From The Editor
“Hand found $16 million in potential savings and a lot of the recommendations have already been implemented, cutting out an estimated 36,000 unnecessary transactions already. And it was clearly a lot of fun, too.”
Our February 2016 article The Australian Public Service: Mad World or Agile Transformation? looked at “radically different views of public service management”.
In June 2016 we are still seeing different views but also encouraging signs of progress. The above quote is from an article in The Mandarin which describes an approach using short videos to to convey the findings of DFAT review and recommendations for stripping out unnecessary red tape. See below, Public Service Lessons Learned.
On the other hand, there is still some scepticism about the public service Agile Transformation. Our October 2015 article Whole of Government Agile looked at how the Digital Transformation Office (DTO) was implementing “Agile with a capital A”. Now a June 2016 article in The Mandarin raises questions about “The myGov elephant in the room” and notes that “While there is a faction that has pushed for a complete replacement of myGov, that’s not a dominant view in Canberra or in the states.” See below, Scrum Masters to coach public servants to be Agile. for an extract and links.
Our August 2015 article New Ways of Teaching Lead To First Year Students Scientific Breakthrough looked at educational initiatives, including flexischools and teaching thinking skills. Now two June 2016 ScienceDaily articles report on separate, startling initiatives. See below, Replacing the WIMP in the Modern Classroom.
“Using the power of analogy, a new structure-mapping engine gives computers the ability to reason like humans and even solve moral dilemmas.
This quote is from of a June 21, 2016 ScienceDaily article by Northwestern Universitywhich describes a machine-learning model based on analogy. To encourage research on analogy, the Northwestern University team is releasing the SME source code and a 5,000-example corpus,
See below, Making computers reason and learn by analogy, Maybe some of our politicians could use this model for moral decision-making,
Current Issue
Articles in the current Issue cover:
Public Service Lessons Learned
“peer pressure is probably the greatest thing that will change behaviour. People always want to be seen as doing ‘the right thing’, or being ‘as good as’.”
Scrum Masters to coach public servants to be Agile
“While it has achieved a decent level of usage, it has also annoyed early adopters when they’ve tried to use the bespoke government service portal.”
Replacing the WIMP in the Modern Classroom
“It’s difficult for an engineering student to extract the technical information from a book on their own. Students need to hear the problem-solving out loud; they need to hear the way the professor works through the solution to the problem.”
Making computers reason and learn by analogy
“In moral decision-making, for example, a handful of stories suffices to enable an SME-based system to learn to make decisions as people do in psychological experiments”
QESP Blog
We have a June 22, 2016 contribution, Are Entrepreneurs born or made? , from Anne-Marie Elias, Chief Disrupter Design Innovation, UTS. See the QESP Blog page for more details (link https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/entrepreneurs-born-made-anne-marie-elias?trk=prof-post ).
Events
ACOSM16 Australian Conference on Software Management
The QESP 2016 Australian Conference on Software Management (ACOSM16) was be held in Sydney on Thursday 23rd June 2016. The event was a success, many participants commenting afterwards on the quality of the speakers. Speaker presentations will be available on the QESP website. ACOSM16 was conducted in partnership with the Australian Computer Society (ACS) NSW and the PMI Sydney Chapter. Further joint events will be planned.
Quotes
Quote of the Day
“Whoever tries the most stuff and screws the most stuff up and most rapidly launches the next try wins.” (Tom Peters, American writer and business management consultant)
Quote from Yesteryear
“To handle yourself, use confidence, effort, mindfulness, concentration and wisdom. To handle others, use your heart.” (Phramaha Sangthong Dhammacaro, Dhammaduta Monk)
Ted Smillie
QESP Chairman