Purpose

It just doesn’t matter.  In my last post, I talked about numbers that are too big to be helped with data.  Now, I’m going to talk about numbers that don’t really matter.  As in how much you paid for the…

I’ve read of lot of financial statements in my life.  And I’ve explained financial data to people who hated anything to do with accounting.  And the key thing that comes out over and over again is that numbers are SIMPLER…

A project can mean a lot of things. But in my world of data and software, I like to distinguish between maintain project and change projects.  Change projects start with the assumption that things as they are don’t work. We can’t…

Technical folks are impressed by smart.  How fast someone can code.  How quickly they can learn a new skill.   How many obscure features they’ve mastered of any given system.  I think it’s better to ask – how right?   As in…

 “Do you really need this data?”  is a useless question  Because 99 times out of 100 you’ll get a yes.   Even if that data was used once three years ago to answer an audit question.  Or it helped satisfy a…

Tech folks love to talk about “really smart people”.   I’ve been lucky to work with a lot of smart, effective people in my career.  But I think that while raw brain power is good, being right for a given situation…

Names are just names.  But if you called a rose a daisy, it would confuse people.  If you’re going to succeed, you need to get your terms straight.  If some folks talk about available inventory and others open inventory, I…

Geeks spend a lot of time talking about the best way to run a software projects.  But no method works without trust.  Trust that when something unexpected comes up, we’ll fix it.  Trust that we can find a solution.  Trust…

As in much of life, software can drive you crazy because how things are (“what is”) is not how we’d like (“what should be”).  Years ago, a client came to me with a small issue in their accounting software.  There…

I’ve worked with a wide range of consultants.  Some great, some acceptable, some that needed to be replaced.  But the worst are the terrorists. Folks who won’t show, share or document their work. Who insist that only they can do…