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The man with the "Leadership Mind" - Bernd Geropp - MES054

Day 2 of the Embedded World - MES053

Day 1 of the Embedded World - MES052

Year's-End Wrap-Up 2016 - MES051

The ESE-Kongress in Sindelfingen. More than 1.300 participants! 100 presentations! 3 days with 4 streams in parallel! Amazing! The German Embedded Software Engineering Kongress is the second largest gathering of Embedded specialists in Europe. I gave my debut presentation with "No belly-flops with virtual teams". But there are about 100 other presentations in 4 parallel streams on three days. From 29th, November until 1st, December people belonging to the Embedded realm has their gathering in Sindelfingen. It's a great happening with interesting persons presenting stunning talks, new topics and detailed insights.

You were misunderstood. Although you have spent a lot of effort to be precise and clear. But nevertheless somehow your counterpart has horribly misunderstood you. And now you're in big trouble. Perhaps your spouse interpreted your "Nice" for the new dress as inadequate. Or there was this tone of desinterest in your voice. Or you just run into this ugly problem at work and your mind is still in the office. You all remember what happens after such situation. Something has gone wrong. How can we avoid such kind of situation? Everything we say OR not say, everything we do OR not do, transfers a message. We cannot decide whether we communicate or do not communicate. We always communicate. Communication happens verbally and non-verbally, explicitely and implicitely. We should be aware that a risen eyebrow, a turn-away face, a dismissive look transfers information to the receiver. You guys should listen to this episode if you want to understand why communicating could sometimes be that complicated, erroneous or misleading. If you want to improve your skills herein you're exactly right in this session. If you want to get the tips in written form, feel free to use the link below to get your personal copy of the tips-list.

It's a pity. That most of us find their best time in staying in their Comfort Zone. In this hammock of our regular habits. Full of cosy feelings, thoughts and emotions. Of course, we all have our regular habits, the routins. In the morning in the bathroom or in the evening going to bed. We also follow our inner boosters telling us to be perfect, punctual, or push ourselves and hurry up. But it's really sad, that we regularly get stuck in this zone. Our Comfort Zone is supposed to keep our life safe. But what it really does is keep our life small. Outside of our comfort zone there seems to be lot of interesting amazing things. Possibilities without end. But it's outside. And before we can get in touch with these endless possibilities, we have to tackle the wall of pain. Lots of pain are waiting: denial, uncertainty, helplessness or fear. There's a way to overcome this wall. But first you need to understand the paradoxon of pain. In this episode I wanted to share with you a tool I have detected some time ago. The Tool "Reversal of Desire" was introduced by Phil Stutz and Barry Michels. And it is their gift to all of us who want to lift ourselves to the next level. A tool to propell you out of your comfort zone. That you get in touch with your possibilities overcoming the pain.

This is the first episode of my mini-series "Improve Yourself". This series is based on the results of my last survey on my podcast listeners. We'll start today with the episode of Time-Management. Is it really possible to manage time? To do Time-Management? I do not think so. Because time is something we cannot impact or manipulate. The only thing we can do is to change our way to experience time passing by. And this change of perspective drops away all these usual Time-Management tools, books, courses, hints and tricks. But you get confronted with yourself. Everybody of us lives in the same time. But some of us seem to have sufficient time. Others seem to always exceed their amount and do not succeed in time. The question is: why is it like that? And what can we do as individuals to get the best out of our time? This episode will support you here. Detect your next steps to realize things which are really important to you. And then start. Stay tuned and be inspired.

Do you have ever thought about the aftermath for your root cause analysis? What should be done if you have found real cause of your problem? What do you regularly do after you have made your correction? By the way - do you know whether your correction really corrects the problem? That it only corrects the problem? And does not introduce a ton of new problems? In this episode it's all about what's coming after the problem's analysis.

Sometimes people ask me: "What's that about project troubleshooting? What does it mean? What are you guys doing? Who does anybody need this kind of stuff? And what's the benefit at the end?" I want to provide some answers on these question. I have invited a friend of mine, who has done this kind of work for roughly ten years. Maik Pfingsten is an elaborated engineer, a versatile project leader and he has saved a lot of projects under rough conditions. He meanwhile works as mentor, speaker, author and coach for specific topics round about projects in trouble. He tells us a lot about his very personal way of coping with projects in trouble. About the regular steps he has used and the experiences he has gathered during his long journey. This episode will support you in understanding the different steps how derailed projects might find their way out of trouble. What kind of essentials you have to take into account. And perhaps also whether this approach is the right one for you, your project or your company.

Right before my holiday I have made a bad experience. Some meetings with a vendor have gone sub-optimal to say the least. There were several road blocks and nit-picking details which brought the meetings close to waste of time. However it was a good opportunity to observe what could be done much more better when talking with vendors for technical problems. I have run a lot of such talks and I wanted to take this bad situation as trigger to collect my 5 hacks to get the most out of vendor discussions.

Tech Chat: What QRAcorp can do for your requirements? - MES043

In episode #38 I have already had the pleasure to welcome Joachim Reinke. Joachim is an expert in requirements engineering. In episode 38 he explained the reasons why we definitely need requirements engineering. And today I'm happy that we managed to continue our talk. We're discussing the big pain points in Requirements Engineering. And how it is possible to relief this pain. But we also needed to back up a little bit to grab the bigger picture. First we identified the main points in Requirements Engineering. In a second step we jumped into the details how to select an appropriate tool to support you in maintaining requirements. It's not that easy to find the right tool. Because there a several aspects you need to consider. For example you will regularly not establish such a tool on the greenfield. There will be environmental conditions, limitations and constraints which might bother you. And here's Joachim's list of 9 important bullets when selecting a RE-tool will become very helpful.

And here we are with the third and last part of how to survive Death March Projects. In episode #37 we have talked about how to define and detect Death March projects. And about your decision whether to leave or stay. In episode #39 we have tackled the kind of actions you will face if you want to bring such a project to a good end. We have talked about politics and negotiations. About rational negotiations and negotiation games you should know. And how to identify accetable trade-offs or what to do if all negotiations fail. Episode #40 was about people. How to hire for Death March projects. How to achieve loyalty, commitment and accountability. And the major aspects of communication and team-building. Finally in this episode I'll present you some very important processes you should know if you find yourself in a Death March project. And I wanted to highlight tools and technologies which might become handsome for the success of your Death March project, too.

In the last episode I have mentioned how important negotiations become in maintaining a Death March project. Today we're focussing on another aspect: How to gather the right people in your project? Especially in Death March projects your surrounding team mates might become the only persons you see for a very long time. Insist on having the right persons in your team. Expect overtime hours, but remember always that you've a long way to go. And at the very end you should have enough power to sprint for the last 100 meters. Taking care for people is an essential part to be successful in running projects. For Death March projects however it is an absolute must to do it. Besides all technical knowledge, besides all negotiations, you need to have loyal, cohesive, and cooperative team with you. In this episode I will highlight some essentials when working with people in critical projects.

Hopefully you guys remember Episode 37 Hopefully you guys remember episode 37. We talked about Death March projects. How to identify them. What their characteristics are. The reasons they happen. And about your decision to stay for them. Episode 37 was the introduction. This new episode starts to emphasize the four major aspects how to survive a Death March project. In this context surviving more means to stay psychologially unharmed than physically shattered. Regularly these four aspects appear in certain combinations. That's the reason you need to know all four of them to get the whole picture. Today I will present you the first of these aspects. We're talking about negotiations in Death March projects. There are not only rational negotiations - the one you might know from your daily life. But there are also negotiation games and special trade-offs to put your free. In a first I will give you some additional support to make your decision whether to stay or leave a Death March project at all.

"We do not need specificiation because our product is its own specification!" You know such kind of statements? You suffer from such kind of attitudes? Then you're exactly right in this tech-chat with Joachim Reinke. Joachim is an elaborated specialist for such kind of hassle. He is an engineer who specialized in the area of Requirements Engineering. He's a crack in this area of the development and production process. We both got acquainted at the systems camp 2016 in Berlin. Requirements engineering refers to defining, documenting and maintaining requirements to the sub-fields of systems engineering and software engineering. But the major question is - why does it seem that neglected in real development life. We're discussing a lot about these aspects. The benefits you get out of well done requirements engineering are tremendous. But it's also a quite long way to go. However also the longest way starts with the first step. In this episode we're giving you the path to do the first steps and continue successfully. Stay with me and enjoy the chat.

Already at the very beginning of this podcast, in episode 5 I have talked about projects in problems. In this former episode I have talked about the warning signs if your project runs into trouble. Everybody of us has some kind of understanding the term "Death March". It's from the military indicating a task you have a good chance to not stay alive. And the same could be, if you take projects in civil life in which the project members are working 13-14 hours each day, 6-7 days per week, for months. There is a good chance to lose people. But there's also a good chance to fail the project itself. I wanted to explain how exactly a "Death March" project looks like. How you can identify it. And what general decision you have to make if you face a Death March project. Due to the bare amount of information I have to split this topic into two episodes. In the second one you will finally get a general guidance how to tackle "Death March" projects.

You know such kind of story - everybody is talking about security, but not really everybody knows what it effectively means. Especially security in Embedded Systems has become a valid topic in the last years. My today's guest has an intimate knowledge about all kind of aspects of security for Embedded Devices. I wanted to welcome Andrey Nikishin from Kaspersky Labs. Many of you will remember Kaspersky Labs as one of the main competitors in providing anti-virus software. However they have become much more. Andrey describes himself as evangelist of new technologies and new business directions. As an expert for cyber security he is working very closely with Kaspersky OS - an operating system designed for security from scratch. I got in touch with Andrey at the Embedded World in Nuremberg. I've seen their booth and initially thought: "What does the manufacturer of anti-virus software do at such exhibition?" I was so wrong! The threats towards security and integrity of embedded devices has grown heavily over the last decade. But that's only one aspect. The other side of the medal are the ubiquitously available small embedded devices connected via the Internet. The bare amount of embedded systems in all parts of our life has dramatically increased during the last years. And they will still grow for the next decades. Stay with me and enjoy the chat.

Taking minutes can be some real awkward story. But using Mind-Maps it gets more natural, more fluent, and more precise. But, doing it that way, I detected during running consecutive task-force meetings, that the Mind-Map approach is not that stringent. It needed some tweaks to get its real harmony and fluency. And this episode is about the five major tricks I have found during the last months when using Mind-Maps for taking meeting minutes.