BusinessA tested system and a proven system are different things, and most companies say covered when they mean tested. I built a disaster recovery site over several years with no budget and no headcount, tested it regularly, and never once…
BusinessIf you cannot fill a technical role, the problem may not be your pay or your posting. I went looking for database administrators in the United States and nobody applied, which surprised me at the time.
Behind the BookA system went down on a Friday night and I discovered that twenty years in the industry had produced nobody I could call. I sat in an empty office surrounded by broken computers and worked out what was missing.
BusinessIf you are the person who gets called every time something breaks, the problem is not your availability. The escalation logic lives in your head and nowhere else, so every call has to reach you. Writing that logic down on…
BusinessThe valuable half of an on-call schedule is the part where you are not on it, and that half only exists if the boundary is real.
BusinessModernization gets sold as an opportunity and it almost never arrives as one. It arrives as a bill, when a vendor stops supporting something or a platform can no longer be upgraded.
BusinessEvery platform purchase has a gap between signing and working, and nobody plans for what happens inside it. We bought enterprise middleware during a major migration, and while it was being implemented one of my programmers and his team wrote…
Behind the BookI went into consulting with twenty years of corporate experience and no idea how to run a business. The technical work came naturally and the business side nearly destroyed me. Every mistake in this book is one I made.
BusinessBefore you fund a project to modernize an aging system, find out whether the failures are coming from the software or from the hardware underneath it. We had an old system breaking constantly and running slow. Nobody rewrote a line…
BusinessThe first time you outsource a capability is usually the last decision you get to make about it. I built a private cloud, my team had no hours to learn the technology, so I hired a firm to run it.
Behind the BookA Fortune 50 executive explained how his company had improved customer service by replacing people with chatbots built to frustrate callers into giving up. He said it like a routine process improvement.
BusinessHalfway through an interview session I stop and ask a question that has nothing to do with the chapter: are we still meeting the goal? That break is the difference between a ghostwriter and a manuscript vendor.
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