Over the last few months I have spoken with fourteen industry leaders who shared with me their thoughts on what makes an organization successful in their particular domain of expertise.
This was not a random survey. It was based on me going down through my social network and finding people who:
A) Had achieved a level of public recognition of their industry expertise
B) Were willing to speak with me and have their ideas published.
Most of the participants are from the Software industry and are reflecting on some aspect of Information Technology.
Recently, I was able to summarize and share the opinions of these experts at a Triangle Technology Executives Council Meeting.
Instead of presenting the material using a PowerPoint I experimented with Prezi.
Here is the presentation.
There are lots of ways to view the prezi. I suggest clicking on the More/Full Screen and then using the right arrow key to move through the material as a first pass.
Since I was limited to 20 minutes for my presentation, I only spoke on a subset of the findings. That is why the focus of the presentation shifts to findings highlighted in blue. However, one of the cool things about Prezi is that at any time you can stop moving along the author's directed path, and manually move around the screen, zooming in/out etc, then resume the path my hitting the arrow key.
So were there any common opinions of the experts?
For success patterns, the idea of keeping projects simple was common. Keeping the number of developers, the number of requirements, and the number of technologies used, smaller then larger. Another common idea was that projects that had frequent feedback loops to correct errors were more successful.
For failure patterns, it seemed that most of the time the experts spoke of an anti-success pattern. So if they thought a pattern of success was to keep a project small and simple, then an example of failure was a large complex project.
For the next big thing, I was focusing on three years into the future. Some of the experts wanted to look farther out, but for the nearer horizon a theme that came up often, was the increasing impact of mobile technology.
I said that this blog is an intermission. I want to line up another group of experts and gather some more opinions. If you meet the two criteria I have stated above please contact me to discuss.
Finally, I want to thank the experts who participated in Patterns of Success for sharing their opinions with us.
This was not a random survey. It was based on me going down through my social network and finding people who:
A) Had achieved a level of public recognition of their industry expertise
B) Were willing to speak with me and have their ideas published.
Most of the participants are from the Software industry and are reflecting on some aspect of Information Technology.
Recently, I was able to summarize and share the opinions of these experts at a Triangle Technology Executives Council Meeting.
Instead of presenting the material using a PowerPoint I experimented with Prezi.
Here is the presentation.
There are lots of ways to view the prezi. I suggest clicking on the More/Full Screen and then using the right arrow key to move through the material as a first pass.
Since I was limited to 20 minutes for my presentation, I only spoke on a subset of the findings. That is why the focus of the presentation shifts to findings highlighted in blue. However, one of the cool things about Prezi is that at any time you can stop moving along the author's directed path, and manually move around the screen, zooming in/out etc, then resume the path my hitting the arrow key.
So were there any common opinions of the experts?
For success patterns, the idea of keeping projects simple was common. Keeping the number of developers, the number of requirements, and the number of technologies used, smaller then larger. Another common idea was that projects that had frequent feedback loops to correct errors were more successful.
For failure patterns, it seemed that most of the time the experts spoke of an anti-success pattern. So if they thought a pattern of success was to keep a project small and simple, then an example of failure was a large complex project.
For the next big thing, I was focusing on three years into the future. Some of the experts wanted to look farther out, but for the nearer horizon a theme that came up often, was the increasing impact of mobile technology.
I said that this blog is an intermission. I want to line up another group of experts and gather some more opinions. If you meet the two criteria I have stated above please contact me to discuss.
Finally, I want to thank the experts who participated in Patterns of Success for sharing their opinions with us.
