Tag: Customer focus

  • You must transform to the future of work!! – or do you…?

    You must transform to the future of work!! – or do you…?

    AND I CAN SHOW YOU HOW!! – or can I?

    The trend is strong, there is a career advisor (or COACH – how I have come to dislike this word more and more) behind every corner, eager to sell you his or her advice. The only thing that seem to differ is the price tag – some are selling a fairly cheap bullet list for you to check, step by step, and thy future shall be bright and prosperous. Others sell qualified courses and programs for more or less hefty sums which in themselves can act as a strong motivator for you to actually do something for yourself, eg. for gods sake, use the expensive toolbox you just bought. And of course, there is a myriad of levels and variants in between these extremes.

    I must emphasize that I have the deepest respect for these people (well, most of them) that are getting themselves out of their comfort zones, and I think it is fascinating how many of them who seem to succeed (of course, the less successful majority is sorted out by the algorithms, but anyway, er).

    The pattern I see in this I find interesting, but it’s nothing new. It is that business areas that are the most prosperous ones are those which are selling hope. We have entered at stage in history (yet again maybe) where the pot filled with gold at the end of the rainbow is the most grateful or easy thing to start selling, which means that being a coach who sells prosperity recipes becomes some sort of meta-coaching, since supporting the marketeers marketing is very common these days when every one needs to (or do they?) start their own business, thus being in the need for advice, right?

    This pattern is common in dire times with lay-offs and distrust in growth forecasts, and it is probably virtously reinforced by the SoMe penetration into our very genomes.

    My problem in this, without making this to a cry baby post, is that I am doing my thing in a high-competition market, where thousands and thousands of skilled people are offering the same thing as me – high-end (er…) consulting services, preferably to more or less large public adminstrations and private enterprises, and this market is owned by them brokers who are offering their customers a filter function in order to push prices down and to cut a nice commission on just being a – broker.
    This, in combination with me having my imposter syndrome, and a not clearly niched competence profile. makes it hard find someone who actually can give me a clear path ahead where I can get prosperous and get an even and nicely leveled revenue stream. So, my analysis of the flourishing coaching market is: it’s not for every one, it’s more for the seller than the buyer, and I’m not one of these.

    Another problem I have with this is a severe bias towards doubt when it comes to salability – my thoughts most often revolves around “nobody can buy that, so stupid can’t anyone be“, about offerings I stumble over, but the fact remains – people buy crap, and they’re happy with it! So why shouldn’t I be able to sell my own value, but towards totally different markets and through totally different channels I’m used to?

    THAT is my challenge ahead, and now I have time to do something about it, before I pop out in a new period of fighting for a (too poorly) paid assignment. I must just find out how my track record can be converted into an offer you can’t refuse, owned by me, giving you maximum value. Time for a change, and to actually start doing it. Stay tuned.

  • The ‘start from a blank paper’ curse

    The ‘start from a blank paper’ curse

    It aint what you might believe at first – a super-trendy writing about how to start blogging. It’s far more boring than that. This piece could also be headlined with something like “How to overcome the lingual glitch between IT and the rest” (though I realize I don’t have any clear answers, after reviewing this mess).

    This reasoning might seem a bit over-due, old school or even obsolete in the era of furious Product-Management-with-an-agile-foundation, but it will never stop being relevant. Why? Because old truths are boring but often more persistent than we actually want them to be.

    I will elaborate on one of the most overlooked phenomena that has existed even since human started to build things that in some way does human work for her – namely managing of requirements. I find it kinda strange that this discipline so often is regarded as a certain discipline, hosted outside a production workflow och outside a development project and populated by specialists that is regarded as a really special sort of nerds. The competence field QA is also often perceived as a bit self-generating and my experience is that it often is slipping around above or around the project or maintenance teams it is supposed to be integrated in*, similar to “the process team” that makes process management a work on its own merits, often regarded as self-generating as well.

    From time to time I have been involved in discussions with business representants and in the context of trying to understands the needs and what problem they want IT to solve. Many times we have been sitting with an existing solution that fits the needs ok but not fully, and trying to improve functionality already decided and designed by a third part, the vendor of a system, may it be a cots, may it be quite a specialized product (in earlier days often named service, but product is a more popular term nowadays, yet another thing to explore in a future post…).

    A repeating thing that has showed in these contexts is that the business side often have difficulties in formulating requirements so they are easy to digest for the IT people trying to technically solve the issues. Once we took it so far that we arranged educations for the business stakeholders, eg. mostly process leaders (might today be replaced by Product Owners), where we let our very dedicated and skilled requirements analyst teach requirements management to the participants. This turned out quite well for some time (not that long that we’d wished though), and lead to a little bit deeper understanding on the business side for the need of a common language when having the specifying dialogues.

    BUT – the error I think we made then was to assume the starting point too late than what we should have** – because we didn’t explore the need for the requirement to occur in the first place. Business needs is the focal point one should start looking into instead of starting a change or request journey with trying to state a requirement that might be quite intangible if the needs aren’t clarified. I have seen agile profiles in different feeds emphasizing the need discussion, but I have never seen it being more than a fragment in the never ending flood of talk-about-how-to-work platitudes. This should be a success factor in both easing the need for translation but also a possible lever for the business side to actually take more active part in the early phase of a change tickets journey in the code-crunching machinery. It has also the potential of easing the often (always) cumbersome with prioritizing a backlog, since it should be much more obvious how needs are weighed towards each other than bad formulated user stories or features with unclear business value. It also has the potential to give a clearer definition of done, if you originate from the need instead of a lingo-feature description.

    BUT – isn’t this already what all agile how to’s and agile descriptions always have told us in DoD and DoR’s explanations??

    OF COURSE – I’m not trying to come up with some new fresh ideas here, I’m just (as always) trying to point out what already exists.

    BUT – try, just try to give a business representative the explanation of DoD found here of even DoR found here, and you will get this “do I dare to question this mumbo-jumbo without being classified as an idiot” face in return. We really do need to be able to talk about needs (and in second-hand requirements) with the business side with being so centric about the IT-side lingo which is held so dearly by too many.

    Tying the ropes:
    Regarding the headline of this post: I somehow feel that I need to get back to this in order to tie this story together. One of the most common and I guess classic mistakes organizations do when it comes to management of requirements is the silly “You just can start from a blank paper” prompt, given by IT to business. It is often ditched quite quickly, since everybody knows that they need some kind of facilitation or guiding, because the present state is needed as input value, as well as different conditions and constraints that limits what actually is possible to describe if the user story is supposed to be meaningful and valuable.

    For reference:
    The explanation of what a user story is supposed to be is actually more or less good, but often overlooked and not fully embraced (or understood, or correct interpreted) by all in the processes, making it necessary to reflect over when uncertainties are spotted.

    To be continued:
    *) The QA experts should have more of a more tangible, facilitating role in the organizations they serve than they have, since their traces most often is a trove of hard-to-answer questions in the WoW-section of the endless Confluence library – for every team to invent and solve independently.

    **) This urges me to write about the real life cycle of a change or new-feature ticket in a teams workflow. Will do this as soon as possible.

  • I posted on Apples user forum for the first time – and got refused

    I posted on Apples user forum for the first time – and got refused

    Now this is a cry baby post – this is the feedback and my post text down below. I don’t think it was that bad

    Hi MrArne, 

    Thanks for participating in the Apple Support Community.

    We’ve removed your post How I solved MacOS Sonoma and the photos library sync dilemma because it contained either feedback or a feature request that was not constructive.

    To read our terms and conditions for using the Community site, see this page:  Apple Support Community  – Terms of Use

    We hope you’ll keep using our Support Community. You can find more information about participating here:  Apple Support Community – How To Articles

    If you have comments about any of our products, we welcome your feedback:  Apple – Feedback

    We’ve included a copy of your original post below.

    Thanks,

    Apple Support Community Staff

    My post text start here:

    N.B – this is not a question, it’s a proposition – not likable by all, but who am I to judge?

    To begin with – this should actually been written down here already, but my search attempts don’t find anything similar.

    I’m on a MBP M1 Max from mid -21.

    I started this computer fresh, no TM backup installed, since I endured the Catalina Hell on my old intel machine and solved these problems in the same way as now, with full success – like now.

    To clarify my prerequisites: I’m nowadays a blind optimist, relying on cloud storage instead of local storage and Time Machine backups, so I store all my files in a somewhat ordered (?) manner on iCloud (with a grotesquely big iCloud photo Library), OneDrive and Google workspace (paid version). Oops, forgot a small portion of Box.com and some residuals on Dropbox…

    So – the only thing to actually backup is the system. I have always been a proponent of backups, but I also realize that this is so much more complicated in order to really achieve a high and reliable quality level. Those of you who think I’m a moron may do so, I simply don’t care (until I need to realize that you were right anyway, by some obvious reason you are pointing out…).

    So, to the point:

    I copied all files I found too valuable and that was stored locally manually on an external disk. I then read in Apples support pages about how to perform a fresh (re-)install of Sonoma, which is much more easy now that it was before – nowadays a little more iOS-like 😬 – you reach it from the settings menu

    After the fresh install I logged in on the computer, with my iCloud-account and all the iCloud-stuff was slowly synced to the computer. Now I have a fully functioning Photo Library – and I need to repeat these steps on my wife’s MBA M1…

    I know that this is quite crappy by Apple from a quality perspective, but it is what it is… at least there is a solution on this very annoying problem, and as so many times before I guess it’s all about file access issues, but who knows where?

    This is a send-only account. Replies received at this address are automatically deleted.

    Of course, I had some badly hidden critique against the quality of the software, but was it so bad? I will never waste my time on posting my findings there, and at least that is somewhat benficial experience.

    It is also interesting because for me it is a sign of the functional dumbness that most enterprises get more or less trapped in.