August 1, 2006
When I read First Break All the Rules, I really identified with their list of 12 questions that differentiate good workplaces and high performers. This list helped articulate some important predictors of success and characteristics of failures I had experienced. Here, I have tried to link this list of 12 questions to what I liked [...]
July 21, 2006
So, a guiding and very freeing philosophy at my former workplace was “make mistakes faster”.
It is part of the iterative and incremental philosophy of development. Instead of doing a huge waterfall process where the team works for months building the perfect design, architecture code, whatever, we should work iteratively and incrementally–deliver paper prototypes, functional prototypes, [...]
July 20, 2006
So, my most excellent friend Chris has loaned me his copy of Stumbling on Happiness. It is giving me interesting things to think about including this:
According to the author, there is something called an “inescapability trigger” that brings our “psychological immune system” of denial, looking to the bright side, and generally improving our experience of [...]
July 5, 2006
My goals for standup are:
actually communicate
get remote folks more familiar with each other (make Chicago and Berlin friends ;))
provide a forum so that I can act less as a clearinghouse/sole gate for communicating with remote folks (though I realize this is much of my job and will continue to be a big part)
We’ve moved to [...]
June 29, 2006
So, a “stand-up” meeting is a communication ritual from Extreme Programming (XP). The developers were sick of long, boring meetings wasting all their time, so someone came up with the idea of ritualizing a quick and productive status meeting. Stand-up has to be short because no one is allowed to sit down.
I believe in stand-up, [...]
June 25, 2006
Last Thursday I had breakfast with a local usability guru. We caught up a bit on what each other have been doing, and he said, to my astonishment, the above line. I suppose I’m astonished because I feel like I’ve been in a kind of exploration free-fall for the last two years. I actually stopped, [...]
June 23, 2006
Four months ago (March, 2006), I signed on to be Director of Operations at a small web company.
Tonight, I had dinner with a friend and former colleague. We’re both project managers and we both left an established XP shop in the beginning of this year. We compared notes on what we have tried in our [...]
not particularly objective musings on odds and ends - Dunrie Greiling, Ann Arbor, MI 48103