“Customer focus”, and “customer centricity” are certainly very desirable traits for pretty much any business these days. With their growing popularity, the idea of “internal customers” has become mainstream. However, I have come to the conclusion that the “internal customer” concept self-deceptive. It avoids questioning some fundamental organizational beliefs. And in turn it avoids fundamental …
Author Archives: Marc R. Lehmann
Another look at the Third Ideal
In a recent blog post, I explained how I ran monte carlo simulations on development projects in an attempt to underpin the ideal of “Improvement of Daily Work”. The simulations suggest that debt is the main factor killing all the projects that did not succeed. The mentioned post also brought up a lot of open …
A view from Monte Carlo on the Third Ideal
Intending to underpin the relevance of “improvement of daily work”, I simulated a couple 100’000 years of development projects on my computer (487’462 years1, to be exact) in an attempt to combine ideas from two books: The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim et al, and Fooled by randomness by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. This led me …
Continue reading “A view from Monte Carlo on the Third Ideal”
Fallacies of Effort Tracking
The discussions around tracking effort for work items of any kind in (new) product development seems to never cease. In this article, I try to lay out why tracking effort is likely a waste of time that does not help your product in any way.
Agile Planning and the Weather Trap
I talk to plenty of people struggling with the idea of planning in an agile environment. It seems hard to get the balance between not planning at all and planning on a level of detail that requires to take all sorts of assumptions concerning a relatively unknown future. A while ago, I did plan for …
Marc's Thought Nuggets 