In case you didn’t know, my wife is an accountant. One time, she was working on a task that required many ledger entries to be adjusted and updated. It wasn’t a huge amount, but it was several dozen. This data could have been automatically imported from various other systems and integrated into the system, but […]
So if you’ve ever worked with me, or you’ve read enough of this blog, you’ve no doubt seen that I base many of my ideas on quotes and memes. Well, here’s a new one that I’ve started using a lot lately. “Given enough constraints, the solution space goes to zero.” What does this mean? Let’s […]
One interesting thing about being a leader is dealing with different types of conflicts. I’ve talked a lot about when there are various aspects or different goals that directly contradict each other. How do you deal with that healthy tension between different competing priorities? The reality is that we all have our personal goals. But […]
Today’s blog post is going to be a little different. Recently, I have been involved in several situations, all involving me advising and advocating for people who are struggling with different work/life balance challenges. These are people who have personal situations going on and are trying to find ways to continue to work even in […]
I’m sure everyone here has heard the expression, “Painted myself into a corner.” The idea is supposed to be that you are in a place where you have no choice but to make a specific decision or perform a specific action, whether you want to or not. Well, as you’ve no doubt figured out by […]
You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time. John Lydgate and/or Abraham Lincoln Here is one of the hardest lessons to learn and manage as a leader and manager. […]
Like many people, I can get stressed and overwhelmed. This is fairly common, I suspect, in many jobs because so many roles are about juggling and organizing multiple thoughts and priorities and tasks all at once. When it gets to be too much, I get what I call, task overloaded. I have tried to teach myself […]
I remember when I was first learning the art and science of software engineering, a really big part of almost all of the techniques was around “reusability”. I suppose even then schedule overruns were fairly common (and given that Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month was published in 1975, I suspect I’m right), and it was assumed […]
I talk a lot about having to put thought into things. I even have a term for it: “Stare at the wall mode”. (You’ve probably heard me use this term before on this blog.) This is when you are wrestling with something in your mind and are working on trying to solve a problem or […]
Formal Agile and Scrum training uses things like Story Points or T-Shirt Sizes for user story estimation. Although I have done lots of reading and training, I still have a hard time understanding how this would work in real life, given that it is very intentionally stated in the formal academic training that the Points […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 