Month: November 2015

Certifying useless knowledge

I was listening to someone describe materials one would need to pass a certification. It was a software certification and I heard the person explaining one section of materials–that would be necessary to pass the exam–that caught my attention. He said that he had to cover a topic, even though it’s no longer apropos because the topic was about a…

Don’t waste time reviewing notes after a meeting

We all face meetings and we all like to keep notes. Speciously it seems like a good idea to distill those notes after the fact and type them up from the ones you wrote down. I’ve done this myself for many years. While the exercise holds value in revisiting what was said, I’ve long inveighed the tedium and futility of…

Perfection is insecurity

Perfection is by definition a never-ending pursuit. Perfection necessitates a lack of an objective standard. The pursuit of perfection assumes that one is not yet good enough. And never will be good enough. Perfection is infinity, it’s unobtainable. The only reason one would seek perfection, as opposed to good enough, is that they don’t have a standard and they’re too…

How to overcome hesitation

If you know what you have to do is the right thing to do, but you’re not quite sure how to do it. In other words, you’re hesitant with how to proceed, then you need to stop thinking and just act. For example, when learning to ride the new self balancing scooters, the ones that look like a mini Segway,…

How to get rid of piles of paperwork

If you have a pile of paperwork that you think is valuable but you can’t quite fathom going through at this time, file it away in a manner that at least groups it based on what it’s about. Then wait a few months. Believe me if you don’t find a need for it in 3 months, 6 months or a…

Routinized retrospectives are worthless

There’s immense value in reflecting upon past work and finding ways to grow. However, when you build in a permanent, recurring checkpoint where reflection is mandated you won’t get much out of the process. Perhaps when you’re first building the habit of using a retrospective to improve, you want to pencil it in on a certain basis, at least to…

Moving beyond Agile and Waterfall… Lean, etc

In response to a post Why Agile isn’t the answer., I received a reply that contained: “We need a better name than specification for the what.” I’m not about to suggest that the person replying was asking that we create yet another blanket term like Agile, but I nonetheless responded that we don’t need a better name. The reason we…