Articles for category: Delivery

December 11, 2022

Greg Thomas

Leave the What Ifs for Later

In every problem you are working on, there are always a number of What Ifs to figure out – after all, it’s a problem – that you don’t know how to solve. But if you give into each and every what if that comes up, you’ll never get to solve the problem and will be left drowning in an innumerable setup of What Ifs for life. Isolate the problem, focus on the immediate, save the What Ifs for when you get deeper and they apply. Remember the goal is to fix the problem, not rebuild the entire system.

December 9, 2022

Greg Thomas

Knowing your Performance Baseline

When doing Performance work, the first place you always need to start with is knowing your baseline. If you don’t know your baseline, you will not know what tools to build, what tests to run, and where to move forward to. How do you hit your baseline? You send it traffic, then you up, measure it, if it’s still working, up it some more.  You keep upping it until it falls over and then you go to the test before where things worked – that’s your baseline. Without a proper baseline, all you are doing is throwing darts in a

December 2, 2022

Greg Thomas

Incremental Gains

They say all gains are meant to be incremental except when you hit that “whoa” moment. Where it finally connects, where you finally break through, where everything completely comes together. At that point it no longer feels like an incremental gain, it feels monumental, it feels huge, it feels like you didn’t just climb up the mountain, but rather ran up it and took a flying leap off of it. But without those small investments, you would have never been able to leap. Don’t doubt the incremental gains simply because you don’t see them immediately, the one day you need

The Idea of Agile

This was the idea behind Agile when it was introduced (written out better than I ever could). But how often do you revisit each one to see how you are doing and where you are with each one? How many of these “steps” have you taken?  Where are you in each one? It’s more than a Sprint but less than a project.  It’s a change that doesn’t happen overnight. When I work with teams that are switching to Agile, I ask each person to pick their Top 4 items from this list.  Everyone is different but it’s hearing from each

November 25, 2022

Greg Thomas

The Anticipation of the Event

Event planners have it tough.  They put everything they can into making something go off smoothly, perfectly, without a hitch and along the way something always goes wrong or off the rails. The secret is that they never let anyone know that something has gone wrong, they never show it on their face, they roll with it, they recover and they move on.  There is a degree of experience worked in there as well as they look for cues to respond to in advance when they are about to happen. We all need to channel our internal event planner on