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DevOps & The Fire Fighting Dilemma

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  So there you are, happily working on your code when an outage is reported and your full attention now goes to restoring the affected systems. As the restoration time stretches on and on, you and your team are further pulled in to solve the outage, in a fire fighting mode. Depending how frequently the team goes into this fire fighting mode, no actual code gets finished, no actual improvement happens and the outages continue to eat up all the team’s time. If this situation sounds familiar, it is because it happens far more often than IT organizations care to admit. And that is what happened to a friend of mine, who asked: “How am I supposed to go on like this?” Accept Reality and Look for Clues Well, you better get used to the idea that when systems are down and your customers are hurting, most organizations respond with an all hands on deck approach. I am yet to come across a situation where the star players who are able to resolve an outage were not pulled in to solv
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Education for a New Age

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As school is back in session, parents and teachers meet again to discuss and decide how best to prepare our children to thrive in the world around us. And to make the challenge a bit more interesting, many say that change is happening faster and faster ( HBR ), leading professionals to learn new skills to be effective in their organizations, higher education institutions to adapt their curricula and even business models ( Georgia Tech MOOC ), and kids to learn how to code ( TED ). So, let us step beyond typical school programs and brainstorm what else we can do to better prepare our children to succeed over the next decade, starting by exploring what is going on around us. The world is changing Our Industrial Age workplace is changing ( Inc ). And here are a some other changes going on right now: The multi-generational workplace : as more generations continue to share the workplace ( Forbes ), it is important for newer generations to not only be able to collaborate,
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How Can Proofs of Concept Shorten Sales Cycles?

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This work by Marcelo Bernardes ( @marcelobern ) was originally posted on LinkedIn . Recently I was asked about my experience using proofs of concept to shorten the sales cycle of complex solution sales engagements. And the audience was surprised to hear that, in my experience, while proofs of concept should increase the win rate, they may actually stretch the sales cycle of a specific deal , rather than shorten it! And yet, it is possible for proofs of concept to shorten the overall sales cycle in complex solution sales engagements, when they are part of a wider solution showcase program. A Layered Approach to Your Solution Showcase Program In order to balance your ability to shorten the sales cycle and cover specific customer scenarios, it is best to devise a layered approach to your solution showcase program, where commonly asked scenarios can be readily demonstrated, while highly-customized scenarios requiring additional time can be built as needed. The layered ap
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What do SMAC and RGB have in common?

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This work by Marcelo Bernardes ( @marcelobern ) was originally posted on LinkedIn . According to Wikipedia : “the RGB color model is an additive color model in which red , green , and blue light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors ”. So, what do colors have to do with the latest business and technology trends: social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC)? Well, like in the RGB color model, where its primary additive colors (red, green, and blue) can be combined to reproduce other colors; the SMAC technologies - social, mobile, analytics, and cloud - when combined can produce business value beyond the “ primary value ” inherent to a single SMAC technology. Primary value of Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud Social, mobile, analytics, and cloud definitions vary and so could the definitions of what their primary values are. These are some SMAC primary values I regularly come across: Social : a collection of user generated data w
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Fail Fast or Learn Fast?

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This work by Marcelo Bernardes ( @marcelobern ) was originally posted on LinkedIn . As I read the article from Jim Belosic (CEO of ShortStack ), it got me thinking how many times people get paralyzed by past failures. While entrepreneurs are forewarned of the danger (and sometimes likelihood) of failure, fear of failure is a challenge for all people and we all should reflect on which risks to take, how to mitigate them, and seek to learn from the outcome. It is about reframing the fear of failure into risk taking as a learning opportunity. Prepare yourself to learn from your journey I agree with Rob Shelton (global innovation chief of PwC), when a more scientific approach is used, learning takes center stage. It's about having a hypothesis, and testing it, if the results don't match your hypothesis, you've got data. If the results do match your hypothesis, then you have a discovery. - Rob Shelton Entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and business leaders m
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