you will fail. Don’t pretend you are using these unless you really have a plan to implement them properly. Ask your solution architect if these are part of your solution and unless they are also in your plan you need to consider taking them out and planning for re-work.
7. You must be able to answer the question “if we had this data, where would it be?” Which means a single consolidated data model linked to source systems and derived data logic. Use this model to track the status of your integration build – field by field.
8. Don’t skip data profiling and the related q&a sessions to understand the results. 80% of the data profile reports will be a waste of time. The rest will be valuable but likely require somebody to go and talk to the call centre, check an asset sticker, or open the operational system it came from.
9. Status reporting must include the following: status of each product(started, on hold, tested, accepted, etc), status of data quality issue log, status of data profiling and q&a log, status of the data model implementation and data availability.
10. If does not matter if the stakeholders don’t want to see the above level of detail. That is the detail required to understand where resources need to be allocated. You need to make them understand why it’s important.
Bonus tip #1o. If your project manager complains that the above list is from somebody who “doesn’t understand project management” – sack them.
IPOs delayed until you can afford the regulatory burden?:
Marc Andreessen:The compliance and reporting requirements are extremely burdensome for a small company. It requires fleets of lawyers and accountants who come in and do years of work. It’s this idea that if you control everything down to the nth detail, nothing will go wrong. It’s this bizarre, bureaucratic, top-down mentality that if only we could make everything predictable, then everything would be magic, everything would be wonderful.
It has the opposite effect. It’s biased enormously toward companies that are big enough to hire fleets of lawyers and accountants, biased against companies that are very young and for whom there’s still a lot of variability.
Manager by Design is effectively advocating better collaboration architectures.
What if Quality Journalism Isn’t? (by @baekdal) #insights
And this is the essence of the trouble newspapers are facing today. It’s not that we now live in a digital world, and that we are behaving in a different way. It’s that your editorial focus is to be the supermarket of news.
The New York Times is publishing 300 new articles every single day, and in their Innovation Report they discuss how to surface even more from their archives. This is the Walmart business model.
The problem with this model is that supermarkets only work when visiting the individual brands is too hard to do. That’s why we go to supermarkets. In the physical world, visiting 40 different stores just to get your groceries would take forever, so we prefer to only go to one place, the supermarket, where we can get everything… even if most of the other products there aren’t what we need.
Worth a read. Rather than decide that all of your customers are now different because they are “digital”, perhaps question your strategy.
The best definitions are sometimes tautologies:
“A business capability is defined as the desired ability for the organisation to deliver a defined outcome, as referred to when defining the organisation’s strategy, or within a hierarchy of capabilities that can be traced to those used to define the organisation’s strategy. Importantly, if it’s not being referred to during the definition of strategy, it’s not a capability. Each capability must encapsulate multiple functions and may not reference any particular function except in the definition of it’s implementation. There is no need for a capability’s implementation to be defined for it to be a valid capability.”
IT News is all about government intervention today.
Leading with stories on the London Taxi blockade and the likely unpopular stance of the AIIA to recommend not introducing legislation to address the so-called “Australia tax” on IT products and services.
It all comes back to innovation. Uber, who the Taxi drivers are complaining about, is innovating. They’ve developed a high quality service that customers want. They are disrupting an industry. They are doing what every management consultant has been telling them to do (though I’m not suggesting that’s why they’re doing it).
As usual, their competitors want protection from the government. Which seems unfair and all very anti-competative of the taxi drivers but I understand where they are coming from. They don’t just want protection – they want protection in exchange for the all of the regulation they have had to endure in the past:
“Why, asked the drivers, is Uber allowed to compete in an industry that is otherwise highly regulated?”
Fair point. Previous legislation has an impact of future expectations – remember that.
Back here in Australia, where Microsoft has admitted it is engaging in the horrendous crime of “charging what Australians could bear” – AIIA is recognising that legislation that caps prices will just as likely cause exits from the market as it will cause lower prices. Just like minimum wage legislation – however desirable in its intended outcome – can’t help but cause jobs to disappear.
But what if it’s not just that Australia can bear higher prices? What if this just plays to our pride in being a lucky and prosperous country? What if Australia’s payment of higher prices reflects an innovation challenge?
It’s not all about price elasticity. There is another major competitive force at work here – the threat of alternatives. Perhaps the reason Australia appears to bear higher prices isn’t because of the prosperity of the lucky country no matter how much we want to believe it.
Perhaps Australia is paying more for IT products and services because our knowledge of alternatives is less.
I’m a happy Apple customer so I’m not knocking Apple products at all. But Apple was slow to make a dent in the Asian market because there are so many other options there. Success in Australia’s limited option market probably helps fund expansion into Asia (speculation).
Knowledge and availability of alternatives is an important force in competition and therefore prices. I’d argue that availability isn’t a problem in Australia (though it might be if you tried to regular price) but rather the problem is knowledge of alternatives.
I’m not just talking about alternatives to Microsoft Office like OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Google Doc, etc. I’m talk about alternatives to Microsoft Office like focusing on the content! Like not needing to write a long complex document to get things done. Like maybe using Photoshop instead and creating something a little more visual.
I’m also talking about alternatives like experimenting with your digital channels to try out new integrations with your customers using the devices they already use. Rather than writing an internal document to explain to a disengaged management team something they should already know. Take that team to a customer site. Or at least show them the data you have collected about in-store traffic flow.
AIIA has the right idea. The legislative framework needs to create the environment for innovation here in Australia. Not to try and protect us from the companies we freely purchase products and services from. The Australian response doesn’t always have to be legislate, or boycott, or feel helpless. Sometimes it has to be – innovate.
Does not knowing how to do something yourself make you expert enough to tell other people that “it won’t take you long”?
Worth a read:
I’ve heard Elliot Rodger’s voice before. I was expecting his manifesto to be incomprehensible madness—hoping for it to be—but it wasn’t. It’s a standard frustrated angry geeky guy manifesto, except for the part about mass murder.
Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds