Category Archives: IT

Learn to Code to Help Your Career

I believe there are big benefits to knowing how to code (programing, software development). What is possible for your organization is often significantly impacted by understanding how to properly use software (and create it, coding, when needed). The lack of … Continue reading

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Agile Story Point Estimation

In agile software development tasks are documented as user stories. Then the level of effort for those stores can be estimated by assigning each story points. The velocity that can be produced in a period (called a sprint, for us … Continue reading

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Pull Consulting: Immediate Management Consulting As You Need It

2013 Update – New method for by the minute consulting with John Hunter. As happens in this fast paced world this service is no longer available. The company has shut down their web site. I think the potential for consulting … Continue reading

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Steve Jobs Discussing Customer Focus at NeXT

Video from 1991 when Steve Jobs was at NeXT. Even with the customer focus however, NeXT failed. But this does show the difficulty in how to truly apply customer focus. You have to be creative. You have examine data. You … Continue reading

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Finding, and Keeping, Good IT People

Finding good IT people, wherever you located globally, is hard. Waiting for the good IT people to apply for positions, is not likely to gain enough good candidates. To get really good IT people you need to actually manage your … Continue reading

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Innovation in Thinking and the Web

Investing time and effort to attract “the right kind” of contributors to a news site He thought we needed to make the same shift with our users – instead of seeing having to engage with them digitally as a time-consuming … Continue reading

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Customer Focus and Internet Travel Search

The internet should make finding airline flight information easy. Instead it is a huge pain. Hipmunk has taken on the challenge of doing this well, and I think they have done a great job. This video provides an excellent view … Continue reading

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Assigning Story Points to Bug Fixes

Agile software development has teams estimate the effort to deliver requests from the product owner. The estimates are done in points (in order to abstract away from hours – as estimates have plenty of variation in how long they will … Continue reading

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The Achilles’ Heel of Agile

Guest post by Jurgen Appelo When I wrote this, I was working in a big open office space in the Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam (see photo). About 100 people work in an office that was the first of its … Continue reading

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Annual Performance Reviews Are Obsolete

Sam Goodner, the CEO of Catapult Systems, wrote about his decision to eliminate the annual performance appraisal. the most critical flaw of our old process was that the feedback itself was too infrequent and too far removed from the actual … Continue reading

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