One of my personal experiences in consulting was the two phases.  The first was the proposal phase where on made commitments to deliver certain things.  The second phase was when the client said yes, and now you had to deliver on the promises.  I always found the accept

Having just about completed my upgrade I am constantly surprised how people throw this word out at any chance they can get. I am starting to feel that this is becoming testing’s non-word.  In a world of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) we should be able to evolve to a ne

How do you really understand a business process?  Often what the initial analysis reveals is not exactly what is required and you are flooded with change request even before the system sees the light of day.  One solution to this problem is to produce a working prototype whi

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

How good are the questions you asked people?  Two simple categories of questions are open and closed.  Closed questions are one that require a very specific answer.  For example "Where do you live?"  or "Who do you work for".  These really

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

One of Peter Senge’s learning disabilities of organizations is the myth of the management committee.   How many times have you said to yourself or others "Management should ……."  We seem to have the perception that management’s role is

Another of Senge’s five disciplines of a learning organization is Shared Vision.  Initially my reaction was this was obvious and every CEO shares his vision with the troops.  Senge did not mean sharing a vision.  He means a learning organization truly has a vision

I think in most organizations we have too many meeting.  Often meetings are excuses for not action. "We need to get buy in from all the key participants."  I suggest a better way of moving forward is to have working sessions that are meant to create action.  A

I have been working on an Enterprise upgrade project for the past 8 weeks and working to leverage the rapid results approach to try and move this faster. Throughout the project Graham has heard of me referring to this as herding cats.  When I was at EDS, they ran an ad campaign t