Latest Posts - Page 121 of 194

March 29, 2019March 22, 2019 Lessons Learned From Consulting

Playing Your Professional Role as An Employee or Consultant – Career Intangibles

We all have seen situations in our career where we are asked to play a role. The role is sometimes a broader one than we are used to. However, we can also be asked to play a role that is only a piece of what we can provide. In either case, we need to fulfill the desired role and add value without overstepping our boundaries. Employees are often given more freedom in this area which can make a large challenge as a consultant. Playing Your Professional Role Is About Expectations Every member of a team (whether in sports, business or otherwise) is expected to play a role. That is the function of a team. We bring together disparate skills and... Read more

March 27, 2019March 16, 2019 Lessons Learned From Consulting

Best Practices For Travel and Related Expenses

A side hustle does not preclude travel. Thus, sooner or later you will face the question of how to handle travel and related expenses. You might not have to wait. Your employer may send you away for your day job and you will be faced with the same challenges. Where large companies often have highly detailed processes, procedures, and limits for travel, smaller ones often do not. Therefore, we are left to use our common sense and set expectations. Common Travel and Related Expenses We have to eat and expect a place to stay along with transportation when we travel. These are all standard expenses. However, we can cover these needs on the cheap, or we can live like a... Read more

March 26, 2019April 26, 2020 Become a Better Developer

Performance Tuning Tips and Tricks for Any Code

One of the recurring tasks I see inside projects is performance tuning. The focus is on a database or queries at times but more often it is a code cleanup. We can dig into someone else’s (or our own) code after it has gotten unusable. However, we can also follow the best practices and make it easier on ourselves. Performance Tuning Loops The largest area of tuning opportunities is always going to be in the code that is repeated most often. Thus, loops and similar code constructs should be our first step in improving speed or reducing memory. There are a number of best practices to consider when reviewing the looped code. These suggestions include pulling everything out of the... Read more

March 25, 2019March 16, 2019 Lessons Learned From Consulting

Consulting Intangibles – Building Relationships

An excellent measure of long-term success is how much your customers like you. Thus, building relationships are a critical part of your job. You may have the skills to be able to stay busy without the “personal touch.” However, life will be simpler when you create some advocates along the way. Building Relationships Organically Your primary focus should be solving problems. When you do this, it is hard for people to not be positively biased towards you. We have a hard time disliking those that remove our pain points. On the other hand, a doctor with a bad bedside manner may end up being an alternative decision rather than a primary physician. The good news is that your normal schedule... Read more

March 22, 2019March 10, 2019 Lessons Learned From Consulting

Explicit and Implicit Project Deliverables

We have touched on the idea that there are explicit and implicit project deliverables in most cases. These may be due to our customer simplifying a solution or general prerequisites and best practices. Some common implicit project deliverables include documentation, test scripts, demonstrations and the like. We need to take all of these into account for our estimates and risk calculation. A Complete List I have found that one of the most significant contributors to bad estimation in software is missing requirements. We spend time on designing the explicit features and let the implicit ones fall through the cracks. Then those missed items pop up during the project and add a little (or a lot of time) to the schedule. These “oops”... Read more

March 20, 2019March 10, 2019 Lessons Learned From Consulting

Deliverable Packaging and Creating a Customer Experience.

When we complete a project for a customer or employer, we give them a product. Thus, there is a form of deliverable packaging that we need to consider for that hand-off. This concept may be confusing, but it is not complicated. You do not need to shrinkwrap a box with a USB drive in it or anything like that. Instead, we are focused on documentation, scripts, and how you hand over the final product. The Simple Stuff When your deliverables are source code or a single document, then little packaging is needed. It is either the file sent via email or committed to source control. No installation is required. However, you should provide comments or some sort of notes, so... Read more