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 to challenge something.
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, projects rarely are closed out fully. Instead, product development’s happens one initiative at a time.
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 own mind about what my next steps would be and how to get there.
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 a stable point. It turns out they cheated themselves out of good results.
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, and the only thing we knew for sure was that there were millions of lines of dead code in there. And the changes were time-sensitive, too. How do you move fast in this kind of minefield?
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 facts. But the human communication protocol includes more and it always applies.
Give yourself permission
Some people have a harder time than others, accepting support. Those people need to learn, to give themselves permission to be cared for. Don’t wait for others to push through to you.
Involvement Poker
Maybe you’ve heard of delegation poker – a collaborative way to determine, what level of delegation a team and team lead are comfortable with. Let me tell you a story about how this applies to leaderless teams.
Motivation
This blog is about stories and the right stories can be really motivating. The story about Napoleon Hill’s son from his book, Think and Grow Rich, for example, has always amazed me. What else motivates people?