Hi, I am Marcel van Oosterwijk and I’m an IT consultant.
I’ve spent much of my professional life helping organizations understand and improve the way they develop software. Along the way, I discovered that I was often just as interested in the assessment itself as in its conclusions.
What are we actually assessing?
What counts as evidence?
How confident should we be in our findings?
Are we assessing processes, or organizational capabilities?
And can the methodology for assessing an organization be separated from the domain knowledge against which it is assessed?
This blog is my place to explore questions like these.
The title Field Notes is deliberate. These are observations from practice, ideas in development, working hypotheses, and occasional attempts to define concepts more clearly. Some of them will mature. Others will be revised or discarded. I’m comfortable with that.
For me, writing is not merely a way to communicate conclusions. It’s a way to discover what I think.
Another important part of that process is my use of AI. I’m deliberately transparent about it. I don’t use AI to replace my thinking or my experience. I use it as a conversation partner that helps me question assumptions, sharpen definitions, explore implications, and identify inconsistencies. The responsibility for the ideas remains mine, but the dialogue has become an important part of how I reflect and learn.
Many examples on this blog come from software quality and software delivery, simply because that’s where much of my experience lies. But my interests increasingly extend beyond quality engineering to evidence-based assessment, organizational capabilities, systems thinking, and the conceptual models we use to understand complex organizations.
If these notes are useful to others, that’s wonderful.
Their first purpose, however, is to help me think more clearly.