Scraping Toasts

In this episode I get to interview Dimitar Bakardhziev. He is widely known and recognized in the community behind the Kanban method since many many years ago and was even nominated for the Brickel Key award for his work in the community. He is a seasoned software development executive and even runs a publishing house to make the writings of dr. Deming and Eli Goldratt more accessible to people in his home country of Bulgaria.

These days he is working on helping the IT industry to apply a completely different kind of perspective into software development. 

What he calls the knowledge-centric perspective is a way to understand and discover the invisible aspects that drive productivity, effectiveness and happiness on individual, team and organisational level by making them far more concrete and relevant for everyone, whether you're the CEO or an engineer.                           

According to him, these aspects are in fact the primary aspects that hide massive amounts of untapped potential, hidden from plain sight.

Based on this model he calls knowledge-discovery efficiency, or KEDE for short, he has founded a startup offering a system for managers to get a more complete understanding of how well their software organisation truly is working and what to do to improve it.

So, if that sounds like an important topic to you, I suggest you pay attention to what Dimitar has to say. I really dig his positive and humane message on the topic so I hope you do too.

More about Dimitar:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dimitarbakardzhiev/

KEDEHub:
https://kedehub.io/

Learn more about KEDE here:
https://docs.kedehub.io/

Have you ever wondered why despite changing jobs the way organizations are being managed seems to stay the same? Or are you one of those who passionately study Toyota and their philosophy, evangelise Lean or go on about trying to make organisations more "agile"? Whatever your choice of poison, you likely are familiar with how frustrating that can be as nothing in your own work seems to stick.

In today's show I've invited Dr. Bob Emiliani to discuss what the underlying causes are that makes it seemingly impossible to penetrate the status quo of the classical management and why Lean and similar efforts to change our organizations keep on failing. He has documented his learnings in his trilogy of books "The Triumph of Classical Management", "Irrational Institutions" and "Management Mysterium". Enjoy!

More about Bob Emiliani:
https://bobemiliani.com/

Book trilogy mentioned on the show:
https://bobemiliani.com/product/the-triumph-of-classical-management/
https://bobemiliani.com/product/irrational-institutions/
https://bobemiliani.com/product/management-mysterium/

Deming's System of Profound Knowledge:
https://deming.org/explore/sopk/

...aaaand we're back! In today's episode we pick up the discussion with Tom Gilb and bring up some very uncomfortable truths about the state of competence within IT, what the extremely failed public sector projects really are about (it's not about serving tax payers btw), what you as a manager can do to maximise the likelihood of actually succeeding with your projects or initiatives and all kinds of fun things like that! There's some pretty hard statements in there so if you are easily offended, you have been warned.

If you do find this useful or appealing, please join the conversation on LinkedIn or Twitter and share it with your your friends and colleagues as well if you think they would find the podcast useful. As they say, the more the merrier! #scrapingtoastspodcast, @scrapingtoasts, scrapingtoasts.com and so on, you know the drill.

But wait, there's more! After the interview I will announce a little giveaway for all you listeners out there so check it out! If you have enjoyed the content of this show so far, you don't want to miss it!

Alright, let's get to it!  

Do you know what’s in common between Marilyn Monroe, Dr. Deming and PriceWaterhouseCoopers or PwC? Well, time to find out! In the previous episode I had the good fortune to be talking to Kai Gilb about the secrets of product development and in that discussion we kept referring to his father’s work multiple times. This time I thought I’d continue on that same path and get face to face with one of the absolute heavyweights in the IT business and Kai’s father, mr Tom Gilb himself. I can promise you this discussion, that I btw will publish in two parts, is extremely relevant especially for all of you who might have a managerial role and/or the responsibility for successful IT projects in your organisations as Tom spells out some really, and I repeat, *reeaally* hard truths about the current state of things and how to maximise the likelihood of succeeding with your projects by adopting a systems engineering approach.

We also touch on topics such as creating extremely clear and unambiguous goals, how the lack of them is causing huge problems all over the world such as in the United Nations, how the lack of competence both from those selling IT services and those buying said services is causing catastrophic failures and mind boggling amounts of waste of time, money and human potential and what you actually can do about it. I must warn you though, if you don’t have a thick skin I’m sure you’ll be insulted in one way or the other. Hard truths can be uncomfortable like that.. :)

Before we get to it, as usual, if you think this podcast might be useful for you or someone you know, please share it and click those buttons you’re supposed to click on the various social media platforms! Not to mention subscribing to it, don’t forget to do that! And as usual, I would love to hear your opinions and feedback so get in touch! You’ll find the contact details in show notes and on my website, scrapingtoasts.com.

Alright, let’s get to it!

So, hand on heart, how confident are you in your capability of developing new products or services, be it physical, digital or both? Wouldn’t it be great to actually sleep at night  and not have to worry about any nasty surprises project after project, organisation after organisation? In today’s episode I catch up with Kai Gilb, an entrepreneur and a product development expert to discuss what it actually takes to be successful at PD. Kai is a highly experienced consultant and a trainer running his company Gilb International together with his father Tom Gilb who should require no introduction. The methods they have developed are extremely robust and systematic based on solid engineering principles and Kai has been traveling around the world teaching large enterprises how to apply them and thus become a more competitive development organisation.

We discuss some of the key ingredients of product development, concrete ways of applying them, the state of IT in general but also some of his future plans working with artificial intelligence.

I highly, HIGHLY recommend you to listen to his interview especially if you are about to or already have engaged yourself in any sort of agile software development. You don’t want to miss what he has to say.