Several years ago (well, more than several), I had a mentor teach me some things about project management. One thing they taught me was the art of risk management. Now I don’t want this blog post to be too much about risk management itself, other that it supposes you understand some of the basics of […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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, […]
One interesting thing about being a leader is dealing with different types of conflicts. I’ve talked a lot about when there are various aspects or different goals that directly contradict each other. How do you deal with that healthy tension between different competing priorities? The reality is that we all have our personal goals. But […]
In the past, I’ve studied and attended training specifically for systems engineering and project management, and in both cases, I was struck by an interesting concept, which is that many of the challenges faced by these two roles and disciplines don’t really have good solutions. This ended up being something I encountered again and again in my roles […]
Image by Barrie Taylor from Pixabay Once upon a time, a company was hired to do some landscaping. There was a large yard, and when meeting with the customer the only user story given was, “Make this backyard look pretty!” OK, easy enough. The landscaping company had done these hundreds of times before. They had the […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 