Articles for category: Drive

February 11, 2022

Greg Thomas

Sprinting Software

The concept of sprints was never anything new. Don’t take on a lot of work, do in small bits so you can show progress and keep your work cycles short.  We then bundle it up with a bow by showing to the people who are paying us what it is that we’ve built, get feedback, make changes, and move forward. We’ve been living this life for years – it’s called a ToDo list – and every app that is geared towards ToDo lists might as well be called Sprints. Granted we have a little more to undertake in Software, but the

February 9, 2022

Greg Thomas

The Update Meeting

Update Meetings are not the easiest. Whether you’re an attendee or a presenter, there is always something missing, it’s never what you want to hear (but perhaps someone else does) and there is always some critical piece of information “missing” that must be discussed today. But the greatest problem with Update Meetings is that they are scheduled, recurring and pre-ordained, so even when we don’t have an update, we have to get into a room and fill the meeting space and void with an update that simply might not exist, or be good enough to exist. It’s this void that

February 3, 2022

Greg Thomas

Status Update Energy

I  heard this the other day from someone and can’t get it out of my mind – I call it SUE for short. SUE happens when someone enters a meeting and they are so pumped about what they are doing they rattle off status updates. We delivered this. I coded that. Someone is testing this. We are designing this tomorrow. This is good, status updates are good, but now give me the context of that delivery. Did we put in lots of Overtime to meet that delivery? Did we validate that last-second code? Does the team know what they are

January 30, 2022

Greg Thomas

What are we Measuring?

If you don’t know what you are measuring, what the goal is, what matters in the end. What are you building for? How are you building it? And what will it be what you need when you get there? Knowing what you’re moving towards (and your team) is the most important part of your delivery. It might get repetitive as you ask the same questions over and over as your spidey sense tingles when you sense confusion is near.  But the more you ask, the more it will spurn others to ask as well. And if other’s are asking, then

January 28, 2022

Greg Thomas

Meeting Presets

Every meeting, whether it’s Zoom, Meet, or Teams – the same ritual occurs. Setup my layout the way I like it for meetings and presentations, do all the fiddling around. And then go. Why these presets cannot be saved, I’ll never know. Why functions I don’t need or have never used that need to be on, I’ll never know. If you’re throwing features against the wall hoping they’ll stick and no one is using them, you’re probably missing the point. The point being the user is having to clean up features from the floor just to make your product work.