Lately, I find myself saying a specific phrase more and more often. If we are deciding whether to take on a new project or start a complex effort, it always seems to come back to this: “Yes, if we can find the right person to do it.” I’m starting to believe more and more that […]
Balancing Freedom of Motion With Guardrails Reviewing my last two blog posts, I realize I still have more to say on this topic. I am greatly challenged by this idea of guardrails and business rules. Generally speaking, I am a fan of The HP Way of management, where the idea is that you empower people […]
Looking back at last week’s blog post, I realized that I’m not done talking about Good Intentions. If you can’t tell, I’m not a fan of administrative controls. If you have business rules, you can’t just tell people to follow them and expect it to happen. There will always be a moment where someone is […]
Looking back through my blog posts, you’ll see that I talk a lot about good developers being less about the ability to write super-awesome-amazing code and more about the attention to detail and quality. https://nuggets-knowledge.com/2021/04/25/dont-let-the-little-things-accumulate/ https://nuggets-knowledge.com/2021/02/20/building-the-habits-that-lead-to-quality/ https://nuggets-knowledge.com/2020/08/08/motivation-vs-discipline-or-i-only-want-to-do-the-fun-stuff/ The thing about this is, I figured this was more or less the known industry standard. I assumed […]
I was working on a project one time. The project aimed to provide systems engineering, architecture, integration, and test support across a large enterprise, including a portfolio of software products worked on a common platform and shared data. As you can imagine, this is a pretty big job and takes a lot of effort, and […]
One of the things that we’ve seen in the last two years as the global economy has shifted so rapidly is the importance of supply chains. One excellent example, and I have no idea if this is real or not, is that I’ve heard that there was a turkey shortage for Thanksgiving. Thinking about this, […]
I was looking through some of my old blog posts, wondering why I haven’t posted lately, and I noticed something. I have duplicate blog posts! Several posts tell the same story and provide the same message. (Finding the duplicates is an exercise left to the reader.) My first thought was dismay. How could I, who […]
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 […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 