Ian Miell

    Ian Miell
    Ian Miell is a Partner at Container Solutions.

    Management Transformation Patterns: The 'Curse of Plenty'

    In mediaeval times, there was a mythical land of Cockaigne in popular culture that served as a fantasy for the hungry masses. In this land, physical comforts were always available, and the harshness o...

    The Biggest Cloud Native Strategy Mistake

    Business strategy is very easy to get wrong. You’re trying to make sure your resources and assets are efficiently deployed and focussed on your end goal, and that’s hard. There’s no magic bullet that ...

    Who Should Write the Terraform?

    Working in Cloud Native consulting, I’m often asked about who should do various bits of ‘the platform work’.

    Business Value, Soccer Canteens, Engineer Retention, and the Bricklayer Fallacy

    Having the privilege of working in software in the 2020s, I hear variations on the following ideas expressed frequently:

    Why Are Enterprises So Slow?

    In this article I want to explain a few things about enterprises and their software, based on my experiences, and also describe what needs to be in place to make change come about. Have you ever found...

    Why It’s Great To Be a Consultant

    I spent 20 years slaving away at companies doing development, maintenance, troubleshooting, architecture, management, and whatever else needed doing. For all those years I was a permanent hire, workin...

    Why I Keep Coming Back to Cynefin

    As I consult with clients to help change the way they work, I struggle to explain that their attack on problems may not be appropriate to the situation I was hired to help with. They might be a start-...

    11 min read

    Is Agility Related to Commitment?

    Previously, I wrote about how a software company’s cultural challenges can be traced back to how money flows through it, using the example of an ‘accidental product’ B2B type of business that tries to...

    If You Want to Transform IT, Start with Finance

    tl;dr – ‘Money Flows Rule Everything Around Me’