Our Approach for Designing Applications
We are currently building an application that will help businesses and the people in them: execute on their strategy, work on their businesses and focus on the most important work first.
Over time our process for designing the application and eventually getting to a working application has changed (and it will probably continue to do so as we move forward). My part of the process ends when it moves into source control, HTML and detailed look and feel. I am focused on capturing two main things in this project:
- The underlying business rules,
- The user interface design (or user experience).
Now to be clear; […]
Fair is Fair (Red Gate and CRTC)
I've been reading a book called "Your Brain At Work" by David Rock lately. It is really about how your brain works (or doesn't) during the day both at work and at home. The concept is that if you understand, you can use the knowledge to your benefit by controlling how you think and react to the world. This is one of the best books I have read for its impact on my own thinking.
In the book the author states that we are wired to know what is fair and what is not. In fact survival often depended […]
Focus On The Good News Folks!
It is a funny thing.
I wrote my last post thinking, “Hey this is good news, I can pretty much do anything I really want to if I am willing to just work at it.” and “As I practice I will get better and better.” These thoughts really pumped me up and I saw opportunity to keep growing as a person… maybe even become great at some things.
A lot of people when they read it went, “I guess I’ll have to settle for not being very good then.”
I’ve always assumed I can do most things if I put my mind to […]
Practice Makes Perfect – Period
To become good, better or great at something we need to practice; right?
But obviously there are some people who have natural talent that slingshots them past everyone else. They can become great at something in a fraction of the time of regular people; it is called talent. These are the instant success stories you hear about all the time… they are born with "the gift".
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? More relevant here… which came first, the talent or the practice?
I was killing a bit of time in a bookstore recently and skimmed the book "Talent Is Overrated: […]
Zap! Make an Improvement
I just remembered something I read in "Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh.
At Zappos they asked every employee to make an improvement to the business every day. The cumulative impact is huge.
If you have 10 employees and every employee makes an improvement to the business every day for a year (say 200 working days), that is 2000 improvements.
This illustrates the power of a group of empowered and motivated people all working towards a common objective; leverage.
What improvement are you making today? Tomorrow?
Fortune Cookies Don’t Lie
I recently got a fortune cookie that said:
"The smallest deed is better than the biggest intention".
In a nutshell: dreams, ideas and intentions are worthless without action towards achieving them.
Far too many starting entrepreneurs are all about the next "greatest idea". They put in place non-disclosure agreements, confidentiality clauses, and non-compete agreements. They are focused so much on protecting the idea and preventing others from stealing it (and thereby building it) that they often don't get past the idea phase.
How can you get customers, investors, employees, etc. if you can't tell anyone your brilliant idea.
Yes, in order to build […]
Sterile Environments Are Depressing
Husbands can now rejoice, there is a scientific explanation for what men have subconsciously understood for years, too much housework sucks.
Apparently our obsession for clean and sterile environments is depressing us. An article I recently read in The Metro said that we are now making our world so clean and sterile that our bodies are being robbed of the multitudes of benign bacteria and germs to fight on a regular basis. This is causing us to become both weaker and in many cases our immune systems actually start attacking our own bodies leading to things like increases in […]
Managing Projects by Outcome
If you have used most popular project management software tools (Microsoft Project, etc.) you notice they encourage two things:
- Schedule (time-line),
- Tasks (and milestones) scheduled on a time-line.
One major issue with time-line based project planning is that the project plan is usually out of date by the end of the first week. Nothing ever goes according to plan so you either spend lot of time changing the plan, or just use the time line as a rough guide; not ideal.
Another common approach is to list all the things that need to get done (tasks or to do's) in a big list and […]
CES Keynote by Microsoft
I took some time today to watch Steve Balmer and his team from Microsoft present at CES in Las Vegas. I was following some people talking about it on Twitter during and after.
What really amazes me is how much we now take amazing advances for granted these days; we expect it instead of being surprised.
Companies used to release everything at one of the big shows. It was the best way to guarantee a large uptake if the reviews went well. Today though, companies spread their announcements out over time to better take advantage of speed to market and critical purchasing […]
Shaping the Path – Building a Business That Reinforces Success (Part 2)
Continued from Part 1…
People and Process
I think the real trick to leadership and correspondingly actual fulfillment doing the work (team member) is to have the right balance of scripting and freedom to choose how you accomplish the work.
Script the things that don’t require creativity, are repetitive, or are really important to follow exactly the same process. Surgeons scrubbing for surgery have a predefined process. They don’t reinvent it each time. This saves having to think about it or the risk of making mistakes.
The same holds true during change. Because you are changing behavior it is sometimes necessary to script the […]