change « Donald E. Gray

Problems vs Opportunities

Problems or Opportunities? Where should you focus your [...]

One of the smartest things I did as Interim VP of Engineering for Padcom was let Don talk himself into coming to play with us over the course of several hours overlooking the Puget Sound one weekend morning. Padcom was a small tech company with some unique internetworking technology in the process of building-out into [...]

Fearless Change: The book review

My thoughts about the book … If you don’t have the book, get it. If you have the book and haven’t read it, do so [...]

Don't Mind Read - Improve How You Communicate

“Why doesn’t my manager listen when I explain the details?”
“Why doesn’t the developer just give me what I ask for?”
These questions popped out during the Tutorial at this year’s AYE Conference. Realizing the energy, Steve and I held an impromptu discussion on the [...]

Now, What is Change?

Re-reading my blog titles occasionally leads to interesting thoughts. Many titles mention change, and most entries have something to do with change. But after all these entries no one has asked me, “Don, what do you mean ‘change’?”. Until recently, I haven’t asked me [...]

Stabilizing Systems

Engineers make the darndest assumptions. I made one such assumption in “Change and Stable Systems”. The unstated assumption involved starting with a stable system. But what do you do if your system (as in team, project, company) is [...]

Context is Everything

Today I had the opportunity to remember that “context is everything”. Hurricane Frances continues her slow crawl up the eastern United States. It started raining here in North Carolina yesterday (Tuesday 2004.09.07). This morning my radio crackled with reports of accidents and emergencies. Fortunately, none were in our response area. Then the [...]

Learning to Change

In Changing Quicker we looked at reducing or removing system delays to reduce the time delay between realizing a change needs to be made, and when the change’s effects occur. Another way to change quicker involves learning to change. Learning is a process that depends on experience and leads to long term changes in behavior [...]

Changing Quicker

Will reorganizing every two weeks lead to stable software processes? What conditions would enable this to happen? When should we schedule the next change? [...]

Change is Good

Several years ago I found out that I was not really in charge of everything, or in control of very much. This lead me to

Don’s Dismal Dilemma: How will I achieve my goals, when I’m not in charge or [...]

Donald E. Gray