CoffeeCAST – #50 – Teradata Partners 2007 – Wednesday Part 1

Welcome to the 50th CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X Ltd. Live from Las Vegas. Hello again from Vegas – baby.  We are coming close to covering the end of a great week at the Teradata 2007 Partners event.  This is a recap of Part 1 of the Wednesday sessions. There wer

CoffeeCAST – #43 – Collaboration in the Enterprise

Welcome to the 43r CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X Ltd.  I finally had a chance to catch up with Rex Lee who I have known for a while and have been bugging to come onto the CoffeeCAST and he finally submitted on behalf of the kids 😉 We took the time to talk about somethin

New System Introduction

I have been thinking about readiness for change and the way we introduced new systems to our customers.  The general scenario is that we do business analysis to find out what are the requirements for the new system.   We then get key people to sign off on the requiremen

Staying on the Same Side of a Problem

When we are on projects and difficulties arise, often people start to run for cover and blame other parties.  The key to leadership is to keep people focusing on solving the problem as opposed to deciding who is to blame.  When pressure is on, people are tired and working on

Return to Fundementals

When we are dealing with a complex subject like data warehousing and most complex IT areas, I think that returning to the fundamentals of the discipline is really helpful.  One often gets mired down in small details and forget about the principle of good design.  A good desi

Collaboration in the Enterprise

One of the interesting things about social computing and it’s evolution is the applicability in the Enterprise.  As organizations grow, the ability to communicate ideas and learning becomes more difficult. The web has done wonders in enabling this sort of shared conversatio

Governance and SOA

I was having a great conversation with someone over Business Process Modelling tools last night and ultimately got into the discussion around Governance (the other side of his role).  So I thought I would open the conversation a bit and share some thoughts. One of the things I li

Desk Checking 2 – Design Reviews

Another approach to desk checking is code reviews and design reviews.  Both these practices are a great help to the project when they are done with a spirit of ego-less inquiry.  I believe we would save a tremendous amount of time in rework and bugs if we did more design rev

SOA, Governance and Upgrades

I have had the opportunity to work with some excellent people over the last little bit on an upgrade of the underlying technology of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) application.  The team I worked with were amazing.  One of the big lessons I had through the process was

Desk Checking 1

Early in my career I worked on real time systems and many batch processes.  One of the things that myself and others preached was the value of desk checking your program after it was compiled before you ran the program to see if it worked.  I ran into huge resistance from mo