Author: Rob Broadhead

  • Holiday Productivity – Make Use of Your Time

    Holiday Productivity – Make Use of Your Time

    Holidays are often busy.  We flip between travel, vacation busyness, and gatherings of all sorts.  This leads to very little of substance getting done in our professional lives.  We have earned our vacation or Holiday and feel like its ok to fall behind.  Unfortunately, this often leads to a few hectic days when we return that leave us exhausted and longing for another vacation.  This sad situation does not need to happen.  We can use the dead time that often occurs during these periods to keep up and even manage a little holiday productivity.

    Holiday Productivity Gains Through Content

    The easiest way to keep moving forward is to consume business-related content.  This task is becoming incredibly easy to do.  You can listen to audiobooks and podcasts while traveling or even browse the web.  Better yet, if you have a more relaxed mindset your browsing is more likely to lead you to great new product ideas.  Your work holiday should free you from the weeds of your regular job and allow you to think out of the box.  All of these options are great for travel, waiting in lines at stores, and those long commercial breaks during sporting events.

    A New Crowd

    We do not want to bore people with our work life, but it does often come up.  Luckily, discussing work with friends and family can lead to new insight.  These people that do not live in your work-world have an entirely different perspective on your products, services, and even life.  Thus, they will often provide a point of view or comments that you never considered.  They will also provide feedback at times that can help you judge priorities as well as how to market your wares.  This suggestion is not about finding ways to steer conversations to work, but instead just to pay attention and keep an open mind.  You never know where your next great idea will come from.

    A New Venue

    Another great opportunity during the Holidays is to find a new location to work.  This may be an hour or two with your laptop in the woods, on a lake, or anywhere not in your office.  The change alone may help you be highly productive and start some creative juices flowing.  This action may seem a bit pointless or obsessive about work.  However, it may open you to new locations and higher productivity.  For example, you might find that you work better in a Starbucks or at the library.  Who knows, you might decide you like to avoid being chained to a desk.

    Vacations and Holidays are essential ways to recharge and get away from the work grind.  However, many of us never really get away from work.  We can fight it, or embrace it and use the time that otherwise would be wasted to be productive.  Take advantage of those long lines and waiting for the family to decide on where to eat dinner.  Get a little work done.  Then you can pat yourself on the back for making your return to your job a little less hectic,

     

  • Coworker Turkeys, Hams, and Undesirables

    Coworker Turkeys, Hams, and Undesirables

    It is the time of year where we eat a lot of turkey and ham as well as talking about being gracious to those around us.  Thus, it seems like a good time to look at ways to handle challenging coworkers.  I have worked with all types over the years and hope that the lessons I learned can help you in these situations.  Of course, these challenging coworkers are not all bad.  Many of them make coming to work entertaining.

    The Turkeys and Hams

    Let’s start with the easy ones first.  These are the employees that are competent and personable; they are just not average.  This different focus may be a love of things like gardening, fanaticism about anything (including and particularly sports teams), or annoyances like loud talkers or those that share too much.

    I personally find these co-workers to be a great reason to go to an office.  Yes, they may annoy you at times or even distract you from your work, but life is like that.  We watch TV shows like “The Office” that highlight these characters and help us forget about our worries.  Why not embrace these people as the spice of life that they are.  Just quietly excuse yourself when they are too “spicy” for you to be productive.  If that doesn’t work, look at your phone like it just vibrated and then mumble about a deadline or a meeting you need to attend.

    The key to dealing with these co-workers is to deal with them in moderation.  Try not to get locked in an elevator with them.  In that case, you are on your own.

    The Undesirables

    These are the coworkers that are more than an annoyance.  They are incompetent, offensive, or downright poisonous.  In any case, they are the ones you are sure you would be better without.  Although this is often the case, I do have to warn you about judging your coworker.  Sometimes there are non-work issues that have turned a reasonable person irrational, or politics at work that are the actual problem.  These situations can be a great opportunity as you might be the person that acts like the princess and the frog.  You don’t have to kiss the person, but maybe your personality or interaction is what turns that frog of a coworker into a prince, or at least a good coworker.

    Complications

    Oh, that life was as simple as I have made it out to be in the prior sections.  Unfortunately, it is not.  Sometimes we have employees or managers that are that annoying coworker, or maybe we get stuck on a team with them.  They might even be tied to us in a way that we fail or succeed based on their abilities.  You do have options in these cases as well.

    First, try to keep the interaction simple and focused on work.  It may be hard to ignore the things that make a coworker undesirable, but your job is not always fun either.  Productivity and success at work may be able to offset the negatives.

    Another approach is to be open and honest with the coworker.  Let them know what bothers you and maybe discuss how you can be bothered less.  When you assume the burden instead of putting it on them, you are more likely to get them to help you.  They might even stop the annoying behavior altogether.  For example, I know people that seem chronically rude that turned around almost overnight and have seen bad habits disappear quickly.  It just took someone telling the coworker what the problem was.

    A Perfect Job

    One last thought.  If you happen to work in a job that has none of these people there, then that makes you the one.  Do not be worried about this though.  As I noted earlier, the turkeys and hams of the world give us something to talk about at work.  They give us a reason to go to work, if for no other reason than to witness what that turkey does today.

  • Software Design – Measure Twice and Cut Once

    Software Design – Measure Twice and Cut Once

    It takes very little time in the software business to see that implementation is king.  Software design and similar pursuits that lack a deliverable outside of documentation are pushed aside far too often.  One may look at the poor success rate of software projects and draw a connection.  In this post, I plan on doing exactly that.

     

    Software is Complicated

    The first thing we must agree on is that software has gotten complicated.  There are all kinds of tools that help with coding and implementation.  However, these do not eliminate the challenge of building a useful and stable system.  The lines of code written by humans may be dropping, but the overall size of modern systems is growing all the time.  Thus, software design is needed to plug all of those pieces together and provide a path for the implementation team to build a cohesive system.  There are tens of thousands of “moving parts” in most modern systems and that means the same number of potential points of failure.

    The Vision Problem

    Code complexity is just the technical part of the problem.  The more significant reason for spending time on software design is due to vision.  A client, end-user, stakeholder, and developer all have their vision of a solution.  Some of the differences are due to gaps in knowledge.  For example, a subject matter expert has a deeper understanding of the problems to be solver than other team members.  This is not an issue unless we skip the step where that knowledge is transferred to others.
    A more substantial challenge is that we do not know what we do not.  Thus, there must be a conversation around software design.  The designers and implementation team needs to be on the same page as the end users and stakeholders.  When this does not happen, it is like giving someone directions to meet you, but they use a different (and incorrect) set of instructions.  When the destination or goal is not the same, then failure is almost guaranteed.

    An Old Problem

    The astounding aspect of this situation is that it is an old problem.  Even worse, it is one that has been solved.  The idea of measure twice and cut once goes back a long time.  However, that is precisely the purpose of software design.  In this case, the action is implementation instead of cutting, but it is nearly as final.  When you make the wrong cut on a piece of wood, you need to get new wood.  You can not “un-cut” the wood. Code is more forgiving; you can undo an action.  Unfortunately, we often realize that we need an “undo” far down the road from the mistake.  This leads to a lot of back-tracking, lost work, and potentially a duplication of effort or worse. A good design is likely to point out mistakes earlier when they are far less effort to correct.

    Not An Agile Problem

    I would be remiss if I ended this post without mentioning the Agile process.  The goal of Agile is to reduce overhead related to design and documentation, not eliminate it all together.  A proper Agile approach still includes planning; it just limits the scope to the upcoming implementation.  This can cause issues and turn up problems later than desired.  However, the trade-off is a more fluid approach to creating software and turning a presentation approach to something more like a conversation.  Agile assumes that we cannot correctly create a complete design from step one, but it does still embrace software design.
    Next time you are pressured to dive into implementation have confidence in pushing back.  When you fight for the value of good design, you improve the chances of project success.  After all, that is the ultimate goal of everyone on the team.