At the recent 2019 Capability Counts conference, hosted by the CMMI Institute, I presented a session related to Enforcing Quality with DevOps Pipeline gates, where I provided an introduction to the concepts and technologies of DevOps, and how to use the concepts of Continuous Quality to improve software quality earlier and throughout the application lifecycle.
Here are the slides, published on SlideShare, if you’re interested.
I’ve been reflecting recently on my father’s life and what he taught me. My father was great (though certainly not perfect), and I keep appreciating more and more how different he was from the ‘average father’ in many ways. Many of these storied reminded me of great values I hope I can pass on well to my children.
When I was in elementary school, I loved competing in a local paper airplane contest. A ‘normal’ father may have said encouraging things, or bought me a book about paper airplanes, but my my father patiently took me to his schools’ gym (he was a school teacher) where for hours and hours on many nights and weekends, he would patiently hang out while I threw so many different types of paper airplanes trying to identify the best one.
In addition to paper airplanes, I also really enjoyed real airplanes as a kid. A ‘normal’ dad may have rented a movie about airplanes, but my father look me down to the local (small) airport and knocked on the door at the air traffic tower, and asked a very confused man if we could come up and see the air traffic control tower from the inside. The man was very confused, asking if my dad was a controller, or a pilot, or if he worked for the FAA. My father explained that no, but his son wanted to see the inside, the and confused man welcomed us up and explained all the screens/lights up in the tower.
Growing up, when we saw someone stranded on the side of the road, my father didn’t just drive by or think to call the police after we got home (this was pre-cell phone era) — instead, he would pull over to the side of the road, get the reflective vest and flashlight wand he randomly kept in his trunk, and ask my mom to drive us home, so he could direct traffic or help them change a tire. Inevitably, a police officer or other helpful person would drop my dad off at home later that day.
When I was transitioning from playing T-ball to ‘real baseball’, I struggled with timing my swing. My father could have just encouraged me to keep practicing. Or asked the coach for some additional attention. But instead, he recruited one of his friends to come to the baseball field with us some random Saturday and video tape me swinging so we could go home and watch my baseball swing in slow-motion. We quickly diagnosed the problem.
My father’s hobby was investing in other people’s lives — whenever he would talk to someone else, he’d pepper them with questions with a real curiosity on learning more about their life and what was important to them, often finding areas where he could help them.
He worked long hours, often juggling teaching and other side jobs, but he was always showing my sister and I with his time that we were very important to us. He was hours early to every play or dance recital, ensuring he had great seats for him (and any family that came at a reasonable time to find the seats he saved) and he was at every baseball game.
He taught my sister and I a real focus on living well below/within our means and saving our pennies for a rainy day — it’s amazing to realize how powerful this is in, once you connect this value with some understanding of things like simple investing, 401(k), IRA accounts, etc. — it’s so powerful to transition from youth to adult by getting used to saving early. And so hard to make that transition later.
He was constantly serving people — he and my mom were always volunteering around our church when we were growing up, which looking back on, I am so impressed with, because it’s hard just getting young kids to church and home.
Work hard and be proud of your work — he loved to say that “There’s no such thing as extra credit in this house”, meaning that any opportunity to get extra credit in a class wasn’t optional — it was expected we’d take every opportunity we were given to succeed.
He had great little nuggets of wisdom to share all the time, like:
I look back on so many things my father taught me over the years, and I am so thankful that he was my dad!
A dedicated employee who will work harder, with a greater sense of urgency (and maybe some extra hours when needed) is great. But what’s much more valuable than someone with that work ethic, is someone who can see when working harder isn’t going to work, and they need to change their approach.
Think about someone using a dull saw to cut a huge pile of wood to build a house — they’ll look at the schedule and say “I don’t have time to sharpen my saw”, which is ridiculous to think about. But we do it all the time when we try to shift into a higher gear and work harder to “dig out” of a busy season/project instead of thinking about what should we change.
It is so valuable as a leader to determine when a situation can be surged over, and when you need different resources/capacity/people/tools to overcome the situation. Years ago, I was helping a Project Manager whose team was continually well below the needed velocity to get to the project’s finish line on time. He kept trying to work nights and weekends to get back on the track, but simple math made it very clear that he could not single-handedly get the project back on track. So we had to investing in both a technology and some additional people to help his team finish — it was easy to easy for those investments on his project; but it was much better to ask for them early in the project’s life as opposed at the end when he would be doomed to fail.
Think about if you need better processes/checklists, or a tool (e.g. software application) to help you be more efficient), or more people on your team, or something else. Take the time to step back and think about how to change the game you’re playing so you can actually win.
There should be a word for people who have the annoying tendency to point at problems and talk about them, instead of trying to actually improve the situation (or maybe there is, and I just don’t know it). I don’t know if you’ve been in a meeting with one of these people, but it’s so frustrating to listen to someone pontificate on and on about some problem and how it’s SO horrible, without trying to come up with any ideas, or asking someone to help them solve the problem, or just stop talking about it so someone else can try to solve the problem.
I’m not saying you should wait to bring a problem to your boss until you have a solution — for some teams/problems that’s a good idea, and for others that’s a horrible idea, and you need to get help for problems. But what I am saying is that you should focus your attention and energy on fixing the problem, or removing the problem, or getting around the problem, or changing the situation so it’s not a problem anymore, or something else productive.
There’s a fundamental pyschology concept called “Bystander Effect“, where a group of people are less likely to help someone in need than when a single person is present. Everyone in the group thinks someone else will/should help the victim, instead of them.
Think about this when you send an email — I recommend you clearly articulate who you want to do what, and ideally only put 1 person in the To: line of the email (even if you have a few people in the CC: line).
If you’re a small business, the world of cyber security can be very overwhelming and intimidating. There are infinite articles you can read about, a long list of cyber security maturity frameworks and concepts you could try to learn, and an overwhelming feeling that you can’t possible actually defend yourself from the hackers all over the place!
Cyber is a big, complex thing that is hard to do — if you’re looking to better defend your organization and you don’t know where to start, I recommend this approach:
Scott Adams, the creator Dilbert, has written about how systems are much more valuable than goals. This concept is incredibly powerful, and there are great, large, complex frameworks for defining and enhancing systems that people and organizations use and manage. Frameworks like ITIL and CMMI do a great job of helping organizations think through all the various aspects of defining process architecture and governance.
However, they’ve often big, intimidating frameworks for a small team looking to become more mature. Something I’ve found a lot of success with is starting with creating a Recurring Activity Matrix (RAM) for teams to write down all the stuff they do more than once, so they can publish a body of knowledge, which helps them be more efficient, collaborate with each more easily, and bring new people onto the team quicker.
I start small with teams, building a simple table with these columns in a wiki platform (e.g. Atlassian Confluence):
Teams usually populate this data initially with a very small list, with early versions having the owner as someone’s job title. But as team’s mature, they start to identify a lot of items that go in this table, and start to break up roles more, so they’re not directly tied to job titles (Holacracy has a great concept related to this called Role vs. Soul).
As teams advance in this, I like to keep building on this — ideas like:
Eventually organizations as they scale will want more complex process management, looking at things like an ITIL Service Catalog or CMMI Organizational Process Definition; but early on the real value is just writing something down and incrementally improving it.
This is great, short article about how 1-800-GOT-JUNK wrote down their key processes, published it in a binder, and used it to rapidly scale a huge franchise business across the country.
I went to the eye doctor recently, after my eye was bothering me. I had slept in my contact lenses for several nights (which I’m prone to do), and my eye started bothering me. In the past, when this happens, I take my contact lenses out, throw them out, and take a few days off of contacts. This time however, my eye was bothering me much more than usual, so I went in to see the eye doctor. I’m glad I did — I had a corneal ulcer, where bacteria had been stuck inside my contact lens. The eye doctor got me a prescription for some antibiotic eye drops and explained how lucky I was, since the ulcer wasn’t on the pupil itself (which can cause people to lose partial sight the rest of their lives!!!)!
The doctor asked me “Do you know you’re not supposed to wear your contacts overnight?” and I explained that I certainly did, but I had no idea what the real risks were — I assumed eye doctors said that, but that my approach to taking a break when my eyes bothered me was fine.
This is a great reminder of how important it is to communicate risks in a tangible, clear way. It’s easy to say “That’s risky” or “This is not a best practice” or “It’s better not to do that”; but if we don’t take the time to truly articulate the possible impacts, explaining both the likelihood of something happening and the impact (severity) if it does happen, very bad things can happen.
Edward Tufte’s book Visual Explanations provides a powerful case study of this concept: Engineers recommended the Space Shuttle Challenger not be launched based on specific weather conditions, but the launch was approved due to a lack of clearly communicating risk.
I’m no expert, but here’s some baby advice for anyone about to have a child:
