Doug Wagner, Author at Sunwapta Solutions

About Doug Wagner

Doug Wagner is an entrepreneur, President and Co-founder of Sunwapta Solutions. Sunwapta's mission is to help businesses transform from surviving to thriving, sustainable growth. From strategy to implementation, this means marketing, sales, managing your brand and delivering consistent value. Get more clients and keep them.

26 May 2008

Making Dough 2 – Effectiveness

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:41:26-06:00May 26th, 2008|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog|

There are other lessons in the prior story as well. Making effective use of your precious time applies to not just business owners and managers.

Employees should strive to make a difference every day. You will spend at least one third of your waking adult life at work, you might as well get the most from it. Besides, by focusing on the most important things and not getting distracted by the noise around you, you are actually increasing your value and long term employability.

Another consideration for everyone is to know if a new skill is useful or if it’s wasted. […]

24 May 2008

Making Dough

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:41:28-06:00May 24th, 2008|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog|

This evening we decided to have tacos for supper. I volunteered to cook dinner.

Started cooking up the lean ground beef, good so far. Got the onions, mushrooms and peppers ready. Looked for soft tortilla shells. None in the fridge or freezer. Looked for hard taco shells, none in cupboard. Now what? We are a 15 minutes drive (each way) from the store.

Well, I decided to make my own taco shells. They did it on survivor so it can’t be that hard. (Peanut gallery said it’s harder than it looks, I didn’t believe her.)

Round one: Found an empty wrapper for […]

22 May 2008

Does a Pair Beat an Ace and a Jack?

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:41:32-06:00May 22nd, 2008|Categories: Doug's Blog, Software Development|

If your organization is like our organization, you were pair programming on and off long before attempting to adopt agile practices. Back then it was called mentoring and solving a difficult issue as a team.

For the last 6 months or so we’ve been using pair programming in a much more XP way on certain projects (driver and navigator, switching roles, etc.).

When the team is estimating work or tracking actual effort, there does not seem to be as much productivity gain involved as we had hoped. Usually the developers are saying, “Hey we like pairing, but I could do the same […]

21 May 2008

Don’t Worry, Be Golfing

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:41:35-06:00May 21st, 2008|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Dream Teams|

In my research and contacts with numerous organizations I’ve come across an interesting observation. The people running things and making long-term decisions about how to handle the emerging demographic shift and labour shortages are generally within a few years of retirement themselves.

This only makes sense. After all, the most experienced people in a large organization by definition have been around a while, and they are entitled to retire after many years of service.

If good succession planning is happening, then perhaps it makes sense to turn this issue over to the candidate who is most likely to be filling the […]

20 May 2008

Echo Louder Than the Boom

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:41:39-06:00May 20th, 2008|Categories: Doug's Blog, Dream Teams|

Demographics play a big role in the world. From marketers to city planners everyone is impacted one way or another by the population makeup. Currently, the most significant impact is thought to come from the Baby Boomers (those born between 1947 and 1966), a bulge in the population distribution affecting Canada and the US the most.

"Boom Bust and Echo" (by David Foot, 1996) outlined how this boom was going to affect Canadians in everything from the aging of the population to health care costs.

Sherry Cooper more recently updated the outlook in “The New Retirement” (2008) and talks about how the […]

16 May 2008

TDD Inaction

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:41:42-06:00May 16th, 2008|Categories: Doug's Blog, Software Development, Uncategorized|

Our company is on the path towards adopting full agile development practices. As the senior “manager” this fits into three of my goals:

Software excellence
Delivering maximum value to clients as soon as possible
Sustainable pace

[…]

Previous 6162