Coffee is for coders. Whether you’re doing waterfall, DevOps, PRINCE, SAFe, PMBOK, ITIL, or whatever process and certification-scheme you like, chances are you’re not using your time wisely. I’d estimate that most of the immediate, short-term benefit organizations get from switching to cloud native is simply because they’re now actually, truly following a process which both focuses your efforts on creating customer value (useful software that helps customers out, making them keep paying or pay you more) and managing your time wisely.

The premise of this book, for most anyone, is painfully boring: planning out and project managing the installation of COTS software. This is mostly lumbering, on-premises ERP applications: those huge, multi-year installs of software that run the back office and systems of record for organizations. While this market is huge, touches almost every company, and has software that is directly or indirectly touched by almost everyone each day (anytime you buy something or interact with a company)…it’s no iPhone.

I get all ants-in-pants about this whole bi-modal discussion because I feel like it’s a lot of energy spent talking about the wrong things. This came up recently when I was asked about “MVP”, in a way that basically was saying “our stuff is dangerous [oil drilling], so ‘minimal’ sounds like it’d be less safe.” I tried to focus them on the “V” and figure out what “viable” was for their situation.

I have a larger piece on common objections to “cloud native” that I’ve encountered over the last year. Put more positive, “how to get your digital transformation started with a agile, DevOps, and cloud native” or some such platitudinal title like that. Here’s a draft of the dread-ROI section. The most annoying buzzkill for changing how IT operates (doing agile, DevOps, taking “the cloud native journey,” or whatever you think is the opposite of “waterfall”) is the ROI counter-measure.

A kingmaker in the making. I’ve talked with an old colleague about pitching a developer-based strategy recently. They’re trying to convince their management chain to pay attention to developers to move their infrastructure sales. There’s a huge amount of “proof” an arguments you can make to do this, but my experience in these kinds of projects has taught me that, eventually, the executive in charge just has to take a leap of faith.

Hey, I’ve not only seen this movie before, I did some script treatments: Chief Executive Officer John Chambers is aggressively pursuing software takeovers as he seeks to turn a company once known for Internet plumbing products such as routers into the world’s No. 1 information-technology company. … Cisco is primarily targeting developers of security, data-analysis and collaboration tools, as well as cloud-related technology, Chambers said in an interview last month.

Figuring out the market for PaaS has always been difficult. At the moment, I tend to estimate it at $20–25bn sometime in the future (5–10 years from now?) based on the model of converting the existing middleware and application development market. Sizing this market has been something of an annual bug-bear for me across my time at Dell doing cloud strategy, at 451 Research covering cloud, and now at Pivotal.

Satisfying the mythical auditors is often one of the first barriers to spreading DevOps initiatives more widely inside an organization. While these process-driven barriers can be annoying and onerous, once you follow the DevOps tradition of empathetic inclusion — being all “one team” — they can not only stop slowing you down but actually help the overall quality of the product. Indeed, the very reason these audit checks were introduced in the first place was to ensure overall quality of the software and business.

Working at home, with a family, is a challenge, as this nice overview piece at The Register goes over. You think you’re trading all those interruptions from co-workers talking about the sportsball or just complaining about the daily grind, but you’re actually trading in for a different set of co-workers, your family. And their requests for your attention are harder to stonewall than chatty cube-mates. And then there’s the whole “out of site, out of mind” effect with management at work.

There’s just as much pull for DevOps in government as there is in the private sector. While most of our focus around adoption is on how businesses can and are using DevOps and continuous delivery, supported by cloud, to create better software, many government agencies are in the same position and would benefit greatly from figuring out how to apply DevOps in their organizations. Just 13% of respondents in a recent MeriTalk/Accenture survey of 152 US Federal IT managers believed they could “develop and deploy new systems as fast as the mission requires.