Ben Wilson

June 17, 2021

Contacting Me & Opinions

This blog platform is fairly basic. Basecamp likes to start with a basic idea and mature it. Subscribers receive email with my contact email address. Non-subscribers can email at merovex@hey.com I would like to add that these blog articles are my personal thoughts on the matter based on my research and professional experience. I know t...

June 17, 2021

Agility, Empiricism and Creative Endeavors

To some, it is bold to assert that waterfall fails in technology management 90 percent of the time. But, where you do not know the answer, it does. Unless you know the outcome with certainty, you need a variant on Agile with its inspect & adapt control method. In Technology Management, installing physical devices and executing automati...

June 12, 2021

Automation Maturity Model

This post will likely evolve as I study this topic a bit more. I've been fascinated with maturity models since 2000 when I was first exposed to the Capability Maturity Model. I've seen various models that were prescriptive in the types of changes required to mature. Some of those were reflective of the bias of the one propagating the m...

June 12, 2021

70 Percent of the Problem is You

I once took a class on Capitol Hill on how Congress operates. The conversations were less on the Constitution, committees and bill making. It was a peek into how Power operates. Then, I was reading books on Organizational Change and Power. Both Change and Power touch on Culture. The Nature of Power. The US Constitution hard codes polit...

June 11, 2021

Riding a Dead Horse

I'm cruising through Kanban Change Leadership, which has some very interesting nuggets of wisdom in the part on Organizational Change. I will write a slightly longer summary soon. They quoted Gary Hamel, which I summarize as: “"You have to dismount a dead horse if you want to go further." - Dakota Tribal Wisdom American corporate respo...

June 10, 2021

Three Things - Success, Small Failures and Invalid information

James Clear has a weekly email where he offers a few brief insights. He had a few this week I thought were worth sharing: 1. What is one action that would make today a success? Since I earlier mentioned Eat the Frog, this aligns to that by identifying the one thing. 2. Fail Small, not big. He suggests using smaller time increments, dow...

June 9, 2021

Decision Papers and Steve Bezos

Some of us live in a PowerPoint world. Decisions are made based on the presenter's ability. If the slides are vague enough and minutes untaken, decisions can be re-interpreted. I've spoken to a lot of commercial and non-commercial people to conclude this is a fairly common occurrence. Pondering this, I happened upon the Amazon model of...

June 7, 2021

Basecamp's Shape Up & Scaled Agile

A few program manager friends of mine are book-clubbing the book Shape Up by Ryan Singer that describes how Basecamp does development. Before we met, I wanted to round out my observations. BLUF. Basecamp has a home-grown framework that claims to be unique, but is a variant of Iterative Agile. It shows how one organization may tailor a ...

June 6, 2021

Business Model Canvas and the Fatality of Unexamined Assumptions

In 2021, Owlet went public for $1.4 billion based on what their effective use of Business Model Canvas taught them in 2014. What can the Canvas teach us? I discovered Business Model Canvas two years after its 2008 release. I coached a non-profit startup to use it to find its product-market fit in 2017-19. The US Department of Defense f...

June 3, 2021

Scaled Agile Success

In Summer 2018, I took a certification course in Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) so that a federated team arrangement could cohabitate on a Platform as a Service such as ServiceNow or Salesforce. Its two-month iteration cadence lets teams predict when they need to complete work to move to production and handle upgrades with less resource...

May 29, 2021

Perry's World

An author I follow mentioned "Renaissance Time" by Perry Marshall in a newsletter. That led me to look into Perry Marshall, and I found a playlist on his YouTube channel. He has a few interesting insights. Renaissance Time. He calls his concept of meditation "Renaissance Time." Perry's argument is that the massive concept explosion dur...

May 23, 2021

Procurement as Organizational Change

ServiceNow is a worldwide IT Service Management platform. It aspires to be more, but ITSM is its core capability. In May 2021, the energy company Shell replaced ServiceNow with (strict) ServiceNow. ServiceNow began as a startup citizen development platform. As it grew to its IPO, it pivoted into a platform with a mix of base "global" a...

May 13, 2021

Todoist: Eat the Frog

Todoist has a productivity quiz that helps your search for the more effective productivity system. Mine is Eat the Frog. I'm capturing this here since World is easier to find things in and document than my other systems. ;) Eat the Frog follows the book of the same name. It is good for procrastinators or those who cannot make progress ...

May 13, 2021

Enterprise Architecture as Organizational Change and Leadership

Like many other great ideas Enterprise Architecture gets a bad rap because it is poorly implemented. Great ideas fail because they fail to take into account human nature or inherent complexity. When Enterprise Architecture is done well, it can bring value. Well done Enterprise Architecture has several value propositions: 1. Effective M...

May 13, 2021

IT Governance Simply Stated and Managed

I once participated in a meeting about governance, where we sidetracked on the definition of governance. Having a curiously deep desire to understand these things, I researched the topic beforehand. The best Internet-facing organizational website for IT governance I found was Texas A&M's University-wide IT Governance. It also offered t...

May 13, 2021

Defining Organizational Values

Organizational change is hard. It is an emotional endeavor, which requires personal leadership. It requires patience, tact, a solid process, and the determination to let the process work toward an ultimate outcome. But, Organizational change is out of the reach of most leaders. That is because organizational change is culture change. S...

May 13, 2021

Undermine Complexity Bias

There is a good article from Todoist on Complexity Bias. This is an assertion that we favor more complex solutions. The article advocates for three courses of action. First, keep research to a minimum to not overcomplicate your decision. This avoids research-paralysis, which Todoist describes by suggesting it is better to open a Vangua...

May 13, 2021

Productivity and Organizational Change

I'm not quite sure how to use World yet. I guess I'll start by sharing insights on things I find interesting. Todoist has a few articles on maker productivity, which includes a link on deep work. The latter is perhaps more helpful to those who need to curtail their meetings so that he can focus on deliverables. The former is more about...