Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: software

Building the post-agile workplace
“I personally believe we haven’t seen a major change in how companies work since the industrial revolution,” says Yammer co-founder Adam Pisoni. “We’re, I think, on the brink of a change as large as that.

Pisoni was speaking at Microsoft’s Australian TechEd conference on the Gold Coast and gave an insight into how Yammer’s development philosophy is being implemented at Microsoft since the smaller company was acquired last year.

He believes all businesses can benefit from collaborative, cloud based tools like Yammer however software companies like Microsoft are the ones being affected the earliest from their adoption.

“We sometimes joke that Yammer’s development methodology is post-Agile, post-Scrum” says Pisoni. “Because they were not fast enough and don’t respond to data quickly.”

Understanding modern workplaces

This will strike fear into the minds of managers who are only just coming to understand Agile and Scrum methodologies over the traditional ‘waterfall’ method of software development.

“We focused primarily in the past on efficiency,” states Pisoni. “In many ways things like scrum attempt to make you more agile but still focus on efficiency. Everyone is tasked based and hours and burn down points and all that”

“The name of the game now is not efficiency, it’s how quickly you can learn and respond to information.”

“Yammer is less of a product than it is a set of experiments running at all times. We take bold guesses about the future but then we try to disprove our hypotheses to get there.”

“So we came up with this ‘post-agile’ model of a small, autonomous, cross-functional teams – two to ten people for two to ten weeks who could prove or disprove an hypotheses based on the data.”

“This lets us quickly move resources around to double down on that or do something else.”

Flipping hamburgers the smart way

Pisoni sees this model of management working in areas outside of software development such as retail and cites one of his clients, Red Robin burgers, where the hamburger chain put its frontline staff on Yammer and allowed them contribute to product development.

The result was getting products faster to market – one burger that would have taken eighteen months to release took four weeks. The feedback loops from the customer and the reduced cost of failure made it easier to for the chain to experiment with new ranges.

With companies as diverse as hamburger chains, telcos and software developers benefitting from faster development times, it’s a warning that all businesses need to be considering how their employees work together as the competition is getting faster and more flexible.

It remains to be seen if this change is as great as the industrial revolution, but it’s now that can’t be ignored by managers and entrepreneurs.

Paul attended Microsoft TechEd Australia as a guest of Microsoft who paid for flights, accommodation and food.

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September 5, 2013
Security by obscurity’s false promise
Yesterday’s post looked at how security needs to be a fundamental part of connected systems like cars and home automation, an article in The Guardian shows how auto manufacturers are struggling with the challenge of making their products secure.

In the UK, Volkswagen has obtained an injunction restraining a University of Birmingham researcher from divulging security weaknesses in Porsche, Bentley, Lamborghini and Audi cars.

A mark of desperation is when a company has to go to court to suppress the details of a software security breach, it almost guarantees the bad guys will have the virtual keys while the general public remain ignorant.

Over time it backfires on the company as customers realise their products aren’t secure or safe.

The real problem for Volkswagen is a poor implementation of their security systems. It was inevitable that a master code would leak out of repair shops and dealerships.

While the law is useful tool, it isn’t the best way to fix software security problems.

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July 28, 2013
Australia’s software disadvantage
This morning ABC Radio 702 asked me to comment on Adobe, Apple and Microsoft being summonsed to appear before the Federal Parliament’s IT Pricing enquiry.

As has been widely reported, the committee has asked the software giants to explain why there are such price differentials between Australian and overseas prices.

By way of example, Adobe Creative Suite 6 is available on the company website for $1299 US which is AUD 1263 on today’s exchange rate. The listed Australian price is AUD 1974 – a mark up of 56%.

This is not new

Australia has long been an expensive place to buy things, I remember my parents in the 1970s asking relatives to send over Marks and Spencer underwear as prices in Melbourne were so expensive.

Books and music have long been overpriced, the publishing industry openly printed the price of books in various countries and the Australian price has always been substantially higher than UK and US charges given prevailing exchange rates.

The high exchange rate has focused attention on the high prices, while the Aussie dollar was low consumers were tolerant of the rip-off. With the Aussie dollar high, consumers are wondering why the prices of many imported goods, particularly software, has remained so high.

A lack of competition

One of the biggest reasons for Australians being overcharged for many items is the lack of competition in the domestic marketplace. Most distribution channels are dominated by one or two players which lends itself to price gouging in areas ranging from technology to food.

A good example of this is the brewing industry, a revealing Fairfax article examined the Australian beer sector and exposed the failings and lack of competition in the market which results in the multinational duopoly extracting five times the profits of local retailers.

The conservative nature of Australian consumers is their own worst enemy as locals, including corporations and governments, prefer to buy major brands rather than experiment with local or lesser known providers.

Where alternatives exist, the price differentials rapidly fall. The price differential for an iPad is far less than the software apps that run on it. The reason for this are the range of alternatives available to the Apple product.

If Australian buyers were to explore open source alternatives, smaller suppliers or locally developed products then the prices of imported goods would fall.

Structural weaknesses

The pricing inquiry illustrates the structural weakness in the Australian economy where the nation has become a price taker both in the domestic consumer sector and bulk export industries.

Where Australia finds itself is an expected consequence of a generation of economic policies which favours debt driven consumer spending underpinned by selling assets and raw commodities.

Hopefully Australians are realising the price of software is just one of the consequences of current policies and start demanding the nation’s political and business leaders have a clear vision for what the country’s role will be in the 21st Century.

If that vision for Australia is a quarry with a few retirement homes clinging to the edge, then we’re well on the way to achieving that. At least software prices will be the least of anyone’s worries.

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February 12, 2013
What happens when software is wrong
The Las Vegas Review Journal yesterday told the story of Wayne Dobson, a retiree living to the north of the city whose home is being fingered as harbouring lost cellphones thanks to a software bug at US telco Sprint which is giving out the wrong location of customer’s mobile devices.

While it appears funny at first the situation is quite serious for Mr Dobson as angry phone owners are showing up at his home to claim their lost mobiles back.

Making the situation even more serious is that 911 calls are being flagged at coming from his home and already he has had to deal with one police raid.

While the local cops have flagged this problem, it’s likely other agencies won’t know about this bug which exposes the home owner to some serious nastiness.

That a simple software bug can cause such risk to an innocent man illustrates why we need to be careful with what technology tells us – the computer is not always right.

Another aspect is our rush to judgement, we assume because a smartphone app indicates a lost mobile is in a house that everyone inside is a thief. That the app could be wrong, or we don’t understand the data to properly interpret it, doesn’t enter our minds. This is more a function of our tabloid way of thinking rather than any flaws in technology.

The whole Find My Phone phenomenon is an interesting experiment in our lack of understanding risk; not only is there a possibility of going to the wrong place but there’s also a strong chance that an angry middle class boy is going to find himself quickly out of his depth when confronted by a genuine armed thief.

For Wayne Dobson, we should pray that Sprint fixes this problem before he encounters a stupid, violent person. For the rest of us we should remember that the computer is not always right.

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January 16, 2013
Apple’s 2am blues
Should a Sydneysider or Melbournite wanted to set their iPhone alarm to 2am or 2pm today they were plain out of luck.

It appears iOS6 no longer likes 2am or 2pm if your location is set to the parts of Australia that switched to summer daylight savings this morning.

While it’s understandable you can’t set your clock to 2am Sydney, Melbourne or Hobart time as the clocks jumped an hour you also can’t set it to 2pm.

Although if you already have a timer set, it still appears as 2am, or 2.30am in the case of my phone.

It’s just a dumb bug and switching to Brisbane time, or any other part of the world that didn’t go over to Australian daylight savings time this morning, fixes the problem.

Had I known about this yesterday I’d have turned on that 2.30am wake up call just to see what would happen. Then again, maybe not.

While it will undoubtedly fix itself tomorrow as the transition day passes, it’s pretty clumsy and embarrassing. Moreover it doesn’t bode well for Apple’s attention to detail in the post-jobs era.

UPDATE: As expected the bug has passed the following day — we have our 2 o’clock back although that such a silly bug could have slipped past Apple’s quality control is still a worry.

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October 7, 2012