Does IT make you productive (or, are you an existentialist or a fatalist)?

Interesting article in Thinking Faster, just getting around to capturing my comments ... On Requirements "The first reason that business folks don't get what they need from IT is because they aren't sure what they want" The fundamental challenge of capturing and managing knowledge - it's much easier to understand something than it is to describe, document, teach it. Why do so many organizations do knowledge transfer and training by saying "follow that person around for 3 months"? Of course,…

Read More ...

The good and the bad about being a hands-on tech manager

Interesting project that I have to take a deep-dive on this week - has to do with automating a piece of barcode printing software, and integrating it with a newly developed labeling process out in the shop. Project was hitting some significant snags, and I was asked to step in. Here's where hands-on software development skills are a boon and a curse ... The perception is that we're trying to get the forms software to work in a certain way…

Read More ...

Interesting Design Sessions

Had two interesting design sessions yesterday, both of which got me thinking / observing ... Push to Prod A team of techs, working in a Unix / Progress environment (QAD MFG/PRO eB2), reviewing our plans for improving our Dev/Test/Prod cycle for controlling / auditing the movement of source between environments. A little history - we didn't get off to a good start because of two key mistakes: Mistake #1: We started with the concept(s) of Development, Test, and Production environments,…

Read More ...