mike.mainguy

I'm responding to a recent email chain where I made the statement "this will only take 8 hours of development time" and stopped. It occurred to me that we had already spent 20+ man hours of meetings to decide if we should do this particular thing, how we should do it, and who should do it. If we had simply said "do it" we would have saved 18 hours labor... or even better, could have developed 3 alternative solutions and spent a couple hours deciding which one was best. It's interesting though because in the chain of meetings, emails, and other administrative things, when I sat down and looked, there where only two people who actually had "work" to do. I define "work" is defined as the act of transforming an idea into a useful piece of software. Everyone else was simply there to "help" get the work done. When I start looking back at my problems estimating... it isn't really that developers and technical people are bad at...

I've noticed an interested effect on corporate portals or extranets. They are often set up so that external access is allowed, but only certain applications/links actually work. This leads to a situation where you either #1 always VPN in (often redundant and useless) or #2 randomly have links break that will not work for you until you VPN in. A better solution might be to make the links visually different if they only work internally and perhaps even put a little broken symbol next to it. This would be best if it only showed up when you are navigating to the site from outside.

What is the difference between a strategy and a tactic? As far as I can tell, the commonly accepted difference is scope. A strategy is typically cross functional and wide and a tactic is smaller and narrower with higher detail. Anyone else have better ideas?