Technorati Tags: BenefitsManagement, Books, GeraldBradley

Who could resist a book subtitled “A Complete Guide to the Laws of The Universe”?

If you didn’t know that the author was Roger Penrose, you could be forgiven for assuming that The Road to Reality was one of the very many quasi-scientific, faith-based, wild-eyed polemics that appear each year under increasingly garish covers, but instead this tome sets out to be a comprehensive account of the physical universe and the essentials of its underlying mathematical theory.

Daunting? Absolutely. Weighing in at 1.4kg and 1100 pages the physical presence of this book sets a certain level of expectation. Beyond that, there’s no doubt about it, this book contains mathematics, lots of it. That in itself will put a lot of people off, as the author notes in the preface:

The reader will find that in this book I have not shied away from presenting mathematical formulae, despite dire warnings of the severe reduction in readership this will entail. I have thought seriously about this question, and have come to the conclusion that what I have to say cannot reasonably be conveyed without a certain amount of mathematical notation and the exploration of genuine mathematical concepts.

Yes, mathematics. Tricky one that. At school it was one of my favourite subjects, but somehow by the end of an engineering degree it was a subject that had carried on inexorably past the limits of my interest and ability. In engineering terms the sheer fun of making early micro-processors jump through hoops was more appealing, and away from the lecture-room and lab my technical nous was finding more practical applications in the challenge of applying sound and light to actors and musicians (with a healthy grounding in the social skills of working in teams and dealing with non-technical people thrown in for good measure!).

So why have I just invested full list price in such a book? Interest, yes, but also a sense of challenge, a feeling that maybe I could get to grips again with the mathematical, maybe, indeed, that I should re-capture the knowledge that I took so long to acquire a quarter of a century ago. I think there’s another root too – last year I attended a business strategy course that was heaviliy influenced by game theory. One of the other delegates was a professor of engineering from one of the best engineering faculties in the UK who, over coffee, waxed lyrical about the underlying mathematics (which the course had avoided) and how the same approach was used all the time in the design of complex control systems. Even though I didn’t know it then, at that moment, I think I was re-infected with some of that curiousity, and the first expression has been the serendipitous contact with this book in a 10 minute bookshop-browse snatched at the end of a mundane shopping trip.

Will I stick with it? Good question. I’ve just finished Chapter 2 which has skated lightly over the surface of Euclidean and hyperbolic geometries, and already I feel I am reading things of which I have no conscious memory (maths at my school was the so-called “New Mathematics”, so I’m not sure we ever touched anything so prosaic as geometry…). This is a book for digesting in small bites, and I know my track-record of grasshopper-brained bricolage is not necessarily the most obvious approach to this feast, but we shall see…

Technorati Tags: Books, Mathematics, Science

Just got around to reading Blink. It’s a quick read – as usual with Gladwell the book’s central theme, the human ability to make almost instant decisions based on the unconscious mind and previously-acquired experience, is presented lucidly and with plenty of examples.
He structures the book in three broad areas:

• Evidence of human ability to make accurate decisions very quickly – faster than conscious thought
• The strengths and weaknesses this gives us
• Ways to develop skill and improve the accuracy of your instant impressions

Although Gladwell includes notes on sources, my frustration with books like this is that they only present one side of the argument, in favour of the core theory, and don’t really explore what else may be going on. However as an entertainment with a basis in science it’s a fun way to spend a couple of hours, and a good source of anecdotes to recycle in a “did you know” sort of way.

Technorati Tags: Books, Malcolm-Gladwell, Psychology

• Strategy Maps
• Working in the Twenty-First Century
• Proactive Risk Management: Controlling Uncertainty in Product Development
• Co-opetition
• Competing for the Future
• Thinking Strategically
• Competitive Advantage

Technorati Tags: Books

Unlike the previous books in my strategy reading which have focused on the [bliki]Game Theory[/bliki] approach to strategy, this book is more aligned to the core competence / resource-based view of the firm.

Strategy Maps are a visual way of drawing out the cause-and-effect relationships between the strategic success factors of a company, the internal goals that lead to them, the internal strengths that contribute to those goals and the necessary tangible and intangible infrastructure needed to develop those strengths. The authors bring in their earlier work on the [bliki]Balanced Scorecard[/bliki] by suggesting the map is stratified along the balanced scorecard axes of Financial, Customer, Internal and People/Knowledge factors.

My short-term goal is to look for a way to combine this approach with some elements of [bliki]Enterprise Architecture[/bliki] to create a pragmatic model for building strategic systems development plans.

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Proactive Risk Management, Controlling Uncertainty in Product Development
by Preston G. Smith and Guy M. Merritt

Technorati Tags: Books, Project_Management

The market-focused, competitive advantage approach of Michael Porter:

The resource-based view of the firm, typified by Hamel and Prahalad:

The game theory approach described by Dixit and Nalebuff:

and then popularised by by Brandenburger and Nalebuff:

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Technorati Tags: Books, Philosophy, Science

*Chapter 3 – Decide As Late As Possible*

* Concurrent development – the importance of both knowledge and collaboration.
* Cost escalation curves for changes – the old “exponential” model for increasing cost of late change really only applies to critical constraints (e.g. major technical architecture decisions)
* Use “breadth first” approach for the major constraints – for other aspects defer decision as long as possible through iterative development
* Importance of keeping options open until “last responsible moment”
* Share information early – don’t wait for it to be “complete”
* Direct worker-to-worker collaboration
* Learn how to deal with change
* Breadth-first decision making works best when business domain is evolving
* Simple rules allow robust and flexible response to real-world variation

Mindmap: JPEG [110kb], MindManager

Technorati Tags: Books, Software_Development

Chapter 2 – Amplify Learning

The problems solved by software do not have “right” answers, rather it is a case of seeking to reduce uncertainty as the project progresses – uncertainty about customer requirements, uncertainty about technology. Software development is therefore a process of learning and like all learning inherently cyclical.

The tools introduced in this chapter are primarily about adopting maximising opportunities for learning, enhancing communication between the people who understand different parts of the problem domain and allowing solutions to emerge that meet the needs of all stakeholders.

An iteration should be considered a demonstration of a possible solution; it should not be considered an only solution [...] As iterations progress and more choices are made, the design space should be gradually narrowed

Tool 3 – Feedback
Tool 4 – Iterations
Tool 5 – Synchronisation
Tool 6 – Set-based Development

Reading this chapter I was struck by the importance of trust between all stakeholders – I’m looking forward to see how that might be dealt with when they discuss teams, committment, motivation and contracting issues…

Mindmap: JPEG [155kb], MindManager

Updated 2003-10-13
Re-reading the chapter, and as the result of a couple of real-life project conversations that have happened since the original entry, I’ve realised the importance of the concept of variable scope. In the book the Poppendiecks cite ROI, It’s your job [PDF 716kb] by Jim Johnson of The Standish Group. In that document Johnson refers to a study of over 35,000 application development projects which found that in a typical system 45 percent of features are never used and 19 percent are rarely used

The Poppendiecks note (p32):

Since customers often don’t know exactly what they want at the beginning of a project, they tend to ask for everything they think they might need, especially if they think they will only get one shot at it. This is one of the best ways we know to increase the scope of a project well beyond what is necessary to accomplish the project’s overall mission. [...] If you let customers ask only for their highest priority features, deliver them quickly, then ask for the next highest priority, you are more likely to get short lists of what is important. [...] This approach to project management may seem to lead to unpredictable results, but quite the opposite is true. Once a track record of delivering working software is established it is easy to project how much work will be done in each iteration [...] by tracking the team velocity you can forecast from past work how much work will probably be done in the future.

Technorati Tags: Books, Software_Development