OSS Transformation is all about managing change – organisationally, functionally and operationally during in-flight projects. This is the most commonly overlooked factor when planning OSS projects
“Moonshot thinking is about making something 10x better. This forces you to throw away the existing assumptions and create something bold and new. Reality will eat into your 10x. At the end of the process it may only be 2x, but that’s still amazing.” Brian Jansen‘s Book Summary: “Bold: How To Go Big, Create Wealth, […]
Regardless of whose estimates you read, OSS is a multi billion industry. However, based on the relatively infrequent signing of new vendor deals, it’s safe to say that only a very small percentage of those billions are ever “in play.” In other words, OSS tend to be very sticky, in part because they’re so difficult […]
Guns don’t kill people, people do. Similarly, Technology doesn’t kill OSS projects, people do… Actually people with technology do. The following shows the escalation of global CAPEX allocated by CSPs over the last thirty years (in current currency).. apart from a few brief years around the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The CAPEX uplift also represents […]
Data quality is the bane of many a telco. If the data quality is rubbish then the OSS tools effectively become rubbish too. Feedback loops are one of the most underutilised tools in a data fix arsenal. However, few people realise that there are two levels of feedback loops. There’s what I refer to as […]
Since reading the first book on this list, I’ve become a very avid and wide-ranging reader. The seeds sown by the book list below have immensely helped enrich the content you see here on the PAOSS blog and other PAOSS content. These are the books that have most inspired me or influenced my thinking. Sometimes […]
I love the fact that we’re constantly seeking incremental improvements for our OSS. However, cumulative OSS changes can be a double-edged sword, just as they can be in the cosmetic surgery industry. In both cases, these well intentioned changes can distort as readily as they can improve. Photo-collage courtesy of DailyMail.co.uk. I’ve seen OSS go […]
“Alchemy is the ancient practice of trying to turn lead into gold… alchemy was an art based partly upon experimentation and partly upon magic.” Benjamin Radford here on Live Science. The definition of alchemy is, “part science, part art,” according to Geoff Leong. To William Whewell, “In general, art has preceded science. Men have executed […]
Have you noticed all the recent headlines about the big, iconic brands in our industry struggling to make targets, cutting headcounts, etc.? This covers vendors and service providers alike. As a complete generalisation: Vendors are going backwards Traditional CSPs are going backwards Profit decline means projects and investments in OSS can only be trending downwards […]
“Forcing people to follow new rules is always an uphill battle, but getting them to buy into a concept to the point where they start contributing their own ideas can literally create a movement within an organisation.” Ken Segall. I’ve really diverted away from direct discussions about OSS in a couple of recent posts about […]
Have you ever experienced an event where you realised that you’d spent the previous 10+ years doing something wrong (or at least incomplete)? I had one such experience last Friday during a presentation by Roger Gibson, a Partner at Infosys Consulting. Now you all know that I’m a passionate spruiker of change management on OSS […]
Let’s say you act for a service provider and the diagram below represents the number of variations you could offer to customers – the number that are technically supported by your solution. That’s 13,824,000 colours. By comparison, the following diagram contains just 20 colours: If I asked you what colours are in the upper diagram, […]
“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Eric S. Raymond, whose quote is now known as Linus’ Law in honour of Linus Torvalds. In other words, if you have enough people looking at the code, someone will surely categorise the problem and then the community will also figure out a way to solve it. The […]
Have you ever noticed that almost every person who works in OSS is extremely clever? No? They may not know the stuff that you know or even talk in the same terminologies that you and your peers use, but chances are they also know lots of stuff that you don’t. OSS sets a very high […]
I recently saw the advertisement below: I’ve clipped only the last 10 seconds because that was the part that struck me. The ad is for BHP*, one of the world’s largest miners. The mining industry thinks in long-term projects because it takes many years to deliver results – for exploration, planning, approvals, for the infrastructure […]
“Think war. Extreme times call for extreme measures. When your ideas are facing life or death, that’s an extreme time. Like a soldier in battle, you can’t even afford to suffer a single hit – so make sure you hit first. Pull out all stops. Remember, when your idea’s life is on the line, the […]
Many years ago I worked on a three-way project with 1) a customer, 2) a well-known equipment vendor and 3) a service provider (my client). Time-frames were particularly tight, not so much because of the technical challenge, but because of the bureaucratic processes of the customer and the service provider. The project was worth well […]
“You have to love being incompetent in order to be competent.” James Altucher. Not sure that anyone loves feeling incompetent, but James’ quote is particularly relevant in the world of OSS. There are always so many changes underway that you’re constantly taken out of your comfort zone. But the question becomes how do you overcome […]
The following extract from Ken Segall’s book, “Insanely Simple,” provides a great story on persuasion: “At one agency meeting with Steve Jobs, we were reviewing the content of a proposed iMac commercial when a debate arose about how much we should say in the commercial. The creative team was arguing that it would work best […]
As recently discussed with two friends and colleagues, Raman and Darko, Proofs of Concept (PoC) or Minimum Viable Product (MVP) implementations can be a double-edged sword. By building something without fully knowing the end-game, you are potentially building tech-debt that may be very difficult to work around without massive (or complete) overhaul of what you’ve […]
OSS business case evaluators routinely ask many questions that relate to key metrics like return on investment, capital to be outlaid, expected returns, return on investment, and more of the same circular financial questions. 🙂 They do also ask a few technical questions to decide risk – of doing the project or not doing the […]
