10 Reasons Change is an Antipattern Everybody’s talking about change: Change Programmes, Embracing Change, Championing Change. Here are ten reasons you might want to avoid change and just improve instead.

Strategy for the Irretrievably Pragmatic Strategy has a bad name with some, being seen as the preserve of talking shops and consultants. But a good strategy, well-applied, can be the making of a company. It’s not possible to say what the right strategy is for all businesses, but there are some good rules for applying it. This article looks at why the most pragmatic people are often the best creators of strategy and how it’s as much about bottom-up thinking as it is about future vision. ...

The ABC of the ESB IT people must be some of the cleverest and expensive in the world. Or at least that the theory. And yet we are constantly falling for the emperors new clothes in the form of next-big-things whilst discarding what we have, even the bits of what we have that work. The answer lies in understanding the history of how we got to where we got to and, unfortunately, accepting that some things are hard work and we have to do it. ...

Magnificence in the Mundane Relationships between IT departments and business customers are not unlike real world friendships. If you can see what works with your friends you can apply it in business. And it’s mostly about conversations. If you can talk, you have a good chance of resolving anything. As professionals in a complex subject area it’s always tempting to look for sophisticated answers to problems, but by focusing on the common sense basics of how we structure ourselves and how we act we can deliver better software. When we do that we cease to be something distinct from the business and we can stop talking about business/IT alignment and get on with doing what we do best. ...

The Interview - Part One Interviewing is a vastly underrated skill, and yet if you can do it well it brings you the best of all rewards - good people to work with. This is part one of a two-part article looking at effective candidate filtering, interviewing techniques and questions that work for technology roles.

Change Steps The last of three articles about change programmes. This one assumes that you have got to the point where you have to have one (the two previous articles explained why generally they are not a good idea). If issues have been left to fester for too long though sometimes you have no choice. This article proposes a way to run a change programme that is effective with the minimum amount of paperwork and fuss. A change programme that makes changes. What a novel idea that is. ...

Scalability

The Fallacies of Agile The Agile approach is great when applied appropriately, but the concept is nothing new. In fact it goes so far back it shares its roots with the waterfall method. But Agile got a cool name in 2001 (before that it was just working closely with the customer in an iterative fashion, which wasn’t anywhere near as catchy) and was jumped upon by consultants and cowboy coders. This article looks at just some of the common fallacies that have grown up around this peculiar buzzword. ...

What would Scooby do How change programmes usually go once the consultants turn up. These are the warning signs to look out for. All found by deep reading the masterful and authoritative canon that is the work of Scooby Doo.

The Retep Principle