Articles for category: Initiative

August 14, 2020

Greg Thomas

Lead Your Way Out

When people work remotely, it becomes clear – immediately – who is leading the team and who is managing it. Managing a remote team is easy – you check the presence icon and make sure it’s green and work is being done in the ticket system. Leading a remote team is a whole other endeavour and involves checking in with the team, seeing how they are doing, inquiring as to whether they need help, encouraging communication with the team, trying to find new ways to keep things fresh and most importantly rekindling those moments and culture you had in the

August 11, 2020

Greg Thomas

Customer Service in a Pandemic

Since the pandemic began, I’ve had a cracked windshield. It happened innocently enough and at the height of the pandemic, the company was able to come to my house and fix the windshield. Since then, there have been issues with the mirror not holding on. Not sure why, but each time (we’re on our third attempt now), the company has sent someone out to look at it, no matter where my car is and they have replaced the windshield without charge. They’ve apologized, haven’t charged and each time I’ve looked at what they’ve done it’s great work with incredible service.

August 6, 2020

Greg Thomas

But will it work?

I hope so. But if we’re building it for the first time, all I can give you is an educated guess based on what I know and where we’re going. I’ll toss in a dash of experience and know-how but if it’s something brand new you’re asking for and you need a definite answer as to whether it will work the way we are drawing it on the board today and you can’t proceed with that answer. Then I’d suggest a new career, one with more known parameters attached to it. The beauty of software is sometimes things don’t work

August 5, 2020

Greg Thomas

Picking a Software Methodology

I was listening to a great podcast in the car today – “Programming Leadership” – and the topic was on Agile Development. At one point the interviewee on the cast said something along the lines of – “you learn a couple of methodologies, you put them into a toolbox and you pick what works for your organization and you do it.” – I almost pulled the car off to the side of the road. I’ve been saying this for years to teams that are hooked on having to follow a methodology for the sake of following it. Don’t. And this

July 29, 2020

Greg Thomas

Losing a Team Member

If you thought losing a team member who was sitting right beside you was hard. Wait until you lose one that you have been working with remotely for the past four months. To be honest, it doesn’t matter the timeline, what does matter is a member of your team is moving on. There are a lot of things probably running through your head – who are we going to find to replace them, how will we train them, what knowledge is going out the window, how do we get their equipment, etc, etc. These are all logical questions but the