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 […]
Here’s an interesting leadership thought exercise. Let’s say your team is walking along lengthy paths, and there are a bunch of boulders in the way along the path. Which of these is your initial reaction? a) Run ahead on the paths and remove all the boulders or b) Make sure each team member has a […]
After posting last week’s blog post, I realized I have more I want to say about effort versus results. Or more accurately, about process versus results. I heard a saying one time, it went along the lines of: “A sub-par team will produce sub-par results no matter what process is used. Conversely, a good team […]
After the last two blog posts, I have yet a third moving story. After the house was all packed and everything moved out, came the fun part…cleaning the entire house top to bottom. One particular task I performed was cleaning all the baseboards. So I did one or two rooms, using spray cleaner and rags, […]
The chore I hate the most in my house is definitely laundry. It’s just never-ending, especially now that I have a couple of kids. It’s better now but it took some mental improvements to myself to get there. Mainly because I had to change my psychological approach. I used to see laundry as a TODO […]
I used to have a personality quirk, and I still do to some degree, where I have to know exactly what all is going on around me to a great level of detail. In my house I could tell you exactly what is in every closet, drawer, or shelf in the entire house. Even movies […]
A recent discussion has come up in my organization. Three years ago we embarked on a “grand experiment”. We re-org’d into 2-pizza service/agile teams, committed to Scrum and DevOps and Agile, trained and hired, and sally forth! For some teams, this was a natural fit and it worked great. There were a couple of in-house […]
Why doesn’t the classic PMP process work with software? The official Program Management Body of Knowledge provides a well-defined process workflow for the initiation and execution of projects. At a very high level, the workflow is something like this: Define Scope -> Create WBS (deliverables list) -> Create Activity List -> Estimate Activity Durations -> […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 