Write, writing, written

A full day of this pattern is soon to end:

Supplier management

During last week I and three very senior colleagues had an interesting e-mail discussion with regards to supplier management. Our discussion started off as a simple question related to automotive where constant improvements are made and there is a constant drift towards more proactive OEM-engineering. The question was how supplier management is affected and whether or not it is taken care of properly. Think e.g. of the difference in degrees of innovative freedom between a ”build to print” supplier and a strategic partner.

If we are doing more and more model-based development with early verification etc are we reducing the suppliers to more and more ”b-to-p” or shall we involve them even earlier? There are a lot of options with different implications; the main point is that we should make a conscious choice.

Personally I think this dynamic is really interesting and sometimes I think it is not discussed (or planned for) enough and becomes more a happening based on purchase-model.

Well the mail-dialog ended up in some really good reflections and statements, if someone is interested I think Dennis should sum them up in a presentation since the subject is too big to just fire away in a short blog-post.

Or maybe you have some good ideas and will be the second one who dares to comment on this blog? Would be huge.

No more procrastination, time to get that report on xtUML and MDA going.

What is requirements?

Just finalized my analysis on Requirements Management Systems and don’t you just love statements from tool vendors such as: 

• X will improve your quality 2x
• X will make you innovate faster by 50%

Is it just me or isn’t it promising a tad too much to say that a requirement system will make you Innovate faster?

 

Anyhow, interesting market and Doors from IBM (prev. Telelogic) still keep a firm grip of most shares it seems. RMS through thin-clients is hot, in the cloud is even hotter… but where does requirements management belong?  

 

Would you prefer the traditional setup, a “thin” setup with in-house server/web-solution or a distributed hosted service through the “cloud”?

 

Or maybe you would prefer the agile puritan’s choice - “no RMS”?

 

Ah just went back to the webpage of the tool that promised me to innovate faster and just saw that if I use their RMS I will on top of it all satisfy my customers. It’s almost too good to be true, it’s “everything out of the box” all over again.

 

Raggmunk

Lunch at the office today together with our sister company Know IT Business Consulting. Got a chance to present Technology Management and what we do/think/live/breathe - from my perspective. Always good to be forced to present what you do, makes you think… what do you actually do?

The presentation went well with some good questions and reflections that I will keep in mind ‘til next time. Technology Management is a rather interesting concept since it isn’t written in stone yet, it adapts over time as I (and my colleagues) progress and evolve. For the interested in the subject you can always travel back to the future and redo your masters at Lund University... or just ask...

The rest of the day has been quite hectic with a very deep and fast dive into requirement management systems; both traditional and more hyped cloud solutions. For the interested I should have a decent exposition of the current market trends by tomorrow.

Well, blog-break officially over, it is time to plunge back into the RMS world for a while and let an echo play my counterpart.

The consultant and the chimney sweeper

The chimney sweeper visited my house this morning; apparently I had a dead jackdaw in my chimney. The power distribution in the room when discussing my tile stove was pretty obvious; he could have been the worst chimney sweeper ever, lying through his teeth, I would still nod, say yes, and do as he said. Craftsmen often have this edge when meeting their customers; we hire them because they are awesome at something we quite frankly suck at.

Obviously (otherwise I wouldn’t write it here) this fired a process in my brain during the daily bike ride down to the office. Often when consultants are discussed they are placed in two different pigeon holes, “the resource” and “the expert”.

The resource is the consultant that “we” always claim is someone else, somehow resource has become a bit negative… even though the opposite of resource seems worse (and believe me, there are “consultants” that are anti-resources and consume more than they produce… if you ever worked with e.g. network communication you might have experienced this).

The expert is always portrayed as the correct model. The customer has a problem but, as I with my chimney, suck and need an awesome craftsman. Ok maybe a bit blunt choice of words but you get the point.

I fail to agree with this. Ok some readers will think that this is not at all how they see it, ok good for you, but I would quickly bet that plenty of people have this view of the market.

You see, the difference compared to the craftsmen is the power distribution. Our customers don’t suck; on the contrary they are often more or less experts themselves. So we must be the consultant that is able to guide the expert when necessary and execute when the customer lack time to do it on their own.

Often the customer knows a great deal with regards to the subject matter and of course their product, what we can add is:

• a new perspective
• experience from other competitors but also other domains
• a lack of political baggage in the organization and a blank “agenda”
• an energy burst and additional resource
• an ability to connect issues with different kinds of expertise

… Or sometimes we simply are better at the subject at hand.

What do you think?

A little bit of this

Board meeting with Modprod this morning and it went well. The agenda for the conference in February next year start to look really promising, ticket-system should be up and running next week. Recommend anyone interested in model-based development, or just development, to check it out.

Think I need to start Kanban myself soon as well, got a lot of different small ventures going on and successful multithreading is a must at this point otherwise I will be late with everything and become deadline, FOFI, driven (which in a sense is just-in-time so perhaps I should… …).

Oh that’s right, played an “agile” business value game together with Responsive on Wednesday evening. It was a fun exercise and definitely worth doing together with product managers, architects or just interested people. Basically you got some direct clues to the dynamics of making strategic decisions based on business value… and what that is.

Well not a lot of technical stuff today, more management. Guess next week will be more on the T side of the scale though when writing down all the juicy stuff with regards to xtUML in automotive… feel really good about this one, the 2-day crash-course-insight into Bridgepoint just added fuel to my fire.


Have a good one.

It’s Friday, if you’ve got extra time on your hands spend them on Demetri Martin, thanks TH. For his show “If I” you need a lot of extra time on those hands but it is worth it in the end, or you could just listen to him on Spotify. Because the unexamined life is not worth living. Man.

Nerdcandy

A short glimpse into ye olde programming world is like eating an awesome cake after a yearlong diet.

Currently we are modeling, traversing meta-models and writing simple model-parsers.

Getting a bit dirty is always fun, engaging and useful even if you stopped programming ages ago.

Ah the sweetness:

.select many objects from instances of O_OBJ
.for each object in objects
public class ${object.Name}{
.select many attributes related by object->O_ATTR[102]
.for each attribute in attributes
Int ${attribute.Name}
.end for
}
.end for
.emit to file “yes.txt”


And it works!

Training day 2

Just minutes left before we kick off day 2 of the xtUML/Bridgepoint training. Day 1 was really interesting and some of my ideas got confirmed and also learned new things since the tutor is approaching some areas from a different angle and perspective than I.


From my end I think model to model transformation looks really promising and the sheer fact that you can verify "UML" models through execution is nothing but pure honey.

Well off to the bakery to pick up some rolls for my peers.

A troubled reader...

... wanted to make comments but apparently of questionable nature since he wanted a cloak of invisibility shaped in the form of being unregistered.

So now I think I've been able to open the gates to Mammon and allowed comments from even the shadiest of characters.

Without the tiresome process of registration.

Fire away.

November rain

Still wet, still November, though this morning I felt awesome riding my 7 clicks to work. The Koss on, playing some sort of soundtrack to my life, and as we now thanks to Tom Rowland it is music that triggers some kind of response.

Well the chemical bro in my ears made me creative and I got some good ”uppslag” (not the kind of uppslag translated into centerfold) with regards to my Vinnova work.

I’ll see if I can play in some of those ideas as questions at the training in xtUML and Bridgepoint that will start here at the office in about 30 minutes. If you run you can make it. As you know I’ve taken a keen interest to xtUML and it will be very interesting to hear the tool vendor’s perspective as new input.

Also, strangely enough, I miss Volvo Cars a bit this morning. There is something special about setting up a large international project as we did in 05/06. Hard work, lots of travel, tons of politics and great fun (at least in retrospect 2 years later). Most of all I miss, this morning, that creative but also conflict-filled mix of cultures working with engineers and managers from different countries. Perhaps it is because I’m on a solo mission at the moment and any conflict in my “team” could be classed as some sort of delusion.

"That's what I'm talking about,
empathy. It's about as useless as the Winter Olympics ...
This February on NBC."

Monday

Sort of a Monday today. It felt like riding through a wet blanket to work this morning.

Guess the Monday feeling origins from the fact that I have a lot of interesting tasks at my table now and I have to juggle them around without losing too much focus. My main priority is the Vinnova project for automotive I’m involved in and Tuesday/Wednesday will be dedicated to a, hopefully, very interesting training session on the subject.

I also work a lot with architecture in a lean and agile context at the moment, an interesting subject that fans out and involve more than you would think. And no, not only product management which is the obvious direction to look… there’s also other implications and ideas. But since I made a promise to keep it a secret I will. For now.

Well just got an e-mail from a colleague of mine with a question regards to organizational structure and post-compile configuration files. Fun question and I think Vinnova and Architecture have to wait.

…and Maurice Jones-Drew really used his head when he stopped shy of the TD to run down the clock and deny Jets the opportunity to come back after a FG in the last play. Damn Jaguars. Damn smart players. It’s not about scoring in the moment; it’s at the right moment. Sob.

Scrum and Kanban

Here’s just a quick link to a paper written by Henrik Kniberg at Crisp… hm misspelled it Crips at first, guess they are not affiliated.

Scrum vs Kanban.

It is an easy-to-read paper which gives a good introduction to both Scrum and Kanban.

I’ve always liked the simple idea behind Kanban… but Kanban Jedi can be one of the most ridiculous titles invented and just give me a bitter after-taste of “let’s invent a title we can sell”. It’s almost as frustrating as reading headlines like “Kanban, the new Scrum”. Titles and phrases like these just diminish what comes next since they take away all credibility. Almost.

Henrik K also wrote the well-known and good paper XP from the trenches.

A day at the other office

I went to Gothenburg and the TM-HQ yesterday. First off 6 hours in the car with my co-workers Gunilla and Mats is always great, somehow we always seem to save the world during those rides (and Gunilla, don’t forget Flight of the Conchords). This trip also gave us time to go through our latest survey with regards to employee satisfaction and it seems that working with Technology Management is great fun.

As if we needed a survey to know that?

In Gothenburg we kicked off with a meeting discussing one of our business areas (focused on architecture). We made some exceptional break-troughs during that meeting. So exceptional I won’t discuss them here. Yet.
Now I just got to get down in writing what we said, fluttered about, scribbled on the board, shouted in exclamation. And so forth.

After our “office meeting + lunch” (which was as usual interesting and this time around also inspiring, at least to me) we continued working with the business areas in larger groups and then concluded the day with a session in our Obeya room. The Obeya room is a recent addition at our office and I like the idea, since we work a lot externally with Lean Product Development etc it makes sense to use fitting techniques for our internal “knowledge process” as well.

Full of energy today… guess it comes from meeting all the people yesterday.

So – Upwards. Onwards.


Flight of the Conchords - formerly New Zealand's fourth most popular guitar-based parody folk duo

Good consultants

One of the more interesting aspects of being a consultant is that you get to see different issues from different angles all the time since you deal with customers working in:

• different domains
• different products
• different area codes
• different maturity levels
• different solutions

Interestingly enough I am now working on 2 quite different topics where 2 major companies are their antithesis in the 2 areas...

Where company number 1 are ahead in one area they are far behind in the other... and vice versa. Since they aren't competitors they could really benefit from some exchange of ideas...

For me this is one aspect where good consultants come in play... to see how experience from one domain can be applied and build leverage in another. Corny? Cliché? Perhaps, but still many times I can count 9 out of 10 consultants as "head-count" at any larger company. I have my theories behind this but I think I'll save you the rant. Let's just say that the problem lies in both ends.

Hmm... quite interesting subject to ponder on.

Translative elaboration

Just opened up a new blank document to kick-off my analysis report on xtUML, even though the deadline is in December I’ve already started to see a draft in my head, in other words it is time to put it in print.

One of the more appealing differences with xtUML compared to other methods is the shift from an “elaborative” approach to a “translative” one. An issue though, for me, is that working translative on a systems engineering level is far from transparent… the technique seems much more easy to understand when discussing software engineering.

Ah, what wouldn’t I give for someone to bounce ideas with at the office today… any takers?

A no escape conference

The presentation submitted JIT a couple of weeks ago with respect to Modprod 2010 just got accepted. This means I have to transform that beta-caterpillar into some sort of insect. A lot of time left but I love the fact that the pressure is on, there is no escape: We have to formulate a message and not just keep it in our heads.

So in Feb 2010 you can see me discuss how to build leverage for model-based systems engineering… and why we should bother.

Modprod Conference 2010

MBSE. Why?

I've been discussing this question a bit during the week with regards to a presentation in the making. The presentation high-lights a, I would say, successful project we’ve been running at Know IT TM where we push an organization towards model based engineering. However, the presentation will fall quite flat if we can’t agree that a push in that direction is of good and not evil.

So yesterday, during the long Win7 installation, I scribbled a lot of comments on a piece of paper, analog, compiling my own thoughts with the good suggestions I got from my colleagues. The process was quite swift and I haven’t read the paper so not sure if they are good or bad… but hey, if they are stupid ideas I can count on YOU correcting me so I learn the right path, or?

As you know, good ideas are only good until someone finds a flaw.

So let me write down what’s on that paper, I will not edit it, where’s the fun in that?

------------------------------------------------
Why MBSE?

+ Ability to spread knowledge and increase understanding
+ Increased transparency in solutions when they are not hidden in bulky text
+ Simplified handovers
+ A shift in focus from documentation towards design/engineering
+ Simplified communication towards suppliers
+ With MDA added you can use automated transformations to navigate through your solution
+ Executable/Testable models will give you the possibility for earlier verification loops (and if we work with executable models for both design &simulation we will avoid inconsistencies)
+ Ability to structure your information in a better way
+ Improved reusability (reusing a model beats cut/paste text)
+ Decreased lead-time in system design – hopefully

You might increase your quality… but that really depends and is not a given.

- You might remove a lot of freedom from the supplier, compare to build-to-print. This can of course be a good thing but can also be strange if you ask your supplier to dazzle you with innovation and then you handover a finished design. There are a lot of different use cases with this respect and a lot of angles so let’s just agree that when introducing MBSE you have to consider this aspect.
- Initial cost educating everyone in modeling
- Moving focus towards engineering/design will show potential weaknesses in staffing (which is good) and addressing it will be painful
- To move towards MBSE can be costly and difficult depending on how you address it


Some general points with regards to an MBSE introduction…
* Choose where to start and realize that you can build Rome in one day… everything will not fall into place immediately.
* Consider decentralized modeling (conquer the world one island at a time) but use coaches that are controlled centralized (can e.g. be your architects if they are proficient in MBSE).
* Don’t “over model”. You can model in infinity if you want get every last detail perfect.
* Engage everyone in a design team so the model isn’t a product of just one person but a collective effort
* Setup work-shops where different disciplines come together around the design model (e.g. get the early comments from your A&V-team… and at the same time increase the A&V-team’s knowledge about the system)
* The coaches/architects need to “push” themselves out in the organization but prepare for a “pull” mentality when things start to get settled
* Let architects find patterns etc to solve problems that emerge in multiple systems

------------------------------------------------

That was that. Win7 is installed and good to go. There’re a lot of different opinions about Windows but it is quite awesome that you can upgrade your OS in 30 minutes without as much as touching the computer… and it works flawlessly for so many different hardware setups. Compared to the embedded world it is remarkable.

Agile architecture

While waiting for Windows 7 to install I started to scribble some stuff on a piece of paper. One very long piece about MBSE which I will post in a bit and one shorter piece on agile architecture.

I simply started to make some bullets what agile architecture is to me.

- Much more collaboration between product managers and architects. Much much more. They should be like bread and butter.

- It is about setting an initial structure but maintain an everlasting mentorship/coaching role... without getting to cranky if the structure have to change along the way... simply because there might be a more fitting structure.

- It is about using models and other visual means to spread your ideas

- It is about creating patterns and other OTS-solutions that can be applied to common problems

- It is quite a lot about communication and providing a service

Basically it is all about using techniques that make you a good architect but take leverage in the agile philosophy.


And of course there are more down to earth implications such as how you would act in a Scrum team etc but I ran out of paper...

Do you have more bullets?

On we go

Hectic end to last week with Call for presentation, made it, a lot of business planning and some Vinnova-work. No time really to stop and think for a bit even though I probably should have prior to submitting the presentation... well if it gets accepted there will be time to polish the message. I hope. I will probably get back to the presentation and said message here on the blog in due time… writing to an anonymous audience seems to be a good way to move forward.

This week will start in the same tempo and I'm just about to "log on" to E4 on my way to meet an old co-worker/customer. Will be interesting to see how they are handling the official "skitår" 2009.

And I couldn’t be in a better mood because this morning I had to help a colleague of mine with some Signal DataBase, SDB, related questions. It feels good to now and again be able to use all that knowledge collected while I “slangade signaler” back in the days of the “bus”.