Imagine your goal is to gather apples. Your immediate instinct might be to wander through a forest, spotting ripe fruit on the ground and collecting them. For a small family or a spontaneous snack, this works perfectly. There are apples readily available, and the effort is minimal. This “foraging” approach is akin to how many […]
I started a training class one time with this statement. Sometimes I still do. It’s intentionally facetious, a tongue-in-cheek admission that aims to set the stage not for certainty, but for critical thought. Because the simple truth is, for almost every topic, every rule, every best practice, there will always be exceptions and edge cases. […]
Something I’ve started to hear more and more lately is “just use common sense in your decision making”. Well, the problem is, you’d be surprised at how much gap there is between different people’s definition of common sense. So here’s an example. I spilled some juice on the counter the other day and I went […]
Following up on this post. I was discussing this post with someone who was giving me feedback, and their comment was, “well yeah nothing happened, but that’s because the consequences weren’t big enough. What if the driver had been seriously injured?” So I thought about that while I was writing the post, as in, what […]
Once upon a time, an analyst was working with a team on a business problem. The team was tasked with improving the delivery velocity for drivers in vans dropping off packages. The goal was to improve quality with faster average delivery times, thus resulting in more packages delivered per driver per day. The measurement for […]
I’ve done a lot of interviews and hiring in my career, and so like most people who have this experience, I have my own library of questions I tend to ask. I was conducting an interview the other day and I asked a common one, along the lines of “Is it your preference to have […]
I made this statement a few blog posts ago: …they are not properly measuring the correct things in their standardized reporting (very valid and probably true, because figuring out what to measure is incredibly hard) I wanted to talk more about this, because this is key. What SHOULD we be measuring? How can we be […]
In both my professional career and personal life, I’ve found myself working very frequently with SOWs and contracts. (Note that in this blog post, I will use the terms “SOW” and “contract” interchangeably.) But there was one specific time that I really gained some specific insight into this area. I was involved with an HOA, […]
I have an analogy I like to use a lot. Have you ever felt like you’ve painted yourself into a corner? Or you see someone who thinks they have? This is a well-known analogy, but I’m going to take it one step further. Frequently when I see people who are convinced they have painted themselves […]
The other day I wrote about executing engineering projects, using landscaping projects as an analogy. I really liked it and realized I wanted to write more about it. In my experience, a frequent issue that managers and leaders encounter is not understanding the difference in training and experience. In fact, I’ve seen many managers and leaders not know […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 