Agility. Does It Mean What You Think It Means?

In my role I spend a huge amount of time on peer reviews and design reviews. Recently I had the privilege of being able to do design reviews for some interns who are here for summer internship. It was a ton of fun because here are people with fresh new ideas and fresh new perspectives, […]

The Art of Troubleshooting

For those of you that know me, I have a swimming pool, but the pump has been broken since about March (so basically I’ve been cleaning it manually the entire summer). I have had a multitude of people out to troubleshoot and try various things to fix it, to no avail. Several pool technicians have […]

It’s All About People

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 […]

Good Intentions Are Not Enough, Part 3

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 […]

Good Intentions Are Not Enough, Part 2

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 […]

Good Intentions Are Not Enough

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 […]

You Are Probably Busy, But So Is Everyone Else

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 […]

Supply Chains and Bottlenecks

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, […]