I’ve never seen a hype cycle like this one. Huge sound bites about AI — specifically, generative AI. Depending on who you ask, AI is either a helpful copilot or it’s gunning for your entire dev team’s jobs. As usual the truth is probably somewhere in between. But with so many CEOs talking up how much code AI is generating, it’s worth stepping back to ask: are they predicting the future, or selling it?
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Tag Archives: risk management
Disaster, rescue and recovery: Kickstarting delivery
70% of projects fail to deliver — and the cost is more than financial. Few broken programmes crash in a spectacular fashion. Most just quietly stall. You’ve got a roadmap. You’ve got people. You’ve got the rituals. But… nothing’s really moving. Instead you have sceptical stakeholders, wincing delivery teams, endless meetings and no actual decisions. Everyone is busy, but no one is sure what they’re delivering or why. Sound familiar? You’ve stalled.
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Contracts do not fix incompetence
“Contracts are the least powerful in getting people to do something. A contract does not fix incompetence.” Not my words, they come from Rajesh Mathur, but I completely agree.
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3 Million Pound Budget Cut! Don’t Panic and Go Look for Help
When dealing with major crisis, like the 3 million pound budget cut I faced once, the first you have you have to remember is: Don’t panic, you are not alone.
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I always work with a Technical Lead. Always
They might be called an Architect or a Tech Lead or just “Bob” but I always work closely with a senior technical person.
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Another kicking from stakeholders? Not when dispassionate and positive
“Well, we just got another kicking”. A group of us, representing technology, had just attended the regular programme board meeting with the business types. In the debrief afterwards the technology folk around me were despondent. In fact they were despondent every month after this meeting. They genuinely felt kicked. But I didn’t. I never did. It was almost like I experienced a completely different meeting to that experienced by my colleagues.
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Bucking Bronco: Software Projects that Kick
Leading software development often reminds me of what it must be like to ride a bucking bronco … with the added problem you have to go somewhere at the same time.
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You can go a long way with a Shonky User Interface
“Shonky” means poor or low quality where I come from. I realised it was a Kiwi phrase, or at least Antipodean, when I told my current UK based team to “give me a shonky user interface (UI)”. They looked puzzled, then laughed, then asked me what I meant, then laughed again, then adopted the phrase into the team vocabulary.
Aside from the entertaining aspect of my request, it does raise two questions:
- What is a Shonky UI?
- Why on earth would anybody ask for a Shonky UI?
Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Dependencies – Don’t Get Smacked in the Face
A RAID log is used for tracking Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Dependencies. To be honest I see more similarity than differences between these. They are all about threat.
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Manage All Assumptions as Risks
Assuming something means taking it for granted. In other words you’ve got a more or less conscious theory (or, less charitably, a guess) that something is going to happen. The trouble is that the assumption might not be true.
That screams risk. And as a programme manager or project manager you need to manage risk.
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