I saw a social media post the other day. I wish I could find it, because I don’t want to take credit for this, but someone made a great point about “personal productivity” versus “organizational productivity”. Let’s look at this from a different approach. When you are a staff developer, your focus is on your […]
So most people I know at work have the usual, “I’m really busy!” mantra. And I get it. I am too. We all are. But one thing I’ve learned fairly recently is that my busyness stress is sometimes misguided. Let me explain. I have tasks that are directly assigned to me, in terms of documents […]
Looking back over my previous posts, what I’m finding is that I’m sort of repeating myself in a lot of ways. Not necessarily by telling the same anecdotes (although that has happened), but realizing that the stories I share all have the same lessons. This led me to realize that there’s probably just a foundational […]
I was talking to my wife about work, which I realize sounds incredibly boring but we find it interesting. Anyways, my wife is a partner in an accounting firm and she has been signing up a lot of new clients lately. We were talking about expectation management with clients, and how there’s an aspect of […]
I was reading a business book yesterday and saw an interesting statistic. The book asserted that in most organizations, the senior/principal/partner-level technical staff are significantly under-delegated. That is, almost 50% of the tasks could be performed by more junior personnel. This was presented as a key financial issue, because if you can move tasks to […]
I’ve found myself lately realizing that the hardest problems to solve on a project are usually not coding challenges. I work with really smart technical developers and I’m very confident that whatever the technical requirement is, they will research and grind and figure out how to make the system meet the technical specification. Because at […]
I spend a lot of time in my role teaching. Either giving presentations, coaching persons, maybe even making videos on technical topics. And something super important I’ve learned in my career is that whenever I make a statement when explaining something, is that I’m probably wrong. In fact, I’ve started saying that at the beginning […]
I wanted to post a follow-up to last week’s post. I really like looking through the lens of “We could theoretically finish eventually, but do we have enough time and money to get there?”, which is really just a practical implementation of the “iron triangle” (fast, cheap, good, pick two). But there’s another nuance here […]
I heard a really good piece of wisdom from someone the other day. I was checking on the status of a project, and I asked something along the lines of, “Well, how do you feel? Do you feel like this will succeed?” The lead’s reply was actually really good. They said, “Yes, this will work […]
I was going to write a blog post on a classical project management concept, namely, the idea of up-front costs versus total cost of ownership (TCO). This is the idea that paying more for quality and the foundationals up front actually saves you more in the long run, because cutting those costs in the beginning […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 