The Urgent Crisis of the Moment has shown up in your inbox in the form of a bug that is going to destroy the company if we don’t get it fixed today. At the moment, there is a surge in pressure to resolve the issue now because it is “hurting” things – maybe not you, but someone else who is dependent upon it. In these moments, there are two things to be done; Alleviating the…
You can’t skip days being a farmer. If you want to sell food at the market in September, you need to till the soil in April, plant in May, water and tend throughout June and July, and pick in August. I most likely have some of the actions and durations mistaken, but you get the picture. You can’t show up in August and do all those things that you should have done months before and…
Someone sent me this error last week. “Could not Process” They asked me if I knew what it was or what it related to. All I could think about was how unhappy that Developer must have been at that point to have written that error with no subsequent log or follow-up information to help the next person to move forward. How bad was their day that this was all they could give?
Processes are meant to be tweaked. To overhaul them, to have the suggestion that they need to be overhauled by one person on their team means one of two things; They don’t understand the process (and thereby think it needs to change) They understand the process (and thereby know it needs to change) You only overhaul once, after that, it’s tweaking on tweaks to keep improving it and making it better. If you’re overhauling your…
Grunt work never has and never will go away. It will always be there, no matter your role, it will exist, in different forms to be sure. Embrace it, learn from it, figure out how to automate it, and do something with it. From grunt work comes our great ideas for what we might work on next.