One of my favorite books is called “Blue Ocean Strategy”.  It is a marketing book on how to position strategies, but fun to read because of all the examples. From Chapter 8: ›Social scientists John W. Thibaut and Laurens Walker combined interest of psychology of justice with the study of process ›Created: Procedural Justice ›- […]

A few weeks back I blogged on Quality and Process Drive Execution and Innovation. When I went back to read it again, I realized I did not express the relationship between Execution and Innovation quite right. At the end of last year during the eBay leaders week, one session struck me in particular. Devin Wenig (President […]

“Fail Fast” can be a really useful technique.  There is a Wikipedia description and a famous software engineering article.  But I am going to talk here about “fail fast” with respect to Agile. In “The Art of Agile Development” there is a chapter on Fail Fast.  It starts out It may seem obvious, but failure […]

SOAP versus REST. Which is better? The politically correct answer of course, as always, “it depends”. But that is not what I think – REST is best. On the surface, SOAP has benefits such as it can have a lot more complex data structure submitted as a request compared to REST. REST normally has a […]

Personally, I am a big believer in quality.  I am also a big believer in process.  Why?  I think both improve execution speed (which translated means getting to do more of the fun stuff).  How does it help? Quality: A concept I like is Shu-Ha-Ri. It is from Karate and talks about when to follow […]

Giving feedback is very valuable. It helps people grow and situations improve. Keeping quiet and saying nothing when you see something wrong is not good. But it can be a challenge to give the feedback constructively, just as it can be a challenge to be strong enough to receive feedback. How to Give Feedback Check […]

What does it take to put accountability into practice in an organization?  I was refreshing my memory with staff performance review season coming up again.  Clear accountability can help organizational efficiency.  I think there is always benefit in defining clearer expectations up front (even though this will take effort) and with better measurement of progress […]

This is probably old, but hey – I came from the backwater of Australia! 😉  My sister sends me these sorts of things occasionally… You have to be old enough to remember Abbott and Costello, and too old to REALLY understand computers, to fully appreciate this. For those of us who sometimes get flustered by […]

Poker planning is one scheme often used in Scrum or other Agile methodologies as a way of helping to estimate tasks in a sprint. The way I used it was to get the sprint team together (the people who will do work in the sprint), for them to come up with a proposed list of […]

What makes a good API design? I don’t think there is a single answer to this – there are different approaches that work better in different circumstances. Here are a few examples. Which is better – a broad or narrow API? One approach is to have a broad API – one where there are lots […]