Day: 21 September 2017
Let’s fund teams, not projects
Being agile in a small agile organisation is one thing. Being a pocket of agility in a large and not necessarily very agile organisation is quite another. One of the points of friction is between conventional approaches to budget setting, typically with a strong focus on detailed advance planning, and agile approaches which make a virtue of early uncertainty and an exploratory approach. It’s clear that that’s not an ideal state of affairs, it’s less clear what the best way is of moving on. This post puts forward the radical approach of not funding projects at all, but funding teams instead.
The thought behind it makes a lot of sense, with the approval process becoming some version of managing a high-level backlog and there being a real efficiency gain from sustained team activity rather than fragmented project team formation. But in focusing on funding as the key tension to be resolved, the post slightly skates over what might be the larger issue of planning, where the gap between the aspiration to be precise and accurate and the reality of underlying uncertainty tends to be large. It may be that following the approach suggested here moves, rather than resolves, the friction. But it may also be that that is a useful and necessary next step.
Reclaiming personal data for the common good
The internet runs on personal data. It is the price we pay for apparently free services and for seamless integration. That’s a bargain most have been willing to make – or at least one which we feel we have no choice but to consent to. But the consequences of personal data powering the internet reverberate ever more widely, and much of the value has been captured by a small number of large companies.
That doesn’t just have the effect of making Google and Facebook very rich, it means that other potential approaches to managing – and getting value from – personal data are made harder, or even impossible. This post explores some of the challenges and opportunities that creates – and perhaps more importantly serves as an introduction to a much longer document – Me, my data and I:The future of the personal data economy – which does an excellent job both of surveying the current landscape and of telling a story about how the world might be in 2035 if ideas about decentralisation and personal control were to take hold – and what it might take to get there.