For a long time a core piece of my ‘style’ has been to wander the halls a couple times a day to see what is going on. It’s been effective as a consultant and as a DBA, I get a lot of requests for help as I pass by that I wouldn’t get if they […]
Read more "Managing By Walking Around"A while back I posted about Culture Posters, a technique for trying to build your culture by writing down the core attributes. It’s worth doing, but is a poster enough? How do you get the team to truly absorb it? The CIO I work with right now took those same values and had them put […]
Read more "Culture Cubes"2011-11-13 15:34:38
Read more "Distance Decreases Stress"One of the mistakes I see a lot is teams failing to identify risks early and failing to leave time to deal with the unexpected things that come up. Imagine a project that seems to have work something like this: Task A. Needs to be done 100 times Task B. Needs to be done 2 […]
Read more "Identify Risk Early"I’ve had jobs where I might have one meeting a week, I’ve had a few with some type of daily status meeting, and in my current consulting role I average more than 30 meetings a week. The size of the meeting may range from me and one other person to more than twenty, with the […]
Read more "The Calendar Driven Organization"The Merriam-Webster site has an interesting list of Top 10 Lists, ranging from commonly confused words to things you didn’t know have names. It’s an interesting way to spend a few minutes. Want to grow more than that? Sign up for the reference.com Word of the Day, they offer email, RSS, even Twitter as an […]
Read more "Lists of Words You May Not Know"2011-11-04 02:57:59
Read more "Culture Shock"A lot of my work right now involves going to meetings. A few of them are ones I host, a few are ones that I have to attend, but most of them are led by others and I usually attend only to watch for problems and to have a sense of the progress being made. […]
Read more "Tentative Meetings"With the movie coming out I realized somehow I’d missed reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis. It’s the story of how the Oakland A’s, a team with a very small budget, are able to compete with teams that have the money to get the best players. It’s about statistics which might seem dry, but it’s really […]
Read more "Book Review: Moneyball"Recently I had the luxury of a long afternoon lunch at Chipotle on a Sunday afternoon, catching up on some reading and enjoying fall in Florida (for those who don’t live here, that means a very tolerable 75 degrees in the shade). For those who aren’t Chipotle fans the key ingredient is iced tea. Quiet […]
Read more "Reliving Basic Training, Sort Of"
SQLAndy 