Intentional vs Accidental Architecture

5 years, 6 months ago

Form Follows Function on SPaMCast 459

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I’m back for another appearance on Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast. This week’s episode, number 459, features Tom’s essay on resistance to change. This is followed by our Form Follows Function segment discussing my post “Innovation, Intention, Planning and Execution”. Jeremy Berriault‘s QA corner finishes the cast with a segment on testing […]

5 years, 8 months ago

Form Follows Function on SPaMCast 450

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It’s time for another appearance on Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast. This week’s episode, number 450, features Tom’s excellent essay on roadmaps and a Form Follows Function installment based on my post “Holistic Architecture – Keeping the Gears Turning”. Our conversation in this episode continues with the organizations as system concept, this […]

5 years, 9 months ago

Holistic Architecture – Keeping the Gears Turning

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In last week’s post, “Trash or Treasure – What’s Your Legacy?”, I talked about how to define “legacy systems”. Essentially, as the divergence grows between the needs of social systems and the fitness for purpose of the software systems that enable them, the more likely that those software systems can considered “legacy”. The post attracted […]

5 years, 9 months ago

Form Follows Function on SPaMCast 446

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It’s time for another appearance on Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast. This week’s episode, number 446, features Tom’s essay on questions, a powerful tool for coaches and facilitators. A Form Follows Function installment based on my post “Go-to People Considered Harmful” comes next and Kim Pries rounds out the podcast with a […]

5 years, 9 months ago

Innovation, Intention, Planning and Execution

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  Convergence is an interesting thing. Greger Wiktrand and I have been trading posts back and forth on the subject of innovation for almost eighteen months now (forty posts in total). I’ve also been writing a lot on the concept of organizations as systems, (twenty-two posts over the last year, with some overlap with innovation). […]

5 years, 10 months ago

Form Follows Function on SPaMCast 442

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A new month brings a new appearance on Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast. This week’s episode, number 442, features Tom’s excellent essay on capability teams (highly recommended!), followed by a Form Follows Function installment based on my post “Systems of Social Systems and the Software Systems They Create”. Kim Pries bats cleanup […]

5 years, 11 months ago

Form Follows Function on SPaMCast 438

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Once again, I’m making an appearance on Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast. This week’s episode, number 438, features Tom’s essay on using sizing for software testing, Kim Pries with a Software Sensei column (canned solutions), and a Form Follows Function installment based on my post “Organizations as Systems and Innovation”. In this […]

5 years, 11 months ago

You can’t always get what you want…

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You can’t always get what you want But if you try sometimes well you just might find You get what you need When it comes to systems, you can’t always get what you want, but you do get what you design (intentionally or not), whether it’s what you need or not. In other words, the […]

6 years, 1 month ago

Emergence: Babies and Bathwater, Plans and Planning

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  “Emergent” is a word that I run into from time to time. When I do run into it, I’m reminded of an exchange from the movie Gallipoli: Archy Hamilton: I’ll see you when I see you. Frank Dunne: Yeah. Not if I see you first. The reason for my ambivalent relationship with the word […]

6 years, 1 month ago

Go-to People Considered Harmful

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Okay, so the title’s a little derivative, but it’s both accurate and it fits in with the “organizations as systems” theme of recent posts. Just as dependency management is important for software systems, it’s likewise just as critical for social systems. Failures anywhere along the chain of execution can potentially bring the whole system to […]

6 years, 1 month ago

Systems of Social Systems and the Software Systems They Create

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I’ve mentioned before that the idea of looking at organizations as systems is one that I’ve been focusing on for quite a while now. From a top-down perspective, this makes sense – an organization is a system that works better when it’s component parts (both machine and human) intentionally work together. It also works from […]

6 years, 1 month ago

Organizations as Systems and Innovation

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Over the last year or so, the concept of looking at organizations as systems has been a major theme for me. Enterprises, organizations and their ecosystems (context) are social systems composed of a fractal set of social and software systems. As such, enterprises have an architecture. Another long-term theme for this site has been my […]