process

One on One Evolution

Background I'm a "middle manager" where I work, but that means a whole bunch of things. My everyday tasks primarily consist of programming, but I do a bunch of work to interface with other departments and teams, and I play a role in managing people on... well, the "people" side of things. For the latter part, I refer to that as people leadership. I think it's pretty easy to look at some of the aspects of people leadership and dismiss them as "fluffy" or needless... I consider myself a logical/technical thinker, so I have that frame of mind sometimes. However, I do see the value in actually being able to support my team so that they can operate at the best of their abilities. I try to find ways to do that without it seeming to them like I'm doing "fluffy leadership things",…

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April 21, 2015

Leadership / Management / Small Business / Uncategorized

Continuous Improvement – One on One Tweaks

Continuous Improvement - Baby Steps! Our development team at Magnet Forensics focuses a lot on continuous improvement. It's one of the things baked into a retrospective often performed in agile software shops. It's all about acknowledging that no system or process is going to be perfect and that as your landscape changes, a lot of other things will too. The concept of continuous improvement isn't limited to just the software we make or the processes we put in place for doing so. You can apply it to anything that's repeated over time where you can measure positive and negative changes. I figured it was time to apply it to my leadership practices. The One on One I lead a team of software developers at Magnet, but I'm not the boss of any of them. They're all equally my peers and…

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August 11, 2014

Articles / Leadership / Management / Perspective / Small Business / Startups / Uncategorized

Innovation: Weekly Article Dump

Innovation and You There's no denying innovation is important. You often see startups oozing with innovation completely disrupt a market and consequently, there are tons of people out there with dreams to do the same thing. How do you jack up the innovation level in your company? Why is it that startups seem to be so much better at innovating even though multi-million dollar companies have the people and financial resources to throw at R&D? Why do big companies suck at innovating? The answer starts with your employees. Empowering your employees to innovate and embedding innovation in the work culture is key to ensuring your company continues to innovate. With big companies, the focus moves from innovation to profit maximization. Over time though, some small team of highly innovative individuals are going to find a way to do it differently…

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September 21, 2013

Leadership / Management / Perspective / Small Business / Startups / Tips

Cookie Cutters For Projects

Background When you're starting work on a new project or organizing a team to accomplish a goal, there's often a foundation that needs to be established: How is your team structured? What software should we use to help us? How do we set goals? How do we measure our progress ... the list goes on. It's a common challenge that's met by anyone organizing a team or setting off to work on something. So do you copy what worked for someone else by using a cookie cutter approach, or do you wing it and see what happens? My approach when faced with two extremes is usually to aim somewhere in the middle. Cookie Cutters Being a copy-cat and using cookie cutters has some benefits. If something worked for some all-star teams at big successful companies, then why re-invent the…

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August 6, 2013

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