Creating a Vision – An Analogy

I’m a big fan of vision and mission statements. Many people think they’re fluff but I truly believe they are valuable tools. I think vision and mission statements are misunderstood, and are really much more difficult to write than one might think. For example should a vision change yearly? When you communicate your vision are

Reward the effort not just the outcome

I came across this again recently and was reminded how important the concept is. It’s easy to call out achievements and successes we see, and of course the bigger the success the more likely we praise. However, we need to also focus on praising the effort in addition to the outcome. Kaizen is a successful

Coffee Notes: How to Build an Agile Dev Team – The GE Way

“Building software in a waterfall approach, where there is a big milestone release at the end of the process, isn’t conducive to success in the modern world, according to top executives from the NYSE and GE.” –Kerner This article by Sean Michael Kerner reviews interviews with Robert Kerner, vice-president at New York Stock Exchange (NYSE),

Coffee Notes: Negotiating Scrum Through Watefall

Here’s an interesting article about how to really deal with many of the challenges faced when dealing with Waterfall cultures and new Agile concepts. In his article Phil Southward lists out many of the key SDLC phases as well as how Agile teams can work through them in a wartefall organization. It’s an interesting and enlightening

Coffee Notes: Offshore 280% more defects

The other day I came across this stat and it was so interesting I wanted to followup on it before I forwarded it on.  According to Michael Mah at the Cutter Consortium offshore IT creates 280% more defects than industry average. Ian Savage reports on Twitter about Mah’s research noting that the industry average of 242