deltalounge

Within lean and other practices the 5 Whys are used to determine a root cause of a defect or problem. However in the following TED talk Simon Sinek shows us that most of the times the answer to one why determines whether we as customer experience value delivered in a product or service:

You might have read here or on other blogs that SOA isn’t a purpose. It is a means to an end. The same goes for all the technologies that we use when implementing a SOA, or an architecture, or an application in general. So I wanted to share the next video with you since I think that it – in an even broader perspective – shows this point. Technology itself is not good or bad. It all boils down to how we as people use it.



Source: RSA.org 21th century alignment.

There is a growing number of Twitter Apps that trick you into giving them access to your account and so enabling them to send spam on your behalf. Should you (like me at least once) fall for this trap, here is an easy way to prevent further damage. Use the following url: http://twitter.com/settings/connections or click the links that are highlighted in the screen shot on the right to manage your Twitter connections.




After that you just click Revoke Access below the Application that is using your account to spam others. An example is depicted in the screen shot below (for a non spamming App):

Yesterday I attended a Lessons Learned session for a Software Development project where I’ll be involved in the upcoming phase. All participants shared their opinion on the negative and positive experiences. What went well and what needed improvement. Putting all these opinions expressed on Post-It notes in perspective I realized that the major part of the negative experience where from the early days of the project. Whereas the positive experiences seemed to be from the most recent period. This brought me back to one of the models I was taught on Group Development while taking training and coaching courses. It suddenly made sense to me that there had to be a relation with the Tuckman’s Group Development Model.

Tuckman’s Group Development Model

The Group Development Model that was proposed by Bruce Tuckman in 1965 has four phases:

• Forming: Individual roles and responsibilities are unclear. Lots of questions about the team’s purpose, objectives and external relationships. Processes are often ignored. Members test tolerance of system and leader.
• Storming: Clarity of purpose increases but plenty of uncertainties persist. Cliques and factions form and there may be power struggles.
• Norming: Agreement and consensus is largely forms among the team. Roles and responsibilities are clear and accepted. Commitment and unity is strong. The team may engage in fun and social activities.
• Performing: The team knows clearly why it is doing what it is doing. The team has a shared vision and is able to stand on its own feet with no interference or participation from the leader. There is a focus on over-achieving goals.

More in this PDF on Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing.
So in which phase do you think the most fun, excitement and productivity is? And as you guessed this was reflected in the Lessons Learned session mentioned: The negative experiences were during the Storming, and the positive experiences during the Performing phase.

Note that:

These phases are all necessary and inevitable in order for the team to grow, to face up to challenges, to tackle problems, to find solutions, to plan work, and to deliver results.

It is important to realize this because sometimes a group of people in a meeting go through these same four phases. And if your a real goal oriented person you could try to skip the first two of three steps. That in will have a severe impact on the buy in of the group / team.
The teams that don’t get out of the Storming phase usually deliver no or very low quality software…

Pranav Mistry did a great TED talk on tools that help the fysical world to interact with the digital world. Pranav works on a project called Sixth Sense and most of his examples are based on this project and the research that led to it.

And the busines – IT gap

Inspiring talks like these make me wonder if there is any groundbreaking research that could bridge the business IT gap that is mentioned so often. One thing that makes this even more complicated is that both “IT” and “business” are concepts, unlike the real fysical world. Besides that the concept do not follow laws of nature like the fysical world does.
To build a bridge between business and IT bith need a level of understanding of how the other works. In most case this will require a lot of communication.

Working as a consultant for multiple customers, I get to work with a lot of different desktops, besides my laptop. This used to result in installing the same software again and again on different machines, and keeping it up to date. I found an alternative in PortableApps.

PortableApps.com is an open platform that works from any USB flash drive, iPod, memory card, or portable hard drive. It’s open source, it´s free and it´s convenient. Now I can carry a great bundle of applications and utilities on a simple USB stick (OK, I admit to use an USB hard drive). This allows me to work with the same tools everywhere without additional cost, or the need to install software.

These are the applications and utilities I favor from the collection:

• Firefox: Not only enables this me to take my bookmarks everywhere, thanks to the great collection of add-ons I also take my Twitter and Yammer platform with me.
• Notepad++ a great text editor.
• Task Coach to keep on track with my tasks.
• Filezilla, WinSCP, and PuTTY
• OpenOffice Works great for reviewing etc. However most companies I work with use templates based on the MS office suite for reports, memos, etc. The right version always comes with the PC…

The complete set of applications can be found here.

Experience

When I started using Portable Apps it was installed on the first available USB stick. Which turned out to have a USB 1.1 controller. That was replaced very quickly with one that supported USB 2.0. This device was a few months later replaced by a USB hard drive. Both because of capacity and speed considerations. Now the external hard drive is the primary device and the (network) storage of the PCs serves as back up.
Portable Apps works on any Windows computer.Using Ubuntu you can use Wine to run it.