Articles for category: Drive

November 18, 2021

Greg Thomas

The Plan Takes Time

I used to work with someone who had an email signature that read – “Your failure to plan does not constitute an emergency on my part”. When I would be up late fixing bugs, I would come back to this line and think about this line – “whose emergency is this?”. You can’t plan for everything, but you can plan for your need. I recently finished a month-long planning and strategy session with a client.  At the end of it, they wanted all the answers, all the plans, everything laid out from them from A to B.  I sensed this,

November 16, 2021

Greg Thomas

But do we all agree?

I’ve been in a few meetings over the past few months where a question is asked (a simple one, i.e., where we are at), and the responses are varied from all points of the delivery. This is good to have varying responses, however, the problem is that they don’t have anything to tie each other together. What are we releasing? When are we releasing it? What are the most important issues? Does the customer agree? These are the core threads that can pull those responses together so that when the discussion goes around the room another time, we have a

November 13, 2021

Greg Thomas

The Leaving Game

When you’ve made the decision somewhere you have a few options in front of you.. Leave in a Blaze of Glory – let everyone know you’re leaving, you’re fed up, they should have listened to you and now they’ll regret. Stop doing Everything and Anything – collect your paycheck, let them see what happens when you aren’t doing anything. Set them up for Success – you know there is going to be a hole where you used to be (c’mon, it’s you) so set them up for success, help them get better, they might not listen to you, but that’s

November 8, 2021

Greg Thomas

Where You Need to Be

At this moment, where do you need to be? Where does your team need you to be? Are those two questions in direct opposition to each other? If they are, that might be part of the challenge you are having in not only leading yourself and but your team as well.

November 6, 2021

Greg Thomas

Clarity in Arguments

As Developers, we put in a ton of effort into naming things. We focus on the case of how we name it, we debate between prefixes and suffixes of how we name them and whether they should be short or long. Great effort gets put into making the arguments of our methods and functions as clear and concise as possible. The same should be done with our team and stakeholders as well – providing clear arguments and paths to what we are trying to accomplish.