I always cringe a bit inside when I hear this statement. It’s generally applied as an effect to a cause that just happened. A release is late because an interface-breaking library was implemented that pushed things back. Requirements are taking longer to deliver then expected. QA is finding more bugs than they originally planned for. People are stretched too thin because they are doing work across multiple releases and branches at the same time. I…
This is how I imagine the beginning of any software release. Birds chirping because it’s the first thing we’re doing this morning is kicking this project off. There is fresh fruit and bagels on the table because nothing reminds you more of something brand new than fresh fruit. Everyone is in a great mood, primarily because nothing has had a chance to go wrong yet. Everything and anything is possible – any risks that exist…
If you are not asking yourself each week what you can be doing your team. You’re not leading your team. Every week, you need to take stock of where they were the week before and what they need to be focused on this week. You need to look at what is on their plate and judge if it is plausible for them to finish. You need to be identifying where the gaps in your team…
There was a time when I believed that the Forwarder was an email client (or rather a person behind an email client) that would read and email forward it to someone else with the tagline – “FYI”. This FYI represented so much ambiguity that it made you question; What am I being asked to do?Do I need to respond to this?Do I read it and move on with my day?Do I get involved? But now…
The amount of meetings you used to have, were constrained by the physical limitations around you. Startups are, generally, in smaller places, so they start off with smaller and less meetings. They simply can’t have meetings all the time because if they did, they’d be having them on Tim’s desk or besides Sales when they are on a call. Instead they are informal. When a startup gets a dedicated meeting room, meetings ramp up and…