As an architect observing and helping multiple teams build and maintain enterprise software, sometimes I think I am living in an alternate reality. I see systems fail on a nearly daily basis, teams under intense schedule pressure, a lack of awareness of basic developer quality practices, repeated failures of communication, servers taking weeks to provision, [...]
Posts Tagged ‘continuous improvement’
Recently I have been doing an architectural assessment of an application for an organization I have not worked with before. As I have been writing up my findings, I have noticed that the portion of my analysis causing the most difficulty for me is in coming up with recommendations. Why is this? In this context [...]
- Add Comment
- No Comments
- Permalink
I have been familiar with the Scrum method for developing software for a number of years. Scrum is a simple tool: it defines just a few meetings, artifacts, and roles. So the basic mechanics of scrum are easy to pick up. Using Scrum to its fullest potential, however, requires a much deeper understanding. One area [...]
- Add Comment
- No Comments
- Permalink
I forget from which source I first heard about the term “near miss” in health care, but I found the concept intriguing. A near miss is a problem with the safe delivery of care that did not actually affect the patient. Here is an example: a pharmacist in a hospital misreads the doctor’s diagnosis and [...]
- Add Comment
- No Comments
- Permalink
People from time to time ask me how I manage to write all the articles on my website despite having a family and a demanding full-time job. My simplistic, off-the-cuff answer is “one sentence at a time” :) Seriously, however, over the years I have developed a personal writing system that I would like to [...]
What if I told you there was only one activity you needed to do to become an expert, high-performing software developer? You might be doubtful of my claim. Yet this is exactly the finding reported in the book Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. Across multiple professions research points to the same activity as being [...]
I will be presenting my continuous improvement framework at Agile Edmonton at 12:00 noon on January 6, 2009 at the IBM Innovation Center (10044-108th Street Edmonton, Alberta). In addition to the framework itself I will be covering lessons learned from championing and implementing continuous improvement. I look forward to seeing you there!
- Add Comment
- No Comments
- Permalink
For over one year now I have been championing continuous improvement across multiple teams. I have seen and struggled with various problems, some of which I have seen reoccur time and time again, and I have identified successful strategies for dealing with some of these issues. In this article I present my lessons learned in [...]
If you believe like I do that organizations must develop a culture of continuous improvement in order to flourish, then the question is how to achieve this. Throughout my career and especially in the last few years I have promoted effective software development practices and a philosophy of learning and growing as a professional. I [...]
- Add Comment
- No Comments
- Permalink
If, like me, you believe strongly in championing continuous improvement then an obvious question is how exactly can continuous improvement be implemented? One answer I have come up with is something I call continuous improvement experiments – CIE for short. What is a Continuous Improvement Experiment? The idea is simple: a CIE provides guidance via [...]
- Add Comment
- No Comments
- Permalink
I am pleased to announce that I am a Champion of Continuous Improvement. The story of how I became such a champion starts a few months ago when I spent some time reflecting on my mission / purpose / vision as a professional software developer and architect. I was inspired to do so by two [...]
- Add Comment
- No Comments
- Permalink
Root cause analysis is an important activity whenever a problem occurs – whether it is a defect, an operational outage, or something else. Whatever the problem, your objective should be to not only resolve the issue but also prevent it from reoccurring in the future. To do this, you need to determine the root cause [...]
After writing my article on Perpetual Learning, I came across the same concept in the book Core Performance Essentials by Mark Verstegen and Pete Williams (a fitness and nutrition book). To quote from the book: “It’s like the Japanese concept of Kaizen, which we translate in this country as ‘continuous improvement’. In America, we tend [...]
- Add Comment
- No Comments
- Permalink
