On quality and constraints

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 opportunity also had the downside of greater risk in time taken. Limiting the technical debt to just one half of the library, directly involved in the feature, massively reduced the risk and allowed a fairly accurate estimate to be produced - with the added bonus of taking an entire legacy class out of technical debt!

 The second conversation was about a subject close to my heart ... food! and more specifically ready meals. I was discussing with our office manager that the finest ranges are usually limited to being oven cooked and not microwavable, this constraint ensures a level of quality without any change in ingredients. They often "force" you not to microwave the meal by packing it in a foil rather than plastic tray. A clever way of constraining and limiting the options within the system. The same is true of jacket potatoes - you can microwave them, but it won't be as good as an oven baked spud

I think that's one thing that experience teaches you and is expressed through expertise - knowing when to put your ready meal in a foil tray and when plastic is OK. Or to put it another way when the solution has to be framed in a way that repaying the technical debt is a natural consequence of the option.

Further Reading

A vaguely related link on the overpowering nature of choice in the modern world
The tyranny of choice: You choose | The Economist

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CONFERENCE: TTI Summer Forum 2017 – Getting to Grips with GDPR

Image
T his week I was at the Travel Technology Initiative's Summer Forum . The subject was the new EU (and UK!) data protection laws. These are due to come into force in May 2018. It's a large topic where the individual member state's laws and guidance are evolving. There were three main points that I picked up from the presentations. First from Dai Davis , GDPR expert at Percy Crow Davis & Co. His lively presentation talked about how a large part of the change is in how rights communicated. Before this was by "fairness" through registration of usage with a central body. The shift is to transparency by informing individuals directly. This means that the consumer mindset could then shift to match how legislation is framed. For example, with the repetition of many companies holding personally identifiable information now having to inform what they are collecting and how they are processing it. Currently, awareness isn't high and the compensation not high eno
Read more

On HBX and online education

Image
I have written this blog post as a reflection on what has occupied me a lot in the past 3 months. After finishing my Post graduate Certificate in Technol ogy Manage ment with the O pen U niversity I was looking at what to do next in continuing my education - being a life long learner! I was looking at different online plat forms for interesting courses.  I was looking at sites like Coursera and  Future Learn , when I came across a new extension to Harvard Business School and a course they run called HBX CORe. This one paragraph pitch they provide sums it up pretty well: HBX CORe (Credential of Readiness) is a 120-150 hour certificate program on the fundamentals of business from Harvard Business School. CORe is comprised of three courses - Business Analytics, Economics for Managers, and Financial Accounting – developed by leading Harvard Business School faculty and delivered in an active learning environment based on the HBS signature case-based learning model. Sinc
Read more

On performance and environment

Image
Hobbies are a great way to relax and unwind from work. They are also an excellent opportunity to practice some skills and learn about yourself.  Photography shows a clear visual representation of how practice with tools can improve output . Running I have found has taught me a couple of lessons about performance and motivation. Here are my top four Goals are important   An arbitrary goal, doesn't fit in any plan but I feel good Yes, even arbitrary goals . As long as they have a narrative that you can use as a guide. They provide a sense of progress and small achievements to celebrate.  For example as an individual runner, it makes no real difference to my life running 10km just under an hour. Or a bit faster at 51 minutes. But the difference in the sense of pride and achievement in my progress was real.  Your environment matters Periodically I pause from running then have to restart. Sometimes this also involved a house move and I need to find a new route. On one of
Read more