A distant future.The year 2000.And ten.

So my last post of the year will be nothing less than quick and dirty 2009. In contrast to all other posts this will be a bit more personal, a mash-up of work and non-work stuff. A bit more Johan. Maybe not so interesting for all of you but a nice way to summarize and recap for me.

 

But first. No promises. Nothing given. But goals. Targets. Ambitions. For 2010. In no particular order.

• Run more kilometers than 2009 (4000min, 765,29km, 104times, 14.44km/week, 5:14min/km)
• Crush that PB in GBG-varvet and finally cross the finish-line below 1:40:00
• Recruit as many people to the Linköping office as we have people with connection to Gothenburg currently
• Talk at 3 conferences
• Mr 100%
• Jump higher with a horse than I ever have before
• Swim in at least one exotic ocean
• Continue to build on the good foundation from 2009 work-wise and go even further
• Stay ambitious

 I could go on and on. But no. 2009. Here you are.

  

2009 was the year when I

• Went back to Volvo Cars and enjoyed the new perspective
• Started to feel really really at home in Östergötland
• Learned xtUML and the benefits thereof
• Started to understand change management and business evolution for real from a practical perspective
• Got that second horse
• Still only have one wife though, when you have the best 1 is enough
• Got a new really good friend
• Lost a bit more contact than wanted with some of my old friends
• Got reconnected through the matrix with one of my oldest friends
• Had a fantastic Round Table year with 117
• Saw two monsters at low altitude over the water between Sweden and Denmark; a once in a lifetime experience.
• Enjoyed working at Know IT Technology Management
• Saw Leonard grow and become an even cooler kid than before
• Was Mr 100%
• Jumped higher with a horse than I ever did before
• Bought tickets to Iron Maiden 2010
• Played handball again
• Besides TM worked a lot with marketing issues
• Finally learned the benefits of symmetrical 4wd
• And so much more.

 But most of all 2009 was a very very good and happy year.

 

Quiet

Working in an empty office today which is good for the focus, however the broken coffee machine level things out.

Nothing can bring me down though due to the current play-off picture after Jets win against a safe-guarding Colts yesterday.

Just one more game...

In i kaklet

With Christmas literally just around the corner I am still working with some things I would like to get done as soon as possible. At the moment I’m involved in some marketing tasks and I enjoy it because you have to figure out what to get across, what you actually do (not to be underestimated) and whom you’re doing it for. It also gives me a chance to go through and make an inventory about all the different areas we work with.


And if everything fails, just do what Jack from 30 Rock would do...

• Liz Lemon: Why are you wearing a tux?
• Jack: It's after 6 o'clock Lemon. What am I, a farmer?

Recruiting

And the first ad is up at our homepage <--

SEMAT

According to this article Ivar J is tired of the moving target… that development teams are so quick to embrace new methods in search for the silver bullet. But as Ivar correctly point out there’s no silver bullet available. So now “he” (as co-founder of the SEMAT community) will create a new method for the development teams to embrace, a “standardized” process, a silver bullet.

If he succeed it will definitely be an accomplishment, but until then we will have to live with the irony.

Ok I guess I’m a bit harsh, and after reading through the comments of the article (where Mr Jacobsson comment himself) the article might be a bit over the top… but then after reading through the SEMAT webpage it still doesn’t taste like cake. It seems as a nice and pleasant idea alright but I can’t find any trace of real substance. And when reading through the limitations of the so called Kernel I can’t stop to wonder what’s left to include…

Hm and now after a couple of minutes writing about it I’m not sure if I agree to all the statements leading up to the “need” for SEMAT.

Is software engineering really “gravely hampered”? And if so is the problem really the “huge number of methods and method variants”? What do you think? For me I haven’t decided yet, if this would be a topic for a debate match I think I just as easily could play for the home as for the away team…

…when something is grey you can always make dramatic effects by turning it into something black and white.

I guess it’s not so much about incorrect methods/processes as it is how they are applied and who’s doing the work. Context and people. At least to me.

Architecture from the cabinet

Spent 30 minutes going through some old material to see what to keep and what not, found this jpg snapped from one of my architecture presentations… been a couple of weeks without talking so much about architecture, in some ways a couple of weeks too much.

It is interesting to follow the debate about architecture, the “to be or not to be”, commonly in conjunction with agile methods. For me architecture is one of the corner-stones for successful product development… but I guess it all boils down to the interpretation of architecture.

Technology Management

I just finalized a collaborative effort in order to put together some recruitment ads. We are intensifying our search for some really good additions to our staff of Technology Management consultants. It is always challenging to find experienced people, even more so when they need to be proficient with both T and M.


Guess the ads will be available across the Internet in a short while... anyhow we are looking for people in Linköping, Gothenburg and Stockholm.

I guess a good hint to whether or not you should be interested is e.g. if you find at least some of the topics in this blog interesting (irrespective if you agree or not)…

Product Development

Sometimes product development succeed, sometimes the customer is forgotten somewhere in the process.

Mag+ from Bonnier (thanks for the tip Tomas) is one example which even makes a skeptic - me - like the idea of a reading plate.

MS Surface at least makes for an awesome parody video.

Enjoy.

Mag+

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Surface

Life in four colours

The figure below is APM in a nutshell; the rest is almost as the old real-estate cliché “Location – location - location”:


Context – Context – Context

Unfortunately that’s the hard part; too bad life isn’t as easy as a presentation in four colors. 

A for APM

Currently updating a presentation of mine on the subject of Application Portfolio Management and find it slightly ironic when reading material about trends in APM (practices to reduce # applications) from an application vendor for APM applications.




Meta.


-

Busy bee

Busy day today, a lot of meetings crammed in this final full week prior to Christmas. Will host an, hopefully, interesting talk on network design on Thursday. It will be fun to speak about one of my old expert competencies, especially when there’s a little twist to it.


Also time to ramp up the work with regards to my MODPROD talk, which will be a perfect task for the days in between holidays this year.

I’ve also started up some quite interesting activities with regards to the Linköping office… hopefully to be disclosed soon enough.

The supplier dynamics thread started up last week seems to be going in a good direction… if you just get the ball started anything is possible. Oh that last bit came out with extra cheese on top.

Aircraft systems modeling

Just wanted to recommend a licentiate thesis for anyone interested in an overview of MBSE. Been reading it a bit on and off the last week and it serves as a good and broad introduction.

It's called: Aircraft Systems Modeling - MBSE in Avionics Design and Aircraft Simulation written by Henric Andersson from Linköping University / SAAB.

Supplier dynamics

Sitting here designing a presentation about supplier management, the consequences of lack thereof and how we TM-consultants at Know IT can help improve... and I just realized something!

All while listening to Mannen I Den Vita Hatten 16 år Senare on Spotify.

A really nice pajsare

Here's a 7-min long video about Lean called Toyota Myself. Niklas was a really nice guy I knew back in upper-secondary and it's good to see old class-mates succeed; especially when he’s working with such an interesting subject.

Supply or be supplied

Ok, some more fuzzy thoughts about supplier management.

Some different ways to a work-split for development between a supplier and OEM:

• Do it all yourself 
• Specify the solution; send it in writing to the supplier 
• Model it; transform the model to text and send to supplier 
• Model it; send the model to the supplier and “forget it” 
• Model it; send the model to the supplier and feedback potential changes to the model  
• Model it together with the supplier; let the supplier use the model to produce the final product 
• Specify your need in fluffy terms and let the supplier realize it anyway wanted as long as it fits with the rest 

Maybe I forgot some examples but you get the picture. Each of these slightly different ways to approach it will definitely have implications to your design department, your A&V department, your purchasing department etc. Sometimes you and your departments will control the work-split; sometimes the work-split will control you.

The key should be to realize the impact and choose based on a choice that best serve your purpose.

Simple? Perhaps. Still forgotten.

Lets get married or shall we just fool around?

Thinking a lot about supplier relationship management today, of course there's an acronym available and someone has sketched down a few lines on wikipedia, anything else would be a chock. But still from personal experience I must say that this is a somewhat forgotten issue.

Looking through traditional "consultancy" products and what the major players are doing there has always been a lot of focus on supply chain management... but that's not what I'm angling for. SCM is more about the logistics, the contracts and so forth…

I’m more concerned about what implications a business development project has on the suppliers, on how we not only should enable innovation at the “supplier-side” but also encourage and stimulate it, how moving towards Lean or agile will affect they way we cooperate with external partners etc.

Friday evening

A pie-chart of procrastination:

Why just UML?

The more I keep writing about xtUML the less I see any purpose to use UML2 when developing software. Granted that UML2 have a wider application-base to select from but as a concept UML without the stringent method of xtUML doesn’t seem complete anymore.


One problem persists though, which is connected to all graphical modeling and not just xtUML, there are still no applications out there that actually support you making better designs over time. The biggest hurdle in UML is still the fact that You have to make good class-diagrams and there is no perfect formula to what that is. Over time your models will grow large and erode if you aren’t careful.

A simple example of design support: In the "coding industry" an IDE without automated refactoring capabilities or a refactoring browser isn’t really a player even so you can’t find much about commercial modeling tools with such features. Why?

Execute this

I am currently having a late evening with the report on Model Driven Architecture and executable/translatable UML.


One thing that intrigues me is that during research, on MDA in particular, the notion of platform in the context of PIM and PSM (Platform Independent Model and Platform Specific Model) seems quite single-sided. In most MDA-papers I have yet to find a different meaning to platform than language + compiler + hardware. In other words MDA shall basically only be used to separate us from the implementation in software.

Why is there so little written about PIM/PSM where platform is put in a product context? Where the PIM is your model of the functionality independent on which final product in your palette it will end up in? And where the “PSM” is your “PIM” (in normal terms) for that specific product? This is nothing new and breath-taking in e.g. PLA-ideas but there isn’t a lot of practical reading where those two have been put together.

A practical approach from PIM, P for product or project then, to PIM (if needed) to PSM would be interesting to see (or create).

For a larger product company enabling this would probably yield a substantial improvement.

Time for a break and some serious running in -6degC.

Registration is open

Yesterday the draft program for the coming MODPROD conference was released along with the online registration site.

So if you'd like to hear me talk about information platforms or maybe learn Lean from my manager Gunilla go ahead and sign up already.

MODPROD 2010