I’ve been doing some plumbing work it’s been driving me nuts how many different connections there are between different taps, connectors, pipes, and diameters and then there are all the materials and how you work to connect them all. It feels as though I’m trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together in the hopes that I’m going to get the perfect alignment to happen but the fun part is, you can’t test it at all…
When doing an Options Analysis of a variety of solutions, it’s imperative that before you start, everyone agrees on what options you are looking at. If you don’t, the road ahead will be much harder than if they all agreed to what you were looking at ahead of time. Save yourself the pain, if needs be, and break it out into two different discussions – what the options are and what the analysis is.
Triaging bugs isn’t the easiest thing in the world – we all have different views of Priority and Severity and of course, there are always exceptions. And the exceptions will kill you and lock you into endless debates of what-ifs. But if you think about the way triage works outside of software (where it originally originated) the goal has never been to make a perfect delivery system, the goal is to get the patient (our…
You assume that when everyone arrives at the “Brainstorming” session that of course, they are all ready to “Brainstorm”. All ready to hear each other’s opinions. All ready to work together and bat around ideas. But it’s not always the case at which point you need to reiterate the goals of the session, why you are there, what you hope to achieve and what the end goal is moving forward.
Brainstorms are about ideas. They are about getting people into a room, or on a call, and batting around ideas back and forth – whether they are good or bad – it doesn’t matter. It’s about nothing more than the ideas in a room. And the moment you start to shut them down, all that energy goes out the door. And you’re left with the worst ideas.