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 […]
I was originally going to talk about organizational change management, and about the challenges faced and how to break down barriers and help organizations mature and innovate. But everything I was writing came across so dry and textbook-like, that instead I sat back and thought of a story to tell. So here it is. There’s […]
Anyone here ever hear of the Iron Triangle? The idea is that, for any project, there are multiple high-level objectives competing with one another: cost, speed, and quality. And that to improve on any one you have to sacrifice the other. Let’s put this another, simpler way. You want a car that has more features, […]
So I’m reading The Slight Edge, a pretty awesome book by Jeff Olson, and it is dawning on me how his basic principles apply to Agile. One anecdote that he mentions several times is that when a rocket is flying to the Moon it is actually off-course for over 90% of the time. Now that […]
So the other day I’m sitting around reading about geeky technical stuff (as I am wont to do) and come across an interesting synthesis of thoughts that can combined in a fascinatingly gestalt-ish way. I’m reading about the history of microservices and service oriented architectures, and how the original thinking for them evolved from a […]
Several times in my career, I have missed deadlines, delivered buggy solutions, or otherwise had failures and setbacks with my engineering efforts that weren’t really my fault. In two specific cases, unknown bugs were discovered in third-party vendor products in edge cases, and the bugs trickled up into our products in a customer-facing way. So […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 