Leadership - Surfing the Cloud

Surfing the Cloud

Leadership

A collection of 17 posts

Sisyphus and Continuous Delivery

Sisyphus and Continuous Delivery

Like Sisyphus, damned to push an enormous boulder up a hill each day only to watch it roll back down, those of us in the Technology industry are compelled with a similar burden in the way we used to manage software, in the world of monolithic/waterfall software delivery — and

How Do You Measure a Good Software Engineer?

How Do You Measure a Good Software Engineer?

How do you know if you have somebody good at tech, or if they are just good at faking it? This is a frequent problem many tech managers are faced with. If you aren't technical, how can you tell the quality people from the fakers? In many other

Effective Tech Meetings - Avoiding the Disaster

Effective Tech Meetings - Avoiding the Disaster

The format of your meeting, or how you run the discussion, is more important than you may think. With design and technology people, it is important that meetings and communication happen in a productive manner because they can easily digress with different personality types. Meetings are critical to good communication

The Importance of Empathy

The Importance of Empathy

Simon Sinek succinctly captures many leadership challenges faced today in his talk on Empathy and Perspective. This is an even greater challenge in the Technology Industry! A few points that resonate: * 1:30 - taking care of people in our charge, not being in charge * 7:32 - What Empathy

DBS: Powerful Agile Scoping

DBS: Powerful Agile Scoping

The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a powerful tool to help scope work at any level – when used properly. But it is usually mis-understood (everybody does work breakdowns, right?); and perhaps because it is listed in an outline format, many consider it a waterfall tool. See also: the Agile Deceit.

Do you have good Tech Culture?

Do you have good Tech Culture?

Work culture is far more critical to our success than work environment, yet it is more often glossed over because it deals with the problematic interpersonal challenges that are never easy to resolve. Have you considered the difference?

Who does most of your work?

Who does most of your work?

Price's law observes that from any given group, half of the work is done by a minor fraction of the whole (specifically 50% of the work is done by a square root of the body). Jordan Peterson calls this fractional subset the horrible people, for who else could

Why Is Design So Hard?

Why Is Design So Hard?

Why do we struggle to figure the right way to build things? Even more so in the Tech industry? Design Thinking is a way of thinking that has powerful outcomes when it is a part of our behavior. Its pattern is found in many places, such as the UX movement.

Four Principles of DevOps

Four Principles of DevOps

DevOps is a very charged word in the industry right now. There is a lot of information and opinions available and not everybody wants to go read several books just to get an idea of what we are talking about (a TL;DR problem). Because of this, I think a

The Courage of being Different

The Courage of being Different

We often hear about the challenge women face in STEM, but I wonder how much we really recognize what it is? I'm a male, in a field of men. Around me what is the norm is the frequency of men, what we don't recognize is how

Remote Work Success!

Remote Work Success!

From time to time situations may call for working remotely, but working remotely comes with its own challenges — on both the remote worker and the in-office workforce. Here are some suggestions for helping this to be a positive experience for all. 1. Hyper Communicate First and foremost, when working remotely,

The Agile Deceit

The Agile Deceit

Understanding Feature vs Deliverable Discord In software development, there is a challenge which, at its root, is about the difference between a feature (described from a user's perspective as something a user needs) and a deliverable (the actual "thing" that is made). If you feel these

Delegate with Success

Delegate with Success

Delegation is something we all want to do, yet we find it challenging. We recognize that we cannot do everything, but it is hard to pass off important things to others. Can we trust they will do it right? Or they will do it at all? The deeper problem is

Fox in the Henhouse

Fox in the Henhouse

There is a renown rivalry in Software Development as polarized as the Hatfield and McCoy's. As long as there has been software, there has existed two factions: the Developers, and the Administrators (also known as Operations). The Developers just want to write code and get it into Production.

The Power of Sustainment

The Power of Sustainment

I have come to appreciate a simple facet of Relationships called Sustainment. The concept is seemingly obvious, yet so often lost and forgotten. Simply put, one must always provide respect upwards to leadership, laterally to peers, and downwards to subordinates. The Withering Countermand If you have ever been in the

Leadership Domains

Leadership Domains

Effective change can only be made with a solid understanding of your organization, and this involves understanding how people behave--these are defined as Leadership Domains and Behavioral Domains. There are three common domains of leadership responsibility in a project: Motivation, Design, and Tracking. These domains come with a variety of

Behavioral Domains

Behavioral Domains

Just as leadership has three common domains, the same goes for how people within an organization tend to think and behave. These are the Behavioral Domains and are commonly described as: Operations, Engineering and Architecture. What varies is how each of these are defined within an organization. What is one