Johanna Rothman in Maintaining Project Agility has a positive take on the skill of estimating:
“In my experience, most engineers with more than five years of experience are actually fairly good estimators, they just can’t estimate the amount of weekly bureaucracy they have to deal with.”
Apple doesn’t belong in a Corporate environment, right? Well someone forgot to tell Wells Fargo, SAP, and Mercedes-Benz:
“[They] are using the tablet-style computer for tasks as varied as accessing work e-mail, approving shipping orders, and calling up on-the-spot auto-finance options.”
It takes time to change things, but now that Apple is bigger than Microsoft, one has to wonder how long corporate will continue to cling to the underdog.
Beliefs: The framework of things you hold to be true, and of which form the basis for all of your decisions.
Here are some of mine. Which do you disagree with? Why?
Workarounds are never a good thing. Short term workarounds are never short-term. They should be avoided. Do it right the first time, and if you can’t due to time or budget, delay the project. I hate technical debt.
Plan as you go is more appropriate to life and to projects, and returns better results, than planning everything up front (ie agile vs. waterfall). What we are talking about is predicting the future. Sure, you can be somewhat accurate, some of the time. But it’s just a guess. You’ll be more accurate if you don’t predict too far out. If you’re more accurate, you’ll be happier.
The problems of new are less than the problems of the old. On occasion you will run into a bug by upgrading software to the latest version. But I’ve found that on balance, I have far fewer compatibility & stability problems if I keep up to date. And as a bonus, new features!
Buy the well-built item once instead of the cheap thing multiple times. It’s eco-friendly, and you get to have the quality item to use every day. My wife and I had been wearing out a $10 garlic press once every 12 months or so with basic wear and tear — till we bought the Rösle Garlic Press for (at the time) $30. Five years later, it still looks good as new and works brilliantly.
Price is not correlated to the value. Just because it’s expensive doesn’t mean it’s worth a lot. Conversely, just because it’s cheap doesn’t mean it has no value. Open-Source Software, Wikipedia, a walk with your kids – these all have a lot of value, and they don’t cost you a dime.
Deals are rarely worth it. Everything is “on sale”. Everything is discounted. Of course, there are good deals to be had. It’s just that the effort to find and take advantage of the deal is more costly than any savings I might obtain. There is a reason why rebate forms are difficult to complete: it is in the company’s best interest that you never fill them out.
I believe in Scaling Software over Scaling People. See my blip on Techies and The Business, or the whole article here.
The most important attribute to any employee is their willingness and ability to learn. I’ve written about this one a lot. I think learning is the key to innovation, that through mistakes you get better, that Adapting is the Most Crucial Skill You’ll Ever Learn, and that progress (and who doesn’t want progress?) is an act of discovery.
So! What are some of your beliefs?
I’ve said it before and Jonathan Rasmusson said it again:
“Let’s face it. Our industry has had some challenges when it comes to setting expectations around estimates on software projects. It’s not that our estimates are necessarily wrong (though they almost always are). It’s more that too often people have looked to estimates for something they can never give—an accurate prediction of the future. [...] The simple fact is that accurate upfront estimates aren’t possible and we need to stop pretending that they are.“
[emphasis added]
“Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward.”
The same can be seen with fighting fires: They don’t want to try something and fail, and they don’t want to be at fault if they do fail … so hire consultants!
monthly email
RSS 2.0