work

On most projects there is a tendency for someone involved to become the "expert" in one or more areas. As they become comfortable and more knowledgeable in an area they will naturally gravitate to picking up tasks related to it. The need to deliver as quickly as possible can also drive this as the person who knows most is likely to be the person who can do the work quickest.

When someone leaves a company there are two sides to it.

We have just completed a two week exercise with the whole development team to identify, design and estimate the next phase of work. It started as an organic process as we found the best way to do this and then developed into a repeatable process for the latter functionality.

We had a meeting recently with 16 people on the video conference call. Due to poor planning and technical issues it took nearly half an hour to decide to postpone the meeting. That is eight man hours wasted - a whole day of work!

I have never been a fan of performance reviews. It may have been down to the way they were implemented at the places I worked however they never seemed to achieve what they were set out to do. The review would usually consist of going over the "achievements" for the past period and then setting a bunch of artificial goals for the next period. The only time these new goals were actually consulted was in the run up to the next review.