geordee

Investing in Time

Time is money. It’s much more than that. Money if not invested shrinks over a period of time. Time vanishes.

Like money, time is another resource which is limited and cannot be accumulated. Investment typically converts a resource into another form, which can be preserved, accumulated and grown – look at how money is invested. In the same way time can be invested by converting it into something that can be preserved.

To me investing time is to best utilize time to build up knowledge, skills, relationships etc. Now the economy is down. There is little money to invest, and...

An Introspection

Here is Google’s Marissa Mayer, how she went on building her team. “I like to hire people who have two traits. They’re smart, and they get things done.”

That comes from Joel Spolsky’s The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing. Today I just asked myself again – am I getting things done smartly?

Certain Uncertainties

It has been a long time since I posted last. These were busy days with a lot of changes happening in the personal and work lives. I have written about changes earlier, but this time I observed something different. A change unsettles, it creates uncertainty, ambiguity and at the core of it these uncertain, ambiguous times and situations makes people difficult to accept change.

Some of us dealt with changes from young ages – changes in school, friends, house, cities – especially those who moved around a lot. But some of us did not. Whether we faced changing situations or...

As Late As Possible

The early bird gets the worm! Common wisdom suggests to get things done as early as possible. Everyday I see people – tuned to this wisdom – rushing on the road, into the elevators, around the vending machines, fretting and fidgeting about the seconds lost. I used to have a manager who was obsessed about every minute in the schedule which ultimately caused huge reworks and led to exhaustion of the team in all sense.

As late as possible is not a new strategy. It is well-known, documented, implemented and practised. However, many of us do not see it as...

No Risk, No Glory!

During a recent discussion on risk management, I suddenly realized that we tend to see risks too negatively. We were trying to enumerate risks and it was easy for everyone to come up with negative risks (threats) and not so in exploring positive risks. May be we do not want to call it risks; we prefer the word opportunities – it sounds a lot more positive.

But, isn’t there an inherent threat in every opportunity? Isn’t there an opportunity in every threat? There is, and this is not something new! A little search in the internet gave me some food...

Time and Talent

The two basic questions in any project/task are – are we doing it in time, using the estimated/allocated effort? Most of the important metrics are then derived out of these parameters – time & talent, as I like to call it. Time & talent are curiously unique while being the very basic parameters of any project.

The most intriguing aspect of time is that we cannot save time. We may be able to – in the most simplistic sense – if our project does not have any dependencies on anything in the world, which is not real. The other option...

The All-rounders

As today’s professional world is adopting a knowledge-intensive culture, it is tough to find a right combination that covers the depth and the breadth of a specific area of knowledge. Conventionally, we relied on deep, explicit, documented knowledge as in the case of research and development projects. But in recent times knowledge acquisition has become broader because of mainly two reasons.

Firstly, technology has helped distributing information wide and far and power of knowledge has become evident in activities beyond research and development. People then needed to acquire knowledge from more than one domain and were restricted in the depth...

Value Addition

Howard Artrip – a manager in Toyota – knows what he does. He knows when he gets up, how long he takes to get ready and get to work. He smiles when he says “I’ve maximized my sleep time”. Toyota’s philosophy of continuous improvement is his personal statement.

Sometime back, I was talking to an engineer from a highly capable and mature company about what he thinks about quality. At the end of a very colorful description about the practices and processes, he confessed that it is difficult to follow them all. It was a...

Well Begun, Half Done

It is a very old saying of Aristotle – well begun is half done. We find this true in many fields, especially when it comes to accomplish a certain goal – whether it is in studies, sports or projects.

We have developed and mastered many techniques and processes to execute a project. But we deal with project initiation with a bit of laxity. In the height of dramatic events involved in realizing a project, we sometimes fail to see the fine cracks that are being developed – in terms of missing out details, under-estimating functionalities, setting aggressive timelines etc. It...

Manufacturing Software

Various books about software engineering usually compares software development to manufacturing. The comparisons often highlight the differences so as to establish a separate set of processes and methodologies for software development. While it is true to a larger extent in the current scenario, the future of software development may blur the line between manufacturing goods and manufacturing software. What makes software unique could be the replicable nature of end products.

The common conception (or misconception) on the difference between software development and manufacturing is that software development is more intellectual than manufacturing. This was true in the nascent and adolescent...