Posts
Thoughts that take longer than a meeting.
On escalation, transformation, and why technology decisions are so rarely technical decisions.
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He was right, just for the wrong reason.
I was brought in to contain a technically strong blocker who was holding up an entire S/4 program. That succeeded. Where I failed was with someone I trusted. The mandate came from the group parent, far from where things were…
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Whose roadmap do you buy with the discount?
A discount is not a gift. It is a bet on the seller’s roadmap. And the buyer pays it. A good twenty years ago, a large German software maker courted its customers with a dressed-up open-source platform. It had bought…
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When my own employer started sending me its fires.
You know you deescalate well when your own employer starts sending you its fires. In my case it happened twice. Both times the official reason was resources. In truth it was about something else. A client was unhappy with the…
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A year in the red.
The client was never a technical problem. It was a trust problem that had disguised itself as a technical one. When I took over the mandate, the first thing I got was a warning. This client’s CIO was a hothead,…
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The night a live financial system almost vanished.
Every single safeguard was there. It was just that someone had economized on each one. And economizing adds up, until one night presents the whole bill. It was about a live financial system, a continent away, in Mexico. It landed…
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99 percent felt, 1 percent real. The art is telling them apart.
The real emergency is the one that is felt in 99 percent of cases and actually present in one. The art is not putting out the fire. The art is telling them apart. Every organization escalates. That is not a…
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A merger does not move the plan. It moves the ground.
My program had 50 entities in 23 countries and one deadline. Then, mid-flight, came the merger. A merger doesn’t move the plan. It moves the ground the plan stands on. The mandate was a Europe-wide compliance rollout: 50 companies, 23…
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A post mortem that hurts no one has dissected nothing.
A post mortem that hurts no one has dissected nothing. The board should not ask what went wrong, but what the team would sign differently next time. In my entire career, no board member and no sponsor has ever seen…
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Three programs that were green the month before.
A status report that can only be green is not a status report. It is a sedative with corporate design. I have taken over three programs that were all reported green in the month before I joined. In all three,…
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A roadmap is a compass, not a GPS.
You cut up an elephant when you know it is an elephant. With complex undertakings, cutting it up before you start is not the solution. It is the first mistake. „Slice the elephant“ is the standard advice for large undertakings.…