Articles for category: Initiative

April 29, 2020

Greg Thomas

Start Before You Show Up

Before you get to the next meeting, learn about what it is about. Take 5 minutes and think about what is being asked of you. What questions will you ask? What questions will be asked to you? What materials would prove useful to bring? What will you be required to do? How will you present yourself? The goal of any meeting is to accomplish a particular objective and not to have the meeting. The need for the meeting is greater than what can be accomplished via an email. So before you get there, show up and be ready, only then

April 28, 2020

Greg Thomas

Learning New Platforms

When building software on a new platform there is only one thing you need to understand. The Platform. This goes for writing requirements. This goes for doing trials. This goes for testing. This goes for selling it. This goes for marketing it. This goes for running performance tests. This goes for deploying it. This goes for building software on it. If you don’t understand the platform, if you can’t communicate the platform, if don’t know where to tweak the platform and if you aren’t going to learn about the platform. Then you probably shouldn’t be delivering a solution on the

April 10, 2020

Greg Thomas

Is Your Approach Going to Change?

Your team might not be different, but how you are talking to them, engaging with them, joking with them is. The question is whether you are going to change your approach for them or whether you’re going to keep on doing the same old, same old in the hope that it works out.

April 9, 2020

Greg Thomas

How do you Google?

That seems like a strange question but for real how do you do it? Do you type in the first random thought in your head and then see the results are nothing what you hoped for? From there you keep on refining your search, refining your thoughts, focusing your query on what you want and need until you discover what you were looking for? Did the “suggestions” from Google actually help you or just send you down a completely wrong path? Years ago, the error messages to programming bugs were contained in these massive books, they were finite. Someone took

March 31, 2020

Greg Thomas

Know Thy Tools

Working remote isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do, many do and are struggling with it. A quick way to get over the hump of it is to take a moment and learn the tools you need to use to be successful. You’ve already learned these tools in the office setting – how to say Hi to people at the beginning of the day, how to greet people when they enter a meeting, how to walk over to someone’s desk and ask them for help – you’ve learned all these norms because you took the time to learn