My family visit was spectacular. We got my niece married and had a good time all around it. And, we had great weather the entire time we were there. Amazing for August in the mid Atlantic. It was good to get away and now good to be back somewhat refreshed.
The Results are In
What better way to beat the 104 degree heat in Denver than to head to the mountains for a down hill mountain bike race in Winter Park. Out of a field of about 50 Amateur men competitors, I placed first in my age group and first overall. Wahoo! I am especially happy because a while …
Fail Early, Learn Often
While moderating a panel discussion recently, one of the first questions after the introductions was asking to explain what was meant by allowing a team to fail. The important understanding that I think was misunderstood is that failure is not meant to allow releases or products to fail, but to generate learning opportunities to ensure …
Measuring Outputs Expanded
I talked at a high level in my Measure Outputs post about the types of measures that are useful. That post stated broadly that input measures do little to help improve, control or predict performance. In this post, I will expand on that concept to cover in more depth what types of measures focus on …
Why Sign on the Dotted Line
Consulting organizations often require signoff on deliverables to ensure that the client acknowledges that contractual obligations are met. Across organizational lines, these signatures, serve mostly a legal purpose. I often wondered about the use of signoff on deliverables inside of an organization where there is no external relationship. I've seen some development shops average as …
Tips for Distributed Teams
Megan Sumrell has 10 nice tips up on working with remote teams. I like that these tips include a softer side to the remote challenge. To them, I add a few fundamentals: Keep an open IM channel. One to one is great, but a team chat room is even better. Create a room that the …
Agile Aligned Organization
What should an agile organization look like?
Learn from Successes and Failures
Brad Feld has a great post up today titled "What do you Suck At? I love the exercise he describes that asks participants to talk about what they suck at. I was recently listening to a podcast from the Standford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar by Tina Seeling. She has an assignment in one of her …
People Laws (part 2) 7th, 8th, and 9th Laws
This post continues the Laws of Development Physics as related to people elements that impact development.
People Laws (part 1) 6th Law = Optimize the System
"...when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in thought advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be." - Lord Kelvin “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that …
Continue reading "People Laws (part 1) 6th Law = Optimize the System"
Horizon Line Group 