"Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather." John D. MacDonald. So you have found the holy grail of the OSS world and delivered the perfect OSS product. Hats off to you! But you can't stop there can you? Is the data in your OSS perfect? If it is, that's holy grail number two. But you're still…
Read More »"Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything." Napoleon Hill No matter what OSS project, or any project you start, capturing the requirements is the first place to start. The requirements help to identify the guiding vision for what you need to achieve. A project without clear requirements is like a boat…
Read More »"I can cite numerous sponsors at different places in my career that made a huge difference for me just in terms of pulling me aside and giving me a tip or some coaching." Denise Morrison. In many organisations, a project sponsor is simply the person who has the budget to approve a new project. When working on a sizeable OSS project, they need to be so…
Read More »"Reporting is not Communicating. Reporting and communicating are not the same! Sending out information has very little to do with effective communication" Lynda Bourne on Project Accelerator News Communication is a fundamental part of delivering (or operating) an OSS because so many people are impacted. Status reports can be a useful repository of information during project delivery. It should be clearly noted that they are a…
Read More »"The shorter way to do many things is to do only one thing at a time." Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart In his book, Developing the Leader Within You, John C Maxwell tells the story of a young and talented concert pianist as follows: "She was asked the secret to her success. She replied, “Planned neglect.” Then she explained, “When I was in music school, there were many…
Read More »"There are two kinds of learning: experience, which is gained from your own mistakes, and wisdom, which is learned from the mistakes of others" John C. Maxwell When working on any OSS project, there are plenty of experiences to be gained. ;) But where does your wisdom come from? In what forums do you learn from others? Who do you learn from? I try to have…
Read More »"Professional sports is a business." Lynn Swann The above is true, but is there also a lot that business can learn from professional sports? With most professional sports, there is a clear goal for every team, the championship at the end of each season. This defines the vision that all players and coaches are working towards Coaches evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their playing squads…
Read More »“The best ideas have most of these traits: They are simple, core messages; they are unexpected; they are concrete, credible, and emotional, and they are stories.” Chip and Dan Heath in Made to Stick It's no coincidence that in the millenia before writing was invented the most important parables were passed down through generations via stories because they, rather than facts or figures, are the mechanism…
Read More »"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do." Eleanor Roosevelt A high percentage of the population has a fear of change - made up of their constituent fears including fear of the unknown, fear of failure, fear of loss, fear of leaving a…
Read More »"You can cultivate optimism by.... Remaining up-beat even when you're beaten up" John C. Maxwell in Failing Forward. Any significant OctopOSS project will find a way of beating you up somewhere along the way. Working with small teams on international projects, away from the support network of home, it was obvious to me that the team members who were able to remain up-beat were of enormous…
Read More »"We need to invest in a way that makes sure we've got the workforce we need in the future." Jeanne Shaheen Workforce management is the tool/s by which discrete CSP tasks are tracked and managed. For example, when creating a new customer order, the following separate pieces of a sample end-to-end order process might all be handled by different staff: The Procurement Team need to order a…
Read More »"Eliminate the things that don't matter, that you're never going to get better at or that you're already good at. What's left are the places where you have the opportunity to change your position in the market." Seth Godin In many ways, the quote above holds true for whether you're a vendor, a CSP or an individual. As an individual or organisation alike if you narrow…
Read More »"Most consultants tend to read voraciously, seeking new ideas and insights as they emerge around the world. Because of the many dimensions of the problems we address, it is important to read both broadly and deeply." Pamela McNamara OSS technologies and techniques are constantly evolving so OSS consultants and integrators have to allocate time towards learning just to remain current. Renewal of databases, programming languages, interface…
Read More »In the State of the Asian CXO Survey 2012 by T.C Seow, there has been a clearly identified increase in corporate culture being an inhibitor of innovation. Seow speculates "that there is now conflict between senior management and the younger, so-called Generation Y executives or millennials who do not see eye-to-eye with their bosses. Perhaps there is work to be done to bridge the widening gap between…
Read More »“Sometimes, reaching out and taking someone's hand is the beginning of a journey. At other times, it is allowing another to take yours.” Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration There is an interesting trend that often occurs when a vendor implementation team begins a new OSS project. There is a tendency to start with "You NEED to...." and that's where the customer often tunes out…
Read More »The following is a true story about an art teacher who decided to experiment with his grading system. It had an interesting side-effect relating to the dilemma of quality versus quantity. David Bayles and Ted Orland document the story in their book, "Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (And Rewards) of Art making " "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing…
Read More »“I don’t subscribe to the ‘great man’ theory of the world. I’d much rather create fertile soil for other innovators to plant their seeds in than just water my own tree." Jeff Hammerbacher As the old saying goes, "There's no I in OSS Team". No matter how awesome you are or how small your OctopOSS is, or even if you are the MVP (Most Valuable Player), you're still…
Read More »"This new economy has three distinguishing characteristics: It is global. It favors intangible things—ideas, information, and relationships. And it is intensely interlinked. These three attributes produce a new type of marketplace and society, one that is rooted in ubiquitous electronic networks." Kevin Kelly in "New Rules for the New Economy" Kevin Kelly's three distinguishing characteristics of the new economy are also what gives OSS increasing power…
Read More »"Design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order." Victor Papanek One area of significant differentiation between OSS inventory systems is in their ability to model design changes. Of the many inventory management solutions that are available currently, many are able to model a single snapshot in time. However, very few are able to manage multiple design revisions (ie different snapshots in time). The traditional…
Read More »"Consultants do most of their best work live (asking questions, innovating answers) while novelists virtually never do their work live." Seth Godin This quote was from an interesting blog entry about doing it live. As discussed in the blog post, Seth compares and contrasts between live music and pre-recorded music. Pre-recorded music sells 500 times more than live music, but it's the experience of great live music that stays…
Read More »“It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.” Edward De Bono OctopOSS are complex beasts so it's very easy to dig out a negative viewpoint, focussing on the difficulties, the failures, the problems or the reasons it won't work. To borrow from Edward de Bono's seminal work of the…
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