Part of the Process

Woah, the past six or so months since I last posted to this blog have been a bit hectic in my personal and professional life! I still have about seven draft posts to write up. So hopefully I'm back on track for about one every week or two :-) mild warning for tenuous link and conclusions jumped to ;) Last week I had two conversations on very different subjects that boiled down to the same thing - constraining options (or ways of working) to ensure quality without change the quality of any other part of the system. The first one was entirely work related. One of our project teams is extending a feature that had been sent for design review for input, in my role as an internal technical consultant and as probably the last person to do extensive work in this area (about six years ago!) I followed up and had a chat with the team's senior dev and his team mate. We talked through the possible options and the technical debt that could be repaid. The option with greater opportunit

Well, it's been a while since starting this blog and drafting 5 posts that I've never finished! This is the first proper post and I expect it to be a bit rough and ready as I get used to writing again.  Recently I've been thinking about motivation, more specifically in keeping morale up and motivating a small but busy support team, staffed by junior graduate and student devs. These are talented people with degrees related to their field of work. I'm mindful however that the environment can be high pressure and the learning curve of joining the team steep. I think that true motivation comes from within, but how to unlock it? Reading  Simon Baker's blog on having a goal  today sparked something in my brain, a memory lodged there from one of my Master's courses on managing software development. So looking over my notes I find that Humphrey (1997, p. vii) lists the following elements for successful management of technical staff: 1.                    a challe

Why hello! thanks for stopping by on my blog. I'm not sure I have much to say or that I'll get around to actually writing it with all the avenues for creating on the web these days :-) The thing is that all these different channels on the internet tend to express an aspect of who we are - say the professional, hobbies and interests. I have: Facebook for posting notes to my friends, LinkedIn for shorter posts on matters related to my professional life Google+ , flickr and 500px for photography related matters Twitter for short links on all of the above So why have I started a blog? Well, I'm lucky to work in a field in which I have a strong intellectual interest. I read a lot of blogs, papers and reports on the area I work in. I also have a lot of discussions with my colleagues and observe how the teams I interact with work. Previously I have done a few academic courses to keep my mind ticking over, organise my thoughts and provide a space for writing this down. It'