I have worked for 14 years in service and consulting companies, for various and varied clients.

I’ve had to work for nearly twenty clients, most of the time for large companies well known to everyone. I have been a developer, project manager, architect, and I have been able to work in contact with operationals, ops and some of the managers of these companies. It is following various recent exchanges that I wanted to share my personal observation, on some fundamental differences between startups and a number of large companies.

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As a project manager, credible sources of information hold significant value in terms of knowledge acquisition. Aside from all the books and certifications, social media platforms are equally beneficial. One such platform to gain fantastic insights is Twitter. We’ve hunted down some of the top project managers that you need to follow on Twitter.

We’re all well aware of Twitter as a popular medium of gaining and sharing information. As we’re speaking, there are around 335 million active users utilizing the platform for exchanging information according to their interests.

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When a Technical Decision (TD) become Important (ITD)

I like Mike Whitaker’s metaphor saying that "decisions are forks in the road." Choosing the right "road" is hard, and it’s even harder to know if the choice was good or bad until we walk on this "road" for a while. Sometimes we know that the decision is important, other times we barely realize it based on its effects at the end of the "road."

Whether we are talking about a multi-billion software company or a small one with 3 best friends, Technical Decisions are invariable in daily work. Some of them are important while others are less important (not unimportant, there is no such thing).

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In the freelancing industry, excellent skills are always required in order to deliver projects exactly as desired. These skills are constantly changing, and it is imperative that freelancers all over the world evolve accordingly.

Clients demand excellence and anything less is not acceptable. These expectations act as the propellant for the acquisition of the new skills in the market. 

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Sometimes, when an important project is going poorly there’s a desire to start over. Sometimes this comes from management but often this comes from the developers themselves. They say if they only had a second chance and could start over then they can build the right system.

But that almost never happens. Take it from me. I’ve seen companies try many times and I can say that without exception, when a team sets out to rebuild the same system with basically the same approach, they end up with roughly the same system the started with, including the same problems only this time they have two systems they have to maintain.

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Throughout this series of articles I’ve explored how we need to bring the same rigor to architecting our software delivery value streams as what we’re witnessing in advanced manufacturing plants. Once we agree on what flows, we can analyze those flows to identify bottlenecks and opportunities to remove them. However, every time I’ve asked an executive-level IT leader where his or her bottleneck is, I’ve received either a blank stare or a vague answer, from otherwise extremely capable people.

To look for a bottleneck in a production system, we must first understand what flows through that system. We’ve seen many measures of software delivery flow proposed and analyzed, including lines of code (LOC), function points, work items, story points, deployments, and releases. Each captures a notion of value flow from a different perspective, but each has its limitations, especially when you consider the end-to-end flow of business value through a delivery pipeline. If my experience talking to IT leaders is a guide, from a business perspective, we simply don’t have enough consensus on this core question of what flows through a software value stream. Yet this should be the most fundamental question to answer if we are to apply lean principles to software delivery.

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[Recently Elon Musk (Tesla CEO) talked about taking his company private. Read how a Zone Leader recalls a situation where a publicly traded company considered going private in an effort to avoid SOx compliance.]

In early August, Tesla CEO Elon Musk indicated he had secured the financial means to take his company from a public traded company to a private corporation. This was around the stock price had plummeted from just under $371 a share down to right above $290 a share a week earlier. Certainly, the memories of the yearly low price of $252.48 were still on his mind as well — not to mention some unfavorable press releases regarding their underlying technology.

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One question that I hear a lot of people asking is whether they should buy or build the software that they need to run their enterprise. This is often a difficult question to answer. One thing I can say having lived through many major software purchases is that the main cost was understanding a system that was purchased and that cost of understanding turned out to be far greater than expected. Large, expensive software products are often more costly to purchase then the price tag would indicate.

If you can gain a competitive edge through embodying it in software then it’s almost always better to build rather than to buy. This applies to entire products. Technology companies are sometimes purchased because of their customer base or inroads into a particular market segment or any number of other reasons. Of course, I’m not talking about off-the-shelf software. I’m talking about integrating essential components that were not developed in-house.

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Value in the community lifecycle is tricky to measure. Value and how you define it depends on what stage of the lifecycle your community is in. It is ever-changing, from the first launch to growth to maturity. You need to prove the value of your community if you want it to stick around and more importantly, grow.

The first stage of your community is actually getting it launched. You will undoubtedly get questions about how the site is doing, whether it is growing, and how you can prove that it is succeeding. Luckily there are hundreds of different metrics and data points you can look at when starting up a site.

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A lot of poor designs can be attributed to sticking with an existing design as changing requirements show us the need for a better one. Oftentimes, an initial design is just a stab in the dark. We might not know enough to make an informed decision but we have to get something done, so we do what Agile says and we code up the behavior that we need right now and not worry about future requirements.

For most teams, the problem comes when they start to enhance that behavior and go back into the code to extend it. Now they’re asking the system to do something that it couldn’t do before and, instead of redesigning a feature to accommodate the new behavior, developers might try to hack in the new behavior while minimally impacting the existing design. But this can degrade the quality of the code when done over and over again in a system.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)