I’ve never been much good at keeping resolutions, they start out strong but then quickly slide.
Let’s see if I can do better this year. Here are my New Years Resolutions:
Look at the Needs of the Business
Too often developers and development managers focus too much on the code and the features and not enough on the business they’re working within.
Mind blowing functionality is worthless if it’s not user friendly, performant, and deployed. I want to keep the goals of the business in mind and make sure that my (and my team’s) goals are aligned with them.
Dedicate Time Each Week to Learn
I’m a great believer in continuous learning, but it’s hard – particularly when there’s firefighting to be done or issues to resolve.
To help me continue to grow as a developer and a manager I want to allocate a little time each week to my CPD.
Get out the Office
I mentioned a few weeks ago The Importance of The Local Development Community so this year I want to make a real effort to attend Agile Yorkshire, Leeds Sharp and a DDD Conference!
I want to meet with clients, put in some face time, and understand how our system (both solution and business) works (or doesn’t) for them.
Find And Exploit Our Bottleneck
If you’ve read The Goal or The Phoenix Project then you’ll have had this one drummed into you. People, teams, and businesses are systems… systems have constraints and bottlenecks, if you want your system to work optimally then you’ll need to find and exploit your bottleneck.
I want do do more work to analyse our Support System to identify the bottlenecks. It’s important for me to understand the big picture. Goldratt tells us that any improvement made anywhere other than the bottleneck is wasted effort, I need to make sure I’ve examined the whole system – customer to customer, if I want to add real value to the business!
The real challenge here will be what to do if the bottlenecks are not within the development team…
Scrutinise Our Signoff Process
Your signoff process is your last chance to avoid walking into a crisis. Finding bugs is not about luck, it’s about procedure and diligence- I want to continue to give ourselves the best chance possible to find those those showstoppers before the customer!
So those are mine, what do you think? What are your professional New Years Resolutions?
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