No plan survives contact with reality, or so the saying goes. So why should we make plans at all? A story.
Contact with Reality
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Velocity – Gross vs. Net
Velocity is where theory and practice clash very hard. Your numbers may look great but your predictability is worthless - or vice versa.
Rank – what is it good for?
Absolutely nothing. Ha! Everybody wants it and the power that comes with it, but when you use it, you lose it.
There is a Season
In most modern organizations, it's fine for everyone to challenge everything. While this is very empowering, it also brings a new responsibility: to determine when it is the right time…
The Five Phases
Project management teaches five phases to project delivery, which are widely accepted. In the software world these don't translate well, however. If you build a product to offer a service,…
If I was Black
Oldest of three, struggled to stay engaged in school, dropped out of college, has a hard time forming friendships, father died early, racked up debt, went from job to job.
Your career, your choice
I've always been a startup guy, so especially early in my career, I never knew such a thing a career paths, plans or guides. I had to make up my…
Cheating yourself
One of my teams was so obsessed with velocity; they constantly stressed about doing 'more.' Yet, at the same time, they were not even able to get their velocity to…
Migrating blind
We had to make substantial changes to the data structure of our legacy codebase. None of us had more than a few months of experience with working on this codebase,…
Communication – a protocol view
What's communication? Simply put it's receiving and interpreting information that has been sent by a sender. The naive assumption here is that you can limit communication to conveying the mere…