Jun 22, 2008 TechRead Read

Uncommon Sense: Out of the box thinking for an in the box world

Peter Cochrane's Uncommon Sense is an interesting collection of opinion pieces taken from his silicom.com blog through to around 2004. While you can read much of the material (and catch later articles) in his blog archives, the book does enhance the content will a liberal scattering of charts and also some additional commentary. Some of the topics are evergreen, such as the failures of the education system, and the gap that often exists between the actual and the perceived in conventional wisdom. Some are specific to a point in time, like his pre-occupation with the 3G bandwidth auction debacle. Certainly worth grabbing a copy for a thought provoking read, and ample encouragement to add his blog to my reader for continued entertainment. Cochrane also has a nice practice of introducing many of his articles with a related quote. One of my favourites is from Douglas Adams: Technology is the name we give to stuff that doesn't work properly yet.

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Jun 18, 2008 Singapore

Looking down your tailpipe from level 56

The RSAF Black Knights got the nod to perform at this years National Day celebrations, which means aerobatics between the buildings in the CBD. Yeehaw!


Now, I've been in Singapore long enough to know that NDP celebration preparations are taken seriously, and you never have less than 4 practices of anything (including fireworks, to everyone's great enjoyment).

So with about two months to go, its seems the RSAF have started daily practice flying around the city. From my desk on level 56, I get a stunning view of the F-16s fly by at arms reach and then get thrown into a 180 degree climb. Stunning.

Looking forward to the next two months of this. Oh, and NDP itself;-)
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Jun 17, 2008 Innovation Product Management

Doing one thing at a time

James Shore discussed Agile Release Planning on this recent PM podcast, and it was refreshing to hear the benefits of agile pitched to a product management audience.

Like the best ideas, the tenets of agile appear almost too simple to be true. "Master of the bleeding obvious" Basil Fawlty would say. Yet most organisations seem structurally incapable of behaving along these lines.

James' presentation is very entertaining, and well worth a listen. He keeps the agenda short and well tuned to a PM audience. Although the ideas are born from a software environment, they are largely transferable to other domains. A discussion of five concepts to help you increase the value you deliver in business:

• Work on one project at a time .. it improves your ROI


• Release early and often .. get to market faster with a minimum, but valuable feature-set. Not only do you get to take advantage of the real customer voice sooner, but, again, better ROI.


• Adapt your plans .. to slavishly avoid change is to confound the opportunity to increase the value of your work as new things are learned along the way


• Conduct experiments .. your project can have many outcomes, and you will never know which is best unless you test options, collect data, and analyse


• Plan at the last responsible moment .. avoid costly planning that is basically trying to predict the future (unsuccessfully). The later the decision, the more information you will have available to make a good decision.

The one project at a time struck a chord with me, as I've recently been campaigning in a minor way along these lines. The classic "proof" is the positive impact it can have on ROI if you allow appropriately sized teams to focus on one thing at a time. This is of course in addition to any productivity benefits you get from avoiding task switching, and giving people the chance to get into a flow state.

Here's my version of the graphic to illustrate the point:


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Jun 16, 2008 Singapore TechRead Read

bookjetty - a great new site to track, share, buy and borrow books

I've fallen in love with bookjetty, a great new site for books by Herryanto Siatono.

Although this blog is officially dedicated to prata (and always will be!), you can tell I use it to keep a diary of the books I'm reading. I probably always will, but I do try out all the "book tracking" sites, facebook apps and so on that I come across.

None have really jiggled my worm until I discovered bookjetty.

The killer feature for me is the great library integration on the site. It helps answer all the usual questions I have whenever I hear about a new book..

• Have I already got it or read it before?


• Does one of my friends have it? Maybe I can borrow it..


• Can I get it from the local library?


• Can I buy it online?


• (oh, and if the last two steps fail, I may actually visit a real bookstore!)

The library catalogue checks work a treat - right within your booklist. I used this feature yesterday as I knew I would be heading to the library. Within 5 minutes on bookjetty I had added a few books I'd been interested in reading and found out that 3 of them were available and on the shelf at my local library. An hour later, I had them checked out.

The bookjetty developer(s?) have done a great job of integrating the libraries, especially considering that most are still running archaic web 0.1 systems which are not very mashup friendly. I've posted before about a kludge to do library lookups from an amazon page, but it never works very reliably because of the dumb library catalogue it needs to talk to, so I can appreciate some of the challenges they may have had.

And here's an example of how the library checks appear...


If you are into books, I heartily recommend you go and register at bookjetty and check it out!
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