Three Tips for Coping when Change Might Make You Nuts (Start with Yourself) Given COVID-19, whatever we “knew” about our organizations or work is out the window now. I thought I might help with this three-part series about how you can manage in this time of crazy-making change. This three-part series is: How you can help […]
You’re “working” from home. The kids are home, and you’re supposed to lead their schooling. Your spouse is home. And, you’re not supposed to go anywhere. Yeah, COVID-19 reality stinks. You CANNOT work the same way you did before. Expecting people to “just” pick up where they left off? Nah. Unreasonable expectations. Here’s what you
Yesterday, you worked in an office with everyone else. Today, you’re supposed to work from home—and so is the rest of your team. And not just for the next few days, but for the next few weeks. What tools do you need? My list of the most important tools: A good microphone and headset so
If you’re like many of the teams I meet, you’ve sort of got a handle on things. You can release. Your product mostly works. And, then Something Happens. And, your team has trouble recovering. That’s brittleness in the system. You can build resilience as a team. In this post, I’ll summarize how your team can
When I started this series about team brittleness and resilience, I expected to discuss winter weather in the Boston area. Every year, we expect several large snowstorms. And, when it snows hard and long, we should stay off the roads so the plows can clear the snow. The organization and team I wrote about in
This series is about helping a team create a less brittle environment—more resilience. Part 1 was about individual work. This part is about shortening feedback loops. Brief description of the problem at a recent client: Person A checked in code that broke an “unrelated” part of the system. I’ll call this checking in code in
I’ve been working with clients who have brittle environments. Their brittleness doesn’t show up all the time. When everything is good, they’re able to finish work and deliver. But, someone checks in code that breaks something “over there.” Or, someone gets pulled off to work on production support issues and is no longer available to
Collecting data isn’t free. There’s a cost to every piece of data. There’s also value. How do we balance the cost and value of data? As with all juicy questions, it depends. And, in general, the easier the data is to collect, the less value there is in the data. Examples of Useless and Cheap
Three Secrets to Building Your Influence, Part 3, Shared Interests If you want to change anything in your organization, you need to influence at least one other person to succeed. I wrote about showing your competence in Part 1. Part 2 was about building trust. Now, let’s talk about creating win-wins with shared interests. I bet you’ve met people who
A client wants to know how best to calculate their software capitalization. They had a “standard” approach when they used waterfall. They no longer have all waterfall projects. They’ve started to use agile approaches. And, the projects don’t all look the same. Being somewhere in the middle means they’re having trouble reasoning about capitalization. Why