lessons-learned
Some (unsolicited) advice if you're looking to pick a real estate agent: * Don't pick the first real estate agent you hear about, meet, or get referred to! It's an important decision for a huge financial transaction, so it's well worth your time
leadership
Trillion Dollar Coach is a great read (or listen if you're an audiobook fan like me) about Bill Campbell, a football coach who pivoted mid-career into a business executive in Silicon Valley, as an executive at Apple, a CEO of Intuit, and an executive coach to Steve Jobs
leadership
Most teams have a lot of recurring tasks they have to keep track of, such as an HR team doing annual benefits 'open enrollment', or an IT Service Desk team reviewing weekly automated backup status messages, or an Accounting team doing their monthly book close, or that annual
leadership
It sounds obvious, but as a leader, it's critical to manage a team based on the team's current maturity level. For example, if you have a high-maturity, high-performing team stacked with A+ players who know how to do their roles well, are excellent at the needed
lessons-learned
If you're ever in an environment as a leader where things are crazy-chaotic, and it feels like all you do is play whack-a-mole, constantly putting out fires (issues) reactively and you're not advancing any of your priorities, you need to do something that will feel counter-intuitive.
agile
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
leadership
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
lessons-learned
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
leadership
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
lessons-learned
I'm no expert, but here's some baby advice for anyone about to have a child: 1. Read the book "Baby Bargains" -- it will pay for itself many times over with saving you money on what to register for and what to buy (it
agile
I recently chatted with Tom Cagley on the Software Process and Measurement Podcast (SPaMCAST) about some of my experience helping scale operations at Halfaker using best practices from various business books (e.g. Good to Great), frameworks (e.g. CMMI), techniques (e.g. Agile Scrum), and tools (e.g. JIRA)
agile
Early in my career, I was a leadership development conference (through Lockheed's great Engineering Leadership Development Program), where we played a game called Gold of the Desert Kings -- it was a group game, in a big event space ballroom packed with engineers from all over the country.