On Friday, 21 October 2016, many internet users could not reach marquee internet destinations like Amazon Web Services, Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, Slack, PayPal, and many others. Why not? Dyn, a large Domain Name Service (DNS) provider, was under attack.
At roughly 7:00am North American...
Read more...Years ago I was involved in trying to figure out how to use an in-house system to replace two cobbled-together commercial products. I know, I know, everyone thinks it's supposed to go the other way, but in this case, the in-house-developed system was far superior. It was already serving a...
Read more...Over the years, I’ve been involved in a number of technical due diligence exercises. They’ve ranged from assessing an organisation’s information technology where the primary product or service was not technology related, all the way to examining companies where the main product or service was...
Read more...Years ago, very shortly after I’d taken over management of a new team, there was to be a demonstration of a new set of features that my team had developed. The demonstration was for the heads of the business areas that would be using those new features. The...
Read more...Years ago we had to implement some business functionality into a large trading and settlement system that was for tax reporting and withholding. I met with the leader of the release team and his head designer for this new feature to review the design, as I...
Read more...What is ‘project change’? It’s anything that deviates from the plan. We often consider change to be only a change in requirements, and indeed that is a change. But there are far more sources of change than that. For example, one of your team members is suddenly...
Read more...Years ago I got a call from our CIO about a project to automate budgeting for our U.S. division. The company made consumer packaged goods, and so the budget was built up from below the SKU level, as different packaging, ingredients, and many other variables had to be taken...
Read more...“The problem with quick and dirty, as some people have said, is that dirty remains long after quick has been forgotten.”[1] Many times in my career I’ve inherited systems where this quote is so applicable. ...
Read more...I came across the expression “hustle provides the cushion” many years ago, and it resonated incredibly with me. It is the antithesis of procrastination, and is I believe a key factor in successful projects.
While I don’t believe in starting a project...
Read more...Failing to plan is planning to fail. And failing to use the plan after it is developed is just as bad as no planning at all. It never fails to surprise me when I see a project manager move into a ‘fly by the seat of their pants’ approach part way through...
Read more...I should start off this segment by defining what I consider “planning” to be. Planning is not just scheduling, although many ‘project managers’ I’ve encountered in my career consider the creation of a project schedule the totality of their planning work. For me...
Read more...A number of years ago, a company for which I was working acquired a competitor. The competitor’s business had to be folded into my company’s operations quickly to stem drastically declining revenue. A very major portion of that folding had to take place in one of the...
Read more...Over the course of my career I’ve managed many projects – from small, straight-forward software development projects for one department in an organisation to global system roll-outs across multiple continents and time-zones. I’ve learned a number of lessons along the way, read some really...
Read more...In order to reward, recognise, and celebrate, of course, you need to know what success looks like. Without understanding what constitutes successfully crossing the finish line, teams struggle to move forward. And, managers will have a very difficult time...
Read more...One book I read relatively early in my management career was Principle Centered Leadership by Stephen Covey. I highly recommend this book to anyone, and especially to those who find themselves in leadership roles. Relatively late in...
Read more...I've spent most of my career managing teams in one form or another. Like most of us, having experienced a variety of team cultures and dynamics, I knew what appealed to me, and what resulted in grumbling from me and my colleagues. While I certainly wasn't a star at creating effective teams...
Read more...I've had the domain sdsheridan.com for a few years now, and ironically never really did anything with it. Well, it's time to change that, and so with a new year comes a re-launch of my domain, and the promise to at least attempt to keep it current and topical. I've also published on this site...
Read more...Look for the following in the overall agreement (either yours or the vendor’s).
As you review the license agreement, look for the following:
A few years ago I wrote a guide for a client on what the lead negotiators needed to think about when negotiating a contract for a piece of software that was going to be highly strategic to the client's business. This post is largely from that set of guidelines, itself which came from a number...
Read more...No software engineering shop is perfect, as human beings are by nature prone to error. So, not only do we want to determine what we can do to avoid defects altogether, but failing that, what can we do better to “nip them in the bud”, before they explode in...
Read more...In order to know what engineering processes to target and how, in order to not introduce defects in the first place and completely avoid the costs of poor software quality, we need to understand where defects come from, how...
Read more...Number-of-defects is a poor measure of (lack of) software quality. ‘Size’ of the defect (what it takes to repair it) and severity of the defect (what damage it caused) are better indicators. When severity can be quantified in terms of cost, the sum of cost-to-fix and...
Read more...A number of years ago, on my first day of my new job as vice president of the software development team of a leading financial institution, as I was being introduced to my peers in the operations area, one of the supervisors in the customer relations call centre came hustling...
Read more...There’s been a lot of chatter over the past couple of weeks around Facebook, privacy, and just what should it all be about anyway. As with so many things, there is the spin, and then amongst all the noise, there is some fact.
Facebook would have us believe that the changes that it has...
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