Articles for category: Leadership

October 10, 2020

Greg Thomas

Identifying Team Drift

There come’s a moment in every team’s lifespan, when they start to drift. They become complacent. They go onto auto-pilot. They start going through the motions. What they build is definitely not what the customer asked for. In short, they drift. Everyone knows how to “wake up” your team, fix the drift, get them back on track and figure out what’s going on (if not, there is a way to fix that). Identifying it before it becomes too late is another task altogether that can be harder for managers, especially new managers to figure out. Some early warning signs include;

October 5, 2020

Greg Thomas

Stop Pushing Things Out

When you had a problem in the office, you’d walk by that person’s desk, sit down, have a chat with them and get the problem resolved. If the issue was raised in the morning (i.e., a delayed project), you’d schedule something for early afternoon to sit down and figure things out. If you passed them in the hall you might stop, have a quick 5 min chat and get things resolved. All of these involved physical cues from working on-site with your team, side-by-side, elbow to elbow – crammed into cubicles that were too small (and we all complained about).

October 4, 2020

Greg Thomas

Priority and Severity

Ask any developer how you sort bugs and they might reply P1/S1 or S1/P1. Priority – the impact to the owner’s of the software Severity – the technical impact to the software Both are critical factors in identifying how bugs are logged. Lately, I’ve taken to updating these definitions to apply to other areas of a project that I might be working on. Priority – impact to the owner Severity – impact to the system that we are working on When we talk about the system it could be the process, the software, the team, whatever, but the question remains

October 2, 2020

Greg Thomas

All Video, All the Time?

I was having a call a few weeks ago where we were trying to figure out how make our meetings more productive. The immediate answer from someone on the call – “Everyone should have video on, we should turn it on by default, I want to see everyone’s faces”. I shut it down and here’s why… Just because I can see your face, it doesn’t mean you are engaged, it just means you are there. When someone has a poor connection, the video saps their audio, which collectively degrades the call. I want to hear what you are talking about,

October 1, 2020

Greg Thomas

Don’t Forget the Little Things

Was at a store the other night and saw a few of these drinks in the grocery area. For some reason, Grape Crush has been the treat over the last few years you didn’t know you would ever want. Goes great with pizza and shawarma. How many little things are you missing right now? What did you used to do with your team that you can’t do anymore? What do miss having? What is your team missing? We’re all missing little things, some things that won’t be back for a long, long time. After six months, I got lucky and

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