Software Engineering, Project Management, and Effectiveness
I posted about 3 ways to spot logical fallacies and 7 deadly logical sins on Source of Insight. These posts are a distillation of some of my lessons learned from Jay Heinrichs, author of Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion .
If you know how to spot logical flaws, you can avoid bad information, protect yourself from bad advice, and improve your own logical arguments. In the rules of rhetoric, your logic doesn't have to be right. You simply have to be influential. Of course, if your audience realizes you are wrong, you lose your ethos (character) influence. In logical debates however, the rules are strict. If you get your logic wrong, the shows over.
I'm honored to have a guest post at Sources of Insight from author Al Ries on Left Brainers and Right Brainers. I first read Al's The 21 Immutable Laws of Branding some time ago. What I liked about the book was it gave me a new lens for looking at business, brands, and product design. It even gave me insight into personal brands as well as team, product, and organization brands. His principles are timeless and better yet, time tested. My favorite lesson was that to win, you narrow the focus. It's about specialization and standing for something. It's about really knowing which category you're in and what distinctions matter. For example, in patterns & practices, we create prescriptive guidance. Prescriptive guidance took the category of "documentation" and specialized. We effectively became a scenario-based, engineering team that produces code and content-based guidance. This differentiation became our strength.
Read Al Ries on Left Brainers and Right Brainers.
We created an initial set of Application Patterns as part of our patterns & practices Application Architecture Guide 2.0 project. The purpose of the application patterns is to show a skeletal solution for common end-to-end applications. Each application pattern includes a scenario, a pattern solution, and a technical solution. This provides you with a relatively stable backdrop and starting point to reuse lessons learned from successful applications.
Application Patterns Here's our initial set of application patterns:
Example Application Pattern The heart of each application pattern revolves around the scenario, the pattern overlay, and the technology overlay:
Scenario Here's the backdrop we use for the baseline architecture:
Pattern Solution Here's our pattern overlay:
Tech Solution Here's our technology overlay:
Application Pattern Template Here's the core structure of each application pattern:
Feedback
My Related Posts
We created a Rich Client Application Pattern as part of our patterns & practices Application Architecture Guide 2.0 project. The purpose is to show a baseline architecture based on patterns.
Application Pattern You can review the full application pattern on CodePlex at:
We created a Web Service with REST Application Pattern as part of our patterns & practices Application Architecture Guide 2.0 project. The purpose is to show a baseline architecture based on patterns.
We created a RIA Application Pattern as part of our patterns & practices Application Architecture Guide 2.0 project. The purpose is to show a baseline architecture based on patterns.
We created a Web Application with Domain Entity Application Pattern as part of our patterns & practices Application Architecture Guide 2.0 project. The purpose is to show a baseline architecture based on patterns.
We created a Web Application with Table Module Application Pattern as part of our patterns & practices Application Architecture Guide 2.0 project. The purpose is to show a baseline architecture based on patterns.
I posted a visual walkthrough of our Microsoft patterns & practices Agile workspace on Shaping Software. I basically did a lap around the halls and pointed out key things along the way. Our patterns & practices team workspace is optimized for agile development practices. The workspace features writeable walls, configurable workspace, speaker phones, projectors, focus rooms, and a customer room. The walkthrough is extensive. It's basically more than 40 pictures. Enjoy!
I'm very honored to have a guest post at Sources of Insight from Jim Kouzes on The Top 10 Leadership Lessons. Jim is co-author of the award-winning and best selling book, The Leadership Challenge. The Leadership Challenge was a BusinessWeek best-seller, and has sold over 1.4 million copies in more than twelve other languages. Jim is a foremost researcher, award-winning writer, and highly respected teacher in the field of leadership. The Wall Street Journal has cited Jim as one of the twelve best executive educators in the United States.
Read Jim Kouzes on The Top 10 Leadership Lessons.
We posted a new version of our patterns & practices Mobile Application Architecture Pocket Guide. It's a significant update from our earlier release. Special thanks to Rob Tiffany and Rabi Satter for helping reshape and improve the guide. Rob Tiffany is a Microsoft Mobility Architect so he brings a ton of customer experience to the table. Rabi Satter is a Microsoft Program Manager and formerly a Mobility Consultant. He has a long history of partner consulting and blogging on mobile and embedded platforms.
Key Changes The key changes include:
Chapters At a Glance Here’s the chapters at a glance:
Download
I shared my notes from Precision Questions and Precision Answers training on Sources of Insight. It's one of the most effective training sessions I've taken at Microsoft. My notes are bit old, so they're a bit rough, but you can get the main ideas. To summarize it, Precision Questions and Precision Answers, or PQ / PA for short, is a technique for improving your communication efficiency and critical thinking. It's especially important for exec reviews, but you can use it for any scenario where the complexity is high and you need to explore assumptions and test information. It works by using a structured approach to explore questions in 7 categories:
It's not for scenarios where you want to brainstorm or build rapport, but it's incredibly effective for improving your thinking and improving your effectiveness at work.
I posted 13 Motivation Techniques on Sources of Insight today. Motivation is key to your results. You can have the best skills in the world, but if you don't have the motivation, you won't get things done. It's one thing to get inspired by others, it's another to be able to inspire yourself. Sometimes even before you get inspired, you need to be able to get past some self-defeating behaviors or self-talk.
The post is brief, but you'll learn a lot. You'll learn negative thought patterns as well as specific motivation techniques for finding pleasure, defeating your inner critic, avoiding analysis paralysis, taking positive actions, and building self-confidence. You'll also learn how to reframe your common thought patterns into more empowering ones.
Even if you already do a lot of this, you'll now have a precise set of named techniques that you can draw from throughout your life, either for yourself or for a friend. These are proven practices by one of the world's top experts, Dr. David Burns. I'm a fan of improving effectiveness and I think these are a very powerful set of simple practices that will serve you well.
It's a platform, a playbook, and a language for application architecture.
At a high level, that's how I think about our patterns & practices Application Architecture Guide and Application Architecture KB.
The work has become a focal point both internally and externally as a playbook for the Microsoft application platform. It’s less of a guide, and more of a platform. Essentially, we’ve framed out a durable, evolvable backdrop for application architecture that we can build on in terms of products, tooling, services and experiences. I get daily/weekly mails from folks inside and outside the company that want to align their efforts with the frames and approach.
I think of the frames as collection of hot spots. The frames help cut through information overload and provide a common mental model. They also help identify hot spots in architecture and design that are opportunities for improvement. They also help map existing bodies of pattern work to relevant decisions that shape applications.
Here's a few data points that I think highlight the impact:
I'm honored to have a guest post from author Michael Michalko on Sources of Insight. The theme behind Source of Insight is "stand on the shoulders of giants" and Michael is one of my heroes. He's one of the world's top creativity experts and author of bestsellers THINKERTOYS, Thinkpak: A Brainstorming Card Deck, and Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius. Enjoy!
While researching the future, I came across IBM's Global CEO Study: The Enterprise of the Future. It's a compilation and distillation of insights from more than 1,130 CEOs, general managers, and senior public sector and business leaders from around the world. I think of it as a set of "hot spots" for today's CEOs and a set of success patterns for the Enterprise of the future.
Vision for the Enterprise of the Future IBM writes the following:
"Grounded in the collective insights and wisdom of more than 1,000 CEOs, we offer the Enterprise of the Future as a benchmark and blueprint for CEO s, corporate officers and boards of directors around the world. It is an aspirational goal: some companies already exhibit particular traits, but few, if any, embody them all. Based on our conversations and analyses, we believe that significant financial opportunity awaits those that become Enterprises of the Future."
Executive Summary IBM identified the following key points:
5 Attributes for the Enterprise of the Future IBM outlined the following five key attributes:
5 Attributes for The Enterprise of the Future Explained I quoted IBM's key summary for each of the attributes to characterize what they mean:
The Growing Gap One of the key themes in the report is how there's a growing gap between companies that succeed and companies that fail. The big factors seem to be the accelerated rate of change and a global market. IBM writes:
"So what’s causing this growing gap? Constant change is certainly not new. But companies are struggling with its accelerating pace. Everything around them seems to be changing faster than they can. As one U.S. CEO told us, “We are successful, but slow.” But in 2008, CEO s are no longer focused on a narrow priority list. People skills are now just as much in focus as market factors, and environmental issues demand twice as much attention as they did in the past. Suddenly everything is important. And change can come from anywhere. CEO s find themselves — as one CEO from Canada put it — in a “white-water world.” CEO s are most concerned about the impact of three external forces: market factors, people skills and technology. Customer expectation shifts, competitive threats and industry consolidation continue to weigh on their minds. CEO s are also searching for industry, technical and particularly management skills to support geographic expansion and replace aging baby boomers who are exiting the workforce."
Prosumers One of my favorite points in the report is about the rise of the prosumer:
“In the future, we will be talking more and more about the ‘prosumer’— a consumer/producer who is even more extensively integrated into the value chain. As a consequence, production processes will be customized more precisely and individually.” - Hartmut Jenner, CEO, Alfred Kärcher GmbH
Key Take Aways Here's my key take aways:
Additional Resources
While researching the future, I came across the free E-Book, What Comes Next? A Trends Perspective for Our Future, by Jim Carroll. I think Jim shined the light on some very key trends that are reshaping and redefining today's business.
The 8 Trends
The 8 Trends Explained I quoted my favorite lines from Jim's guide to help characterize the trends:
I posted my Lessons Learned in 2008 on Sources of Insight. 2008 was a pretty insightful year for me. I met a lot of great people, read a lot of books, and learned a lot along the way. I recapped my top 10 lessons here.
Top Ten Lessons for 2008