Author Archives: John
The Power of Planning Ahead
Why do things go wrong? Is it inevitable? To some degree it is, but I think the likelihood, frequency, severity and impact of adverse events can be minimized by several key practices, one of which is planning ahead. Continue reading
A Leadership Philosophy
I think it is critically important for every good leader to have a core set of beliefs about how they go about being a leader – a leadership philosophy. Having an explicit philosophy provides consistency and purpose to the direction … Continue reading
Everyone Doing Their Job
If every employee in our company did their job (as defined in their job description, most recent performance doc, or whatever), would that make us successful as a company? Of course it would – well, at least in theory. That’s … Continue reading
Complimentary Power
It has been a few years now since I read First, Break All the Rules, but I remember it as one of those books that made an impression on me when I first read it, so I recently picked it … Continue reading
Ability to Deliver
This is what software development is all about. So simple in concept, yet seemingly so hard to accomplish. A development organization that can’t deliver what’s needed is a wasteful expense, not to mention a generator of false hope for those … Continue reading
Quality Part 2: Cleaning Up as You Go
Years ago I had an epiphany that has stuck with me to this day. When I went away to grad school, I finally got an apartment of my own and thus had to cook my own meals (this was before … Continue reading
Quality Is Not The QA Group’s Responsibility
Whenever an angry customer complains about a product defect, someone is sure to ask “Why didn’t QA find it?” That’s a logical question based on the assumption that every product has a QA group whose job it is to create … Continue reading
Handoffs
The more handoffs that are required by a process or organization to do its business, the less effective that process or organization is. Said another way, there is an inverse correlation between handoffs and high performance. I think I first … Continue reading
Adding (or Subtracting) Energy
Do you add energy to the organization, or do you absorb energy from it? Or maybe you don’t do either one. I started my blog a long time ago with the intention of focusing primarily on leadership, but most of my … Continue reading
Is Software Development Fun?
This is a question that I really hadn’t thought about explicitly until I came across it in a book recently. While it might seem to be a trivial or even irrelevant question at first, it takes on greater meaning when … Continue reading