Part of the Process

Doing background desk research for my final MSc project and I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole. It started with looking at the different industry bodies that look after computing fields. I have been a member of the  British Computer Society (BCS) for a number of years, mainly because of their Project Management group and local branch meetings. But they are lagging a bit on modern development practices and roles, such as Product Management. Although they do have a Digital Product Management book coming out later this year! This got me to looking at associations that specifically support product roles, and building a " body of knowledge " like the project management world has. I found quite a few out there, and some names I had seen in academic research started popping up. I also fell down a rabbit hole in terms of the difference between a certificate and certification ! I have joined a couple, and ordered copies of all of the "bodies of knowledge" books I can since ...

Last week was the briefing webinar for the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar. Like many of us, this was the first time they had gone through a process remotely which appeared as the pun/theme "the elephant in the zoom". It is interesting to hear from experts in specific technology areas discuss the latest trends and techniques. This time I was struck by the story behind how the Tech Radar came about.  It didn't start as a external "thought leadership" or sales device, It was a reaction to business growth and internal knowledge management issues. I think it's the bi-directional process of the teams feeding in the ideas, the advisory board then collating and debating them to pull out patterns and asses the different maturity levels makes it powerful. Also this is based on actual experience from their projects, rather than desk analysis that you might get from a report like Gartners. They also offer advice on how to make your own , which is great to get people sha...

Photo by  rawpixel  on  Unsplash My journey with writing new R scripts had taken a bit of break recently. It started with exploring Text-mining. Then creating my library of reports for Product Management . Although R takes a bit of getting used to, it is like Excel x100 once you do. It is great for repeatable analysis and report generation. Saving a lot of the hassle of the export, format, and save cycle that I was going through. The problem When I needed a new report though I took the chance to expand my skills. I wanted an automated report that showed progress in the product process. This was to show the pipeline to meet strategic goals in the product ideas worked on. This should be in a suitable format to share with senior management. An be understandable especially to those outside the Product team. The solution I had been manually noting figures from the ProdPad UI when I remembered that there was an API. I took a look and it is a nice RESTful API ...

Hobbies are a great way to relax and unwind from work. They are also an excellent opportunity to practice some skills and learn about yourself.  Photography shows a clear visual representation of how practice with tools can improve output . Running I have found has taught me a couple of lessons about performance and motivation. Here are my top four Goals are important   An arbitrary goal, doesn't fit in any plan but I feel good Yes, even arbitrary goals . As long as they have a narrative that you can use as a guide. They provide a sense of progress and small achievements to celebrate.  For example as an individual runner, it makes no real difference to my life running 10km just under an hour. Or a bit faster at 51 minutes. But the difference in the sense of pride and achievement in my progress was real.  Your environment matters Periodically I pause from running then have to restart. Sometimes this also involved a house move and I need to find a new r...

Once you have the results from the spike you are ready to start the project. That will develop the excellent feature or product from your roadmap . How the actual project then starts can have a massive effect on the results. On that topic "Project startup. Is there an art to getting it right?" was subject in the BCS PROMS-G Spring School in 2015. One session I enjoyed was   Project Start-up - Acknowledging the Outside World . Here two members of the National Audit Office (NAO) shared observations from reviews of large projects.  Often problems in government projects are as a result of issues at the project start. They estimate that around 75% projects late/over budget. So, £300bn of tax payers money at risk (seems to be cycle where much better in election years before going up ;) The NAO approach has been to pay more attention to major projects. Looking at value for money and delivering, rather than just cutting costs. Alison and Grace then talked about the report "...

online - simplify decision making So you've got g reat new idea s but you need to decide on what to do next. In most c onsumer product development where there is a volume of (potential) users, e.g. a popular public service such as Facebook or Amazon, this is relatively easy as you can go through an MVP process, do some lean startup experiments or even run some A/B test and make changes.  B2B product management doesn't have quite the same volume of usage or "want" being a driver, for example a SaaS platform about coordinating snow ploughs won't be able to gain much more usage during the summer months. With this in mind I am going to take a look at five things I've read this month and pick a key idea from each to build up a toolbox that can be applied. Ask the right questions , onc e we know we are solving the right problem then we are off to a good start. Keeping the bias out of questions and using techniques such as conjoint analysis to find ...

Photo of Bellagio by me Bit of a parable about chasing silver bullets ... I have been a keen photographer since mid-2008 when I got my first SLR. Since then I have taken tens of thousands of photos, practising my technique and getting used to the tools available - for example natural light, flashes or particular lenses. Most of these photos never see the light of day and get written off as I don't like them for some reason or other, but I can't bring myself to delete them and every now and again go back and look to see what I can salvage. Each time I then fall into the trap of Gear Acquisition Syndrome ! I have been doing that recently and looking at what themes I can find in my photos and how they can be edited to fit in a series - at the same time as pricing up the latest Fuji X-T10. This time there are a couple of photos that have not only gone from the "nah" pile, but are now being shared on the Internet with other people! So, what has changed? ... The...

Waiter - B1 by Hartwig HKD If the previous episode that I shared was like a case study for my working life, the this one was like living this blog post on Gross Incompetence Implies Bad Intentions . We began the trip after an early start and arrived after 10hour flight (+5 hour time difference to add to the tiredness!) to find the room "not available" (later find due to problem rather than late checkout of previous guest). A meal was offered at this point on the hotel, but frankly with a body clock all over the place and constant grazing on an long haul flight really not needed. Betsy, the Lady from customer service then made it her mission to make up for various things going wrong, starting with catching us at the bar and converting our free meal into the mojitos and chips (fries) that we had after the complimentary "Welcome Cocktail". I'm not sure which room we should have had, but we ended up in a senior suite that although tired looking had a grea...