I took a brief break from writing about software to write about cardboard creations (there will be more), but now I’ll come back to writing about software. Specifically, I want to talk about the small team and how to actually get things done. Continue reading “Getting Things Done With A Small Team”
Month: May 2017
The Eagle Has Landed!
When I was a kid, I sadly was not showered with everything my heart desired. One object of desire for me was the GI Joe USS Flagg (now considered the greatest playset ever), which my parents somehow didn’t think was necessary to have. I really felt that my GI Joes needed the force projection that was an aircraft carrier, so I gathered the cardboard inserts from my dad’s laundered shirts several months and built my own of cardboard and wood. I subsequently used cardboard to build everything that my GI Joes needed. Now that I have kids, I love to use cardboard to make cool stuff for them. So today I’ll take a break from software and talk about building something else.
At the beginning of the year, my son’s PK teachers came to our house for their welcome interview and saw one of several cardboard space ships that I had made that was being housed in my living room due to having been made too wide to pass though doorways. Due, I suspect, to that, a few months later on I got a letter from my son’s class of 4 year-olds asking if I could come in and build something with them.
The PK class had just completed a unit on Leonardo Da Vinci’s flying machines, and I love space, so after some brainstorming for a good project, I thought that building a replica of the Apollo Program Lunar Module would be a cool and fun project to do with the class. Continue reading “The Eagle Has Landed!”
Lean and the Team
In my last post, I talked about comparative advantage and how it can aid you in developing your team and your members’ skills. Now, I’ll talk about another aspect that you need to consider in a lesson from Lean.
I have never described myself as a person who espouses any one single methodology for solving problems, so you won’t ever see me write about the one right way of doing things. Many processes and frameworks were originally designed for one thing, and I have had uneven results applying them to software development. One thing that I have found to be very helpful in developing a team is a specific subset of the Lean concept of muda, which I came to understand when reading the book The Goal.
If you haven’t read this book, it’s highly regarded and a bestseller for making certain business concepts very accessible to the reader. I highly recommend it.
The book has two great takeaways – first is the answer to the question: What is the goal of a company? The answer: To Make Money. It’s a very handy thing to keep in mind.
The second takeaway is the Theory of Constraints. This is the idea that production bottlenecks can take an assembly line and slow it to the speed of its slowest machine. Continue reading “Lean and the Team”