Blog

September 21, 2020

Greg Thomas

Learning Something New

It’s hard to learn something new when you see someone mastering it. You watch as they make it look so simple, effortless and without even breaking a sweat. And then you go to do it and you fall on your face. You don’t see the time they put into learning the skill. You don’t see the mistakes they made. You don’t see the tricks they learned. All you see is where they got to. It doesn’t matter how accomplished you are in your area of expertise, when we learn something new, we all go back to square 1. Things to

September 20, 2020

Greg Thomas

But We Didn’t Know?

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 shake my head every time I hear this statement because I know the amount of work that goes into making all of this information available

September 19, 2020

Greg Thomas

The beginning of any Release

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 are brushed off because we have “tons” of time. I’ve been through enough of these meetings to understand the importance of resetting the team once

September 18, 2020

Greg Thomas

Do We Need this Meeting?

Here is the question we are all asking ourselves daily now that our calendars are littered with them – do we need this meeting. Worse – when we leave the meeting and have the answer – “we didn’t need that meeting”. Here is how I’m trying to break up my meeting schedule these days to get back the time to do work; Is there a problem/goal in mind that we are trying to solve? Yes, then we need it. Are you on point? If this is a status meeting (sometimes you can’t get out of them), is the meeting staying

September 17, 2020

Greg Thomas

You Need to Invest (In Your Team)

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 exist and what you need to do to help them overcome them and grow. The more you put into your team, the more they are