Among CRM vendors, SalesForce.com pursues the pure software-as-a-service strategy and Microsoft the hybrid strategy. Microsoft customers choose between licensing Dynamics CRM for on-premise installation, hosting with Microsoft, or hosting with a third-party hosting provider. SalesForce.com lets customers host its software…
At the Agile Meetup in San Mateo yesterday evening, Steve Bockman of Agile Learning Labs led us through a simulation of the Team Estimation Game. Steve invented the game as an alternative to Planning Poker, a popular Scrum technique for…
This past Wednesday evening I attended the Agile meet-up in San Mateo where Chris Sims of Agile Learning Labs presented on story mapping, an alternative to the Scrum backlog. What I found interesting, however, was not so much story mapping…
In Innovation to the Core, Peter Skarzynski and Rowan Gibson explain how organizations achieve ongoing innovation by building up an organization-wide, systemic innovation capability. The “to the core” of the title implies that the effort must touch every aspect of…
At the SDForum Engineering Leadership SIG meeting this past week, Shayne Hughes presented on “Learning as Leadership.” Shayne started out with the basic proposition that the results we achieve follow from our behaviors which follow from our thoughts. And our…
Given all the cloud hype, it is little wonder that so many vendors have aligned their products and services around the concept. Yet despite the diversity of vendors claiming their piece of the cloud, there is a consistent theme running…
Ok, if you’ve not heard the joke yet, here it goes. The chicken suggests to his friend the pig that they open a restaurant called ham and eggs. No thanks, replies the pig, while you would be merely involved, it…
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. –John Muir I’ve recently re-read Improving Performance and thought I’d share my enthusiasm for the book. Starting with the quote above,…
A common problem I run into as an IT consultant is a reluctance of project sponsors to include all of the stakeholders in project discussions. Sponsors often cite the following concerns: Getting too many people involved will complicate and delay…
This past Thursday evening I attended the SDForum Engineering Leadership SIG monthly meeting on the SAP campus in Palo Alto. Jeff Richardson of Jefferson Consulting did a terrific, very interactive session on networking skills that pushed many of us geeks…
Jim Downey 
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