Notes on building and operating digital work

OPM Insights exists for a practical reason. The principles we describe elsewhere on this site, such as long-term thinking, responsible development, and maintainability, are easy to state and hard to apply. Stating them is not worth much on its own.

These articles are where we set out the reasoning in enough detail to be useful, and in enough detail to be argued with. They cover the decisions that come up repeatedly when you are responsible for building something and then keeping it running: how to tell a reasonable deadline from a damaging one, when a shortcut is efficient and when it is debt, where artificial intelligence genuinely helps and where it quietly introduces risk, and what a business needs in order to survive an ordinary bad year.

We write from our own practice rather than from surveys or secondhand summaries. That is a deliberate limit as much as a strength. You will not find statistics we cannot source, studies we have not read, or confident claims about what works for every organization. What you will find is clear reasoning, worked examples of the trade-offs, and explanations of what we do when the guidance is inconvenient. Where a question is genuinely open, we say so instead of resolving it artificially.

The articles are intended to remain accurate rather than to be timely, so they avoid trends and focus on decisions that will still be recognizable in several years. We revise them when our thinking changes or when something turns out to be wrong. If you find an error, the contact page is the place to tell us, and we will correct it.