Category: Juel.me

My trustry PC kicked the bucket last night, and unless I can perform some kind of miracle, it will stay dead. This means that I am currently without a personal computer, a thing that has not happened since 1994.

I have been looking at Windows PCs and there’s not really anything that interests me, which surprises. Even the Macs don’t seem to hold any real appeal at this point, so I might just go ahead and not buy a new any time soon. Might actually be a pretty interesting experiment to be without a computer and only rely on my phone.

They can be pretty difficult to change. Normally, when we digitize processes, we only touch a subset of the overall number of interrelated processes. Project constraints, such as time and resources, tend to limit our view insofar as we try to limit the scope of the development task as much as possible. However, as interrelated processes may either receive data from our process, or feed our process with data, we will inherently run the risk of breaking larger, more complex processes when we make smaller changes.

It seems to be a condition we have to deal with when running development projects. Since we cannot afford to take the entire systems/process landscape into consideration due constraints we run the risk of missing important interactions between high level processes; interactions that are pivotal to making our processes function properly in a business context.

The solution? Who knows? My suggestion would documentation. If proper documentation can be obtained, we might be able to pin point high level interactions in the planning phase, thereby mitigating the risk. It’s a pretty simple solution but for some reason it seems to be difficult to carry out in real life. BPM could actually be a really good solution to this problem. However, as one of my coworkers always says: Habet realitatem intercession.

Oh the horror! I am losing my home office. Well, maybe not horror, but as the wife and I are expecting baby #3 it is time for me to get out of the office, and let the oldest kid have it. I spent a lot of time and energy redoing that room after we bought the house, and I managed to make it into a really nice little work space with a big elevation table, back light, 27″ monitor and a fairly decent chair. I currently use a desktop computer that I bought back in the Vista days. I have upgraded it with an SSD and some RAM, so it is still a decent machine for my use.

Outside of the work space, I managed to get some bookshelves that hold my book collection as well as the books I used for my Master’s degree along with my CD collection. I know, CDs are a thing of the past, but call me a sentimental sucker.

Anyway, I am in the process of packing away all my things, so the big questions arises, what do I do for work space now. Well, I need to go all mobile. That in itself is not anything new, but for the first time in 12 years, I don’t have my own work space at home. So I need to bring the work space with me. Therefore, I have started shopping around for a PC replacement since my trusted desktop machine is about to be retired. So far, I looking at a Lenovo IdeaPad and a Surface Pro, since both are compact machines that carry enough punch to run fairly demanding applications. I don’t need a big powerhouse of a notebook, since my time away from the computer is ever increasing, but I still need to be able to the basics in a smooth manner.

So, the game is afoot, as Mr. Holmes would say, and it is time for my credit card to pay the ultimate price.

So, I am looking through some of my more recent blog posts, and I realize that I absolutely hate 95% of my own posts. Note only have for about a year been one of those guys who write about the latest gadgets, but I have been uncritically regurgitating what the media has written.

Added to that indignity, I have been blogging in Danish. Sure, I am Danish, and it makes sense, on some level, to be writing in Danish, however, I have essentially been  limited myself from having interesting conversations with people who do not speak Danish. And believe me, there are plenty of them.

Where does this “revelation” leave me and my dumb ass blog? Well, I have decided to take a road that might land me in a heap of trouble. I will be blogging about my job, and what I do 8-9 hours a day. Well, that and some more stuff I am sure.

So why is my job so interesting? Well, to most people it probably isn’t. Being a Product Manager is like being in a no man’s land. Developer’s claim that you sit around and make pretty screen dumps, funny flow charts and basically has no clue about anything. On the other side of things you have a sales department, who think that you are sitting in an ivory tower thinking abstract thoughts about the otherness of other.

I guess both sides have valid points. I also think that perhaps there is much more to it than that, and that is exactly what I want to write about. See, I meet all kinds of people during my day. I have a development team in Manila that I have keep busy. I have architects and project managers in Denmark, who keep me busy, and then I have a large customer base, a customer base that is anything but homogenous. Believe me when I say that is a challenge when you manage a Saas application, which is supposed to work for everyone. I can give you a little hint. The Danish government does not work in the same way as global private companies do.

Anyway, I am getting ahead of myself. At Evenex, and earlier versions of the company, there has been no tradition of blogging about what we do there as individuals. It might be frowned upon by management, or people just don’t feel they have anything to share. I have been there for four years, and I know that is not true. AS far as I can tell I am the only there really blogging, so the Internet will have to make do with me, at least for now.