"The problem is we build on the assumption that we should not fail, not the assumption that we are bound to fail, but with early detection and fast recovery/exploitation we can turn the situation to our advantage. That means organisational structures that are agile before the crisis, not bureaucratic. It means network connections built and sustained in advance, the ability to delegate power when needed without complex process."

Some nice food for thought about what software Kanban might be.

While I am not particularly a user of Facebook, nevertheless I am interested in how it might have come so far. The overall catch phrase of the presentation of People Times Process is certainly not something I'd take issue with.

Organizations - well, people, since orgs are just the people in them in some sense - seem to have a big problem realizing how fubar they are. An analogy I like to use is your local (at least in the USA) public transportation system.

Most likely, it frankly sucks. For example, the schedules suck, especially if you are doing any transfers in the system, and doubly especially if you are doing any transfers among systems.

Yet if you ever see the maintenance yard for the stuff, or the control room, or the computers, or whatever, it actually probably could almost seem impressive. We've got all these buses/trains/computers/whatever here! Surely they can zip out and cover the place well and lead to happy fun commute times! And yet obviously that possibly fancy looking infrastructure that seems so ripe with potential when seen in aggregate almost utterly fails to translate into something that really really really meets and oversatisfies the end user.

Sure, this is partially just a matter of not realizing how big the lay of the land to be serviced is. Sure, it is perhaps due to not thinking about all the real intricacies of multiple lines, lots of people, limited hardware, the need for overcapacity for fail-over, the damage of knock-on effects, yadda.

But the point is that if you aren't the end user and you are instead somebody looking at the infrastructure, you can easily totally underestimate just how much it totally freaking sucks to be the end user.

Agile vs. Waterfall, oy veh

People who aren't, for whatever reasons, already bought in to Agile will be asking you why they should do agile. One way of looking at it is, wouldn't Waterfall clearly suck? So at least go for the lesser of the two evils :-0

P.S. yes, I am using 'waterfall' in the colloquial pejorative sense vs. the actual sense (go see Leprechauns of Software).

Cognitive Dimensions

A good designer presumably knows how to talk about usability at a higher level. A particular attempt at codifying that higher level is Cognitive Dimensions, sort worth musing over.

Managing the Design Factory was, i thought, very good. It succinctly and clearly gives one the lay of the land. It starts by taking the perspective that everything costs money, and the Design Factory should be aware of this and should look at the bottom line as much as anything else. Then it goes through the ideas, models, metrics, systems, organizations, architectures, customer interactions, et. al. that the author sees as crucial to respecting that bottom line. Not just in the sense of making things on the cheap, but trying to make something terrific for the customer yet affordable and respectful of the people doing the work all along the way.