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
I’ve been seeing a lot of references to continual development methodologies lately (ie references to agile, DevOps, CI/CD, etc). Quotes like focus on projects rather than the mission statement, focus on products rather than projects, etc. The core principle is in chunking workload down into modular pieces that can be implemented to give flexibility and […]
“It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking, than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting.” Millard Fuller. The agile, lean documentation delivery models of today have the huge advantage of gaining momentum on OSS projects. No longer do we have the big-bang cutovers, but we start […]
“The truth is that whale-sized companies would love to do business with smaller suppliers. The relationship is more immediate in every way. Small suppliers can deliver goods more quickly than larger ones. It’s much easier to get the CEO of a small supplier on the phone for discussion of the transactions. Small suppliers are more […]
Here’s a tip for you to try on your next OSS project: Instead of building a behemoth OSS with a million contributors (and a million opinions), stand up something simple (but meaningful) quickly and let word of mouth draw others in. It’s a technique I’ve helped implement in some very “democratic” decision-making environments, environments where […]
Many telcos around the world have a sometimes subtle, sometimes not, turf-war going on between networks / operations and IT groups. Virtualisation of the network potentially amplifies this because it increases the scope of possible overlap. As described in yesterday’s “Noah’s Ark of OSS success,” one of the ways of improving the success of an […]
Gartner’s magic quadrant for OSS is often used by organisations as a proxy for determining a short-list from the hundreds (thousands?) of OSS products available on the market. I’ve even heard of executives from tier-one telcos issuing directives that their short-list should consist of the top right corner of Gartner’s OSS Magic Quadrant (the Leaders […]
“Sometimes designing is very tempting; sometimes not designing is the answer. Often silence is required instead of shouting.” Karres en Brands. It’s said that when presenting a lecture, the softly spoken have more chance of reaching an audience than the classical loud extrovert. The theory goes that if a voice is barely audible, the listener […]
“The design not only determines uses, it’s also determined by users.” Karres en Brands. Designing an OSS, or updating the design of an existing one, can be challenging for the reason that user experience is so subjective. You think your design is practical, intuitive, elegant and simple, but others may have a vastly different opinion. […]
Success leaves footprints… and so does failure. This statement is probably true in any field but especially so in OSS. One of the reasons I follow the OSS industry so closely is because I’m always on the lookout for clues. Clues that track both sets of footprints to understand why. An organisation that consistently gets […]
The first step of the Design Thinking methodology is emphathising (aka getting to know your customers). For some OSS vendors, they overlook this step assuming that they know what the customers want. Similarly for an internal project, the project team will act as the proxy on behalf of a large group of OSS users without […]
“You’re the example that can create light. Don’t try to talk people into the light. Be the light.” James Altucher. One of the things I love about OSS is that there are so many opportunities for improvement. Tools, techniques and models are all jumping forward in leaps and bounds but there is still so much […]
“All the technological change in the telecoms industry is pointing towards a more final and ultimate change, the death of the old “telco” carrier model we have known for the past few decades. We have known it is coming but the last vestiges will be swept away in 2017. All telcos will finally abandon “telco” […]
“I first came across the phrase “strong convictions, weakly held” through Marc Andreessen, but a bit of Googling showed me it was originally coined by Paul Saffo, then Director of the Palo Alto Institute for the Future. According to this post he advised his people to think this way for three reasons: •It is the […]
“Chris Bradley: You had these contests as the smoker between your current self that loved that next cigarette and your future self that didn’t want to live with the consequences of many years of smoking and knew that once you were actually out of that vicious cycle of smoking you would actually be happier. Angus […]
For those of us in the technology consulting game, we think we’re pretty clever at predicting the next big technology trend. But with the proliferation of information over the Internet, it’s not that difficult to see potentially beneficial technologies coming over the horizon. We can all see network virtualisation, Internet-connected sensor networks, artificial intelligence, etc […]
Have you noticed how the curves we’re dealing with in the service provider industry are either falling off a cliff (eg voice revenues) or going to the sky (eg theoretical exponential growth like IoE)? Here in the OSS industry, we’re stuck in the middle of these two trend curves too. Falling revenues mean reduced appetite […]
A funny thing happened today. I was looking for a reference to Marc Andreessen’s original, “software is eating the world,” quote and came across an article on TechCrunch that expressed many of the same thoughts I was going to write about. However, it doesn’t specifically cover the service provider and OSS industries so I’ll push […]
The first step of simplification (exiting legacy), be it systems, processes, products, is to know who/what is still using the old thing. Are the users internal (eg admins), external (eg customers) or are the transactions M2M (machine-to-machine)? If M2M, which machines and what are the transactions? This information becomes important for change management (eg transition […]
Blogs from the last two days have covered the dilemma of dynamic operating procedures and why the standard operating procedures of the past are perhaps too idealistic a concept. Despite this, I still try to build repeatability into the various aspects of OSS delivery – initial installation, documentation, demonstrations, training, testing (and regression testing), etc. […]
Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) have been pivotal in codifying and standardising the use cases of service providers for many years. The theory goes that if you can standardise a process, then you can produce repeatably high quality and streamline it in a cycle of continual improvement. The repeatability objective is one* of two primary recollections […]
