According to last night’s Vent-Con 2020 conference, about 10,000 people worldwide are trying to build ventilators to help solve the anticipated shortage due to COVID19. Highly qualified speakers from various countries shared a panel to showcase their projects, discuss design considerations and help get teams from “workbench to deployment”. I was interested in all these …
Africa DevOps Day was hosted by Barclays in Johannesburg recently; I spoke about experimental agility at scale using the recent FNB CodeFest as an example. DevOps seeks to drive increased levels of collaboration between developers and operations; much like the way Agile values “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. In his talk, Thomas Enoch …
“I was blown away by the energy and progressive thinking … world leading … streets ahead”; these comments from a business colleague after our second FNB CodeFest last week, read on to see why he felt that way. No matter how well you plan something or bring an expert team together, there’s a special magic …
FNB CodeFest: Highlights from the coolest IT sprint in the FirstRand Group – Part 1 Read More »
Day 0 of the second FNB codeFest was held recently on Spring Day; our theme was the green shoots of ideation. It’s been said that Thomas Edison figured out 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb; all his attempts still contributed to the one that changed the world. Fintech ideation is a lot about disruptive thinking to find …
Prototyping new technology is exciting and important but speeding up current projects is equally valuable to business. A colleague emailed me this week about the next FNB codeFest which is being held 28 Sept – 2 Oct. She explained her team was keen to get involved but it would put strain on a big release that was …
Codefests should also accelerate in-flight projects Read More »
Rewards are fun and easy to give out but do they really motivate coders to write better software? The biggest hackathon prize money so far was $1m which was awarded to a team of 2 at a Salesforce.com event. It was later disputed because they were found to have worked on their app for a year beforehand. …
Avoid a case of too many hammers and not enough nails with structured ideation before your event. We all know how it works, some IT departments love a certain technology and every problem can be tailor made to reverse fit the pre-built, pre-decided solution. There is one hammer and everything becomes a nail, in fact often people …
“What are my blind spots?”; gives you new perspective, avoids danger and might help you with the 2nd most important question for your boss.. As an over-achiever you’ll be trying to please all the people all the time, and this simply isn’t possible. Your boss is the only person that has a unique perspective on …
The most important question you can ask your boss Read More »
Authentic leadership requires effective ways of engaging people, here are some practical suggestions. A regular newsletter will cut down on email volumes if you and your management team are disciplined about compiling information about what’s happening. If your team know they get a batch of short updates in a visually appealing format every second Friday they will …
This powerful concept arose in a recent leadership meeting, but what does it mean? We are often told there are 2 kinds of people in this world; those that make things happen and those that watch things happen. I’ve always tried to be in the former category but my leadership journey is teaching me it’s …
