NEW e-Book! "A Misplaced Displaced Geek"
This book documents nearly two years of our life transitioning from Ankeny, Iowa, USA to Harare, Zimbabwe, Africa and back to the US again. Knowing that we were transitioning from a first-world, middle-class lifestyle to a third-world country with varieties of unknown elements, the purpose of the book was originally to document raw emotions, observations and thoughts along the journey for the purposes of analyzing how we transition, why we transition the way we do and what it looks like along the way. In reality, while we had traveled internationally many times before we fast learned the difference between traveling overseas and living overseas.
We believed we were reasonably intelligent people and prepared for most. We were naive.
This journey proved to be the hardest and best two years of our lives to date. Zimbabwe taught us the difference between 'desire' and 'need', brought us closer as a family, showed us more plainly who we really are and helped us strengthen our love of home country while opening our eyes to the world including the harsh realities of country formation, leaders, politics and poverty.
While this book does not document every single day, it documents various high and low points along the journey which crafted this family's experiences, outlook and personalities.
NEW e-Book! "Fundamentals of Software Company Operations"
Many leaders of software and technology companies today look at their organizations as a collection of departments bound together by a set of corporate, department and individual goals believing that, along with the organizational structure and cost accounting methodology, they are leading a focused, high-throughput organization. While we expect software, hardware, network and performance engineers to look at system level architecture and solutions, software and technology company leaders often behave as component thinkers and fail to recognize the need to balance system load, that which is on the company as whole, in order to maximize throughput, and as a by-product, revenue. While many technologists may seek to practice iterative, predictable, repeatable and disciplined system level behaviors, these same leaders do not realize or understand how their component level viewpoints and decisions actually degrade organizational performance.
This book discusses the immediately tangible operational value of using General Systems Thinking, Agile Principles and the Theory of Constraints as a synthesized platform from which to run a well-honed, profitable software and technology company. What we all need to know to run a company is not contained in one graduate degree, one book or built upon the successes of yesterday. Rather, what we really need to know in order to run a profitable, healthy and flourishing software and technology company is contained in our ability to synthesize multiple bodies of knowledge into foundational set of operational principles and behaviors that not only keep leaders employed, but keep companies profitable.
"Becoming Globally Competitive in Software"
This book will teach you, the software student, practitioner and/or manager, how to become competitive in the global resource pool in which we reside. In sometimes humorous, mostly direct conversation, this book discusses understanding the customer, serving the customer, and learning to discern what really matters along the way by exploring some difficult and often unpopular subjects:
- The professional software talent pool is truly global and we are only grains of sand on a world beach
- There is more value in seeing the forest than worshiping the tree
- Know when to solve a problem, when to simplify, and when to be quiet
- Delivering a technical solution is a social problem
- Overpay the right people for the right reasons
- Serve the customer and provide immediate value or someone else will
Overhauling a Failed Project Using Out of the Box Scrum" ACM IEEE
A software solutions company out-sourced a ground-up application build to a team of globally distributed independent consultants. The project eventually exceeded time and cost expectations and failed to deliver production ready tested software according to a planned market release window. The asserted reasons for this planned versus actual delta varied with time including failure of leadership, failure of project oversight, to design and implementation flaws and so on. Out of the box Scrum was implemented by a newly contracted consultant and the project delivered 153% of plan by the end of four two-week sprints. This report discusses the problem, the implemented solution, and the results while challenging what really made the difference.
"Data-Driven Agricultural Behaviors"
Publisher: Just ICT Trade Journal, Zimbabwe Date: August 2010
This article, written for the Government of Zimbabwe's Ministry of ICT trade journal, discussed the adoption of data capture, analysis and resultant decisioning in the Agricultural industry of Zimbabwe. The purpose of the article served to challenge and expand the technology adoption velocity in the agricultural space in order to make systemic decisions in all sub-fields of agriculture.
"Technology Driven Education"
Publisher: Just ICT Trade Journal, Zimbabwe Date: September 2010
This article, written for the Government of Zimbabwe's Ministry of ICT trade journal, discussed the adoption of diverse technology solutions in the educational sector. The purpose of the article served to challenge and expand the technology adoption velocity for the purposes of teaching teachers, as well as, students and preparing them for global job markets associatively.
"E-Learning. Is it Valuable?"
Published: Just ICT Trade Journal, Zimbabwe Date: May 2011
This article, written for the Government of Zimbabwe's Ministry of ICT July issue trade journal, discusses the value of a mixed enterprise training methodology portfolio. Particularly focused on the value of e-learning as a method of delivering commodity knowledge to the masses, this document argues that instructor-led training makes sense for expert-led, in-depth specialized educational materials while e-learning solutions make fiscal sense when when considering basic skills, repetitive and professional behaviors training with predictable, repeatable messages at volume price-points