This is my planned 30-day check-in on this post. So far, my goal is met and my outcome is achieved; I have consistently posted once a week since I made that commitment. Go me! As we follow a standard “project-management-like” playbook here, what’s the next step? Let’s do an after action review. I can tell […]
I spend a lot of my time in design reviews or business reviews. Either highly technical and engineering-focused, or strategic and business-focused. The goal of these review meetings is for me (as one of a group) to look at the document, artifact, plan, or whatever, and decide whether the quality is sufficient for it to […]
I remember reading an article one time about how business leaders spend their days, and I remember a high percentage of the time was “reading”. I tried to find the article and I never found it, but I saw anywhere from 15% to 30% of their time is spent in reading and reviews. But what […]
Want to hear a trick that might reduce your stress? I’ve both read the book and seen the movie The Martian, and I think both are great! But there’s one part that really stands out, that really resonates with me. At one point the protagonist is talking about solving problems, and says something along the […]
Lately, I’ve found that I’ve been using a particular analogy a lot. The analogy is, let’s say your customers are race car teams. NASCAR, Formula One, Monster Truck, whatever. But the point is, a race car team, at the enterprise scale, needs many things working together. A race car team is not just a car. […]
Have you heard of the Hawthorne Effect? It’s based on a study done at the Hawthorne Works factory in the 1920s and 1930s, where researchers tried making changes to workers’ environments to try and increase productivity. Things like making lights brighter or dimmer, making it hotter or colder, etc. What they found was there was […]
As the year comes to an end, many people (myself included) typically take this time to reflect on the past year and plan for the next. I was looking back at my 2023 and realized something interesting. I have 134 posts here on this blog, stretching back to August of 2017. That’s an average of […]
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, […]
There’s a personality trait I’ve seen with high-quality leaders, a soft skill if you will. I’m not really sure what it is called, but I heard a person one time refer to it as “bandwidth”. But that’s not quite right. Let me try and explain it. As a senior business leader, you might have dozens […]
So I like measurements and KPIs as much as the next business manager but I am always concerned about being too overly-reliant on metrics, especially along the lines of whether the right things are being measured and optimized. It’s not even whether or not you are measuring the right things, it’s also understanding that when […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 