Articles for category: Initiative

January 27, 2022

Greg Thomas

Know Thy Product

I spent a number of hours on the phone, email, and chat with a company I’ve worked with for years trying to get a simple answer to a basic question.  I even had my account representative call me out of the blue and tell me they are here for me if I need any help. I did need help, but they didn’t look at my account to see there was an open case. I updated the case three days in a row (the last day primarily just to ask if anyone was there). After the final online chat that went

January 25, 2022

Greg Thomas

This Week’s IceBreakers

We are still remote. We are still leading our teams remotely. And as much as we would like to accept that this is how things are, we can keep doing the little things that made us better in the first place and got us over those earlier humps. We just need to work at it. Whether it’s a new team or an existing one, some good Icebreakers to get things started; What was your win last week? What did you get out of this weekend? What is your goal for this week? What can we help you with this week?

January 15, 2022

Greg Thomas

Writing Performant Code

The beauty of working on performance problems is that they are the simplest to measure – code still does what it was supposed to do before AND goes faster. WIN! The problem is, we always do this after the fact, after the customer reported it, after we deployed it to QA and it blew up.  After everything went wrong. We don’t do it before. And that’s where we need to start bundling the work into what we do, from the beginning, from the moment we start, from the first day. It will be a change to our coding and process,

January 10, 2022

Greg Thomas

Remote Work Behind the Scenes

Stagehands get the stage ready between takes, they close curtains, cue fog machines, turn on lights – all that great stuff that no one sees happening but is infinitely critical to the success of a play. These people exist in your team and company, but they are harder to see when you are remote because now they are not walking past you to do your job or being “cued” in, they are simply doing it, because they need to do it, because it needs to happen, because this is what they do. Don’t forget these people, celebrate them, make sure

January 9, 2022

Greg Thomas

The Ongoing Agile Dilemma

When asked about the best methodology to follow, my answer is always the same – Common Sense. When constructing a software delivery process always do the following; Do activities that are worth doing. Do activities that provide value to yourself, your team, and your company. Ensure that anyone, at any time can know what is happening. Don’t put it onto the shoulders of one person, the team should share in it. The dilemma in agile is that we think it does all these things, but it doesn’t, just like waterfall doesn’t, just like scrum doesn’t, and just like any other

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