Does this seem familiar? Months before a deadline, the team is relaxed and responds to problems with: “Don’t worry!  We’ve got months to deal with that!”  As months turn into weeks, issues get addressed along the way, but some of the really hard problems continue to hang around. Finally, when the deadline is days away, […]

Working on an intense project is hard work but in the end it is worth it when you know your team will ship something of which you will all be proud.  After each milestone, it is very important to remember to take time to renew or “sharpen the saw” as Stephen Covey wrote in The […]

The following comment was submitted on one of my blog articles. It’s quite a rant about Agile, so I thought it was worth addressing as a full post. Agile is not always implemented in a good way or at the point in the life of an application/product where it can be useful and not disruptive. […]

Have you ever found yourself in a “can’t win” situation at work?  You are working hard, doing your best, but yet things still seem to be going wrong.  What do you do?  Be a superhero and try to fix it yourself?  Or do you reach out and ask for help? Contrary to popular belief, asking […]

As my project is gearing up to go into Production, we are starting to review a lot of applications.  Considering how many resume and job search resources are available online, it is both funny and frustrating to see how many potentially promising candidates sabotage their chances of getting an interview.  Even with the competition for […]

It’s performance evaluation season at my company and I have been working long hours to get all of them done.  I have read a lot of articles that are strongly against performance evaluations because of the damage they can do to individual motivation and team dynamics. Having been the recipient of demotivating evaluations (even though […]