Taking notes, especially during meetings, is a VERY easy way to create value, and help save your future self from potential challenges.
All in Problem Solving
Raising Issues Early
When we know something’s off it’s REALLY important we let folks know, and you can’t really loop them in soon enough..
Beginning Background Knowledge
Understanding underlying concepts is critical to being successful. Not only will they help in whatever you’re up to now, but they can be applied across tools areas and people to make other ventures more successful as well.
Bring Solutions
Bringing solutions is always better than just bringing problems. It’s great to find things that need fixing. Do yourself a favor though… before letting your manager/etc. know about it, first think through how you’d fix it.
No Extra
Not doing extra on a task is hard… we always find something we can add, or something that was “missed”. Doing this, howe ver, distracts us from the actual task. At best it results in a weaker final product… at worst, complete failure.
Conceptually speaking...
Rote mechanical skills are essential to learning, but at a certain point the underlying concepts become more important. Knowing how a tool works, or why something is done a certain way is an incredibly powerful skill, and one that takes conscious effort to build.
While collecting defects is a great first step, there’s a lot more that can be done, including retroactive investigations and proactive avoidance.
Despite our best efforts every process or system produces some unwanted or unexpected behavior - defects. Many times our customers are the ones letting us know about them, which is less than good.
We all make mistakes. It can get dangerous when you begin “tilting” - allowing those mistakes to distract you into causing more mistakes. It’s very important to both recognize, and recover from, tilting.
Finding a way to prioritize work is critical to success. The one approach that should NEVER be taken is to have the tech teams determining the priority… they’ll almost always get it “wrong” and end up agitating partner teams.
Frequently technical resources are pull into projects at the last minute. This deprives the project team of a valuable viewpoint and raises blood pressure all around. Tech should be included as early as possible to best leverage their skills and avoid last minute scrambles.
Frequently in tech we get pulled into high-criticality situations. Despite the pressure of these it’s incredibly important to remember to breath, look around, examine options and then execute your plan. These steps can help stop a situation from snowballing out of control, and also help your partner teams through tough situations.
Ticketing systems help us keep track of our work, and many have lots of bells and whistles. At it’s core, however, there’s only a few things that are REALLY needed.
I’ve found there’s two types of basic skills - generic and specific. Understanding which one needs to be addressed helps folks better address underlying problems.