Spinning. Wheels are spinning. We go around in circles. Progress is illusory. Just when we think we are “getting somewhere”, we realize we are right back where we started. Its frustrating. I bet you’ve been there. I bet you’ve experienced this feeling in many different ways. I have heard it called many things: “Paralysis by…
Customer as Boss
Periodically I have observed people complain about their employees or co-workers, and occasionally I have complained myself. Sometimes people at work act as if they are either ignorant of who their customer is, or as if they don’t care about their customer, it sometimes it is hard to tell the difference.
One Neck to Ring
This post is an extension of What Did The Boss Say. In that post, we explored why executives and managers tend to want a single point of control or responsibility, as well as some of the things that must be delegated to that single point. But there are disadvantages to the single point strategy.
Don’t BS Yourself During Your Job Search
Read this great line from Johanna Rothman’s Hiring Technical People blog: When you are unemployed, your job is to get a job. If you do other work, you better have a great reason. It so correlates with the book I just finished on Friday “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield which completely expands the…
What Did The Boss Say?
Last year, two goofballs from Norway released a song they thought would be funny, called “What does the fox say?” that turned into a viral hit. The concept for the song is that we know all the sounds the animals make, but not the fox. Today, I want to talk about things our bosses say.…
Connecting the Boxes
2013 was the year that I finally decided to replace my ancient two channel sound system with a 5.1 channel home theater capable system. My old setup was very simple. A pair of ADS speakers that I had bought when I was in college (1981) and a Nakamichi receiver that I had bought shortly after…
Vacations and Holidays
It’s been a while since I posted on this blog. It has been a nice time off for me, as I have taken a break from writing for about 6 weeks. In this time I have taken a vacation from work, and changed some of my technology around. Now I am away from work spending…
Project vs. Product
Continuing down the path of understanding the differences between contemplation of project vs product as the center of our software universe. Here are a few pithy aphorisms: The resources expended during a project are the cost of the product created, not its value.
Product Centered Worldview
Agile thinkers focus on the product – and how we are intentionally adding value to a “software asset” and potentially how we manage our “portfolio” of software assets. Phase-Gated Delivery (some people call it waterfall) patterns allow us to “optimize” the work against the constraints – but do not allow us to optimize the value…
Sprint Rationale
People tend to use the terms Sprint, Iteration, and Time box interchangeably. For the most part this is true, but there is some nuance: Sprint is a term popularized by Mike Beedle and Ken Schwaber in creating the Scrum methodology. They chose the word because it implied a desire for fast pace. It’s not a…