New opportunities

2011 has gotten off to an exciting start. We began this year by transforming the Linköping Technology Management office to a legal entity as its own “AB” within the Know IT group. This means that we know also have our own CEO, Roland Almgren. I got to know Roland at an assignment at Scania a couple of years back and I really appreciate the opportunity to work with him again. He’s a really experienced technology management consultant and when it comes to improving businesses with aid of business modeling he is leading edge.

For me personally this means a great opportunity to help Roland shape our business areas, to get a lot of experience from the transition “division” to “legal entity”, i.e. the corporatization process. Additionally I have been asked to be a member of the board which will be a really interesting task. So 2011, here we go!

.

Fight the power

And in my context, the power is time. Been a while since the last proper update, is it because my days are uneventful? On the contrary, it’s quite the opposite.

Met with Scania last week, had an interesting 2-hour session with a team there discussing MBSE together with two colleagues of mine. I can’t help myself to be impressed with their relentless focus on the customer. -In-every-context-. Of course one could argue that sometimes it gets too much, but I think it is in their consistency and endurance to keep that focus you’ll find the explanation to their edge. Anyhow the discussion was really pleasant, they have a lot of ideas and the people there like to twist and turn the arguments which make for a fruitful dialogue.

Have to comment on my SAAB assignment as well, passed the 6-month mark now and by then you are starting to get settled in. In the beginning I liked the assignment a lot, and I have to say that it only keeps getting better. Guess that’s easy though when you are working with great people, interesting technology, new challenges and opportunities almost daily, and all in an environment moving towards agile. For me it has been extra rewarding so far since it’s been a while since I got to work the full scope down to the smallest bit and byte, something that definitely improves my ability to work with the bigger picture.

Outside the scope of SAAB there’s a lot going on. Since 1st of July I’m standing in for a colleague in Gothenburg as Business Area Manager. We have great people working with architecture and MBSE and I try to help them channel all that knowledge. There are a lot of great ideas and with all those talented consultants it will be really interesting to see what we have achieved given some time. Next big check-point is our conference coming up soon. Let creativity flow.

Funny, when I read through the post I notice how positive it is… I guess when I stop and contemplate over “now” for a second I realize that life’s really good at the moment. Uppåt! Framåt!

Just text makes for a boring post… so why not a clip from Grandaddy. No matter how much money you have nothing beats a good idea, I love the simplicity of this video. It will be really interesting to see what the guy behind it come up with making a video for Tomas Halberstad.




Oh, and reading a book from Jim Coplien on Lean Architecture at the moment (will probably share some thoughts here later). He quoted someone (who I apparently forgot the name of). Think about it.
"Live simple, be complicated."

Lean Software/System Architecture

Softhouse publish a neat little mag called Lean Magazine. In their most recent addition Staffan Persson from Scania describes how they apply architecture in a Lean culture. I’ve couldn’t agree more to Staffan’s words and I’ve tried in recent assignments to gently push towards this philosophy… in this respect I think Scania, from what I’ve seen in my assignments there, currently is the beacon in the sometimes hazy embedded industry in Sweden. Scania represents a very clear step away from the Tayloristic approach which definitely is appealing.