Latest posts
-
From Engineering to Intelligence: How CPTOs Must Adapt in the AI Era
For most of the last two decades, the arc of technology leadership has been clear: build reliable systems, scale them, keep them secure and resilient, and ensure the product vision is tethered to engineering reality. But the rise of AI has bent that into something much less predictable. Organisations are discovering that the shift from…
-
The New Technical Debt: Unmaintainable or Misused AI Models
Technical debt used to be easy to spot. You could walk into a development team and see it in the codebase, the lack of tests, or the patchwork of quick fixes that no one wanted to touch. It had a smell to it. You knew that every release took longer, and every new feature came…
-
The Platform Dilemma: When small services businesses outgrow their own systems
After more than three decades advising and leading technology and product teams across sectors from Telecoms to Healthcare, I’ve seen a familiar story unfold time and again—particularly in smaller services-based businesses. It starts with a team building their own bespoke system, perhaps as a natural extension of their service model or out of necessity. What…
-
A good plan for the future can make or break your Technical Due Diligence
When private equity firms evaluate a company for investment, understanding the company’s future plans is a vital part of the Technical Due Diligence (TDD) process. Investors are not just interested in the present state of the company but regard both the future plans, and the structure that surrounds them, as critical parts of the investment…
-
Just what is Technical Debt?
Technical debt refers to the additional work and future costs that arise when a company opts for a quick, easy solution now instead of a more efficient and long-term approach. It’s like taking a shortcut that saves time initially but requires more effort to fix later. Technical debt can accumulate in various forms, such as…
-
It’s all about the velocity isn’t it?
In a word, no. Velocity has been a core metric for Scrum based projects since its inception in 1995. Organisations like it because it’s a quantifiable figure, and one that can be measured over time. But it has problems, it has a lot of problems. “Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare…
-
Scrum: It’s supposed to be simple
How difficult have we made it? If you go to the agile manifesto website, the manifesto itself is articulated in clear and succinct terms. Individuals and interactions over processes and toolsWorking software over comprehensive documentationCustomer collaboration over contract negotiationResponding to change over following a plan Just below this there’s another paragraph, which is often overlooked. That is, while there is…
-
Unpicking spaghetti
Why is software governance complex? We’ve talked about the three gates of software development and why organisations make this more complex, but why is it more complex? Why can’t we fix it? Understand the complexity The first reason things become complex in organisations is “scale”. Simply put, while a startup might be able to concentrate all…
-
3 gates for Software Development
It doesn’t matter whether you use Waterfall or Scrum, or XP, or any other methodology; there are three and only three gates in the process of creating software. The first is the “Idea” gate. At this stage what we’re trying to do is to understand if we should actually build the thing that we’re talking…