This Fourth of July marks the 233rd year since the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the United States Continental Congress. This is usually celebrated with fireworks, picnics, political speeches, etc. This year I was reflecting a little on enormity of that step 233 years ago. To declare independence from something not only takes courage but also provides a rallying cry.

In honor of this declaration of freedom I’ve come up with a list of five things that you should consider declaring independence from in your business. This is just a starter list, write your own Declaration of Independence and change the rest of 2009 today.

1. Time Drains (email and meetings) – as Tim Ferriss says less is more when it comes to email and meetings.  Matt Waite, a news technologist, says “meetings suck” and even has a game to play during meetings that will hopefully get you to reconsider scheduling another one without a good reason.  Seth Godin just attacks the issue head on with a nine step process.
2. Scaling – If you have struggled with your application or database scaling for the first half of 2009, start putting an end to it today. Figure out what is not working (SPOF, synchronous calls, inability to rollback, etc) and stop those behaviors.  We all know the well quoted saying about doing the same thing over and expecting different results. Learn or teach your team how to scale applications and databases. Go even further and declare your freedom from relational databases and get rid of it.
3. Unhappiness – Life is way too short to be unhappy where you spend the majority of your time. Start your search for happiness by reading about this longitudinal study that is trying to answer, among others, the question of “Is there a formula – some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation – for a good life?” If you work at a j-o-b and not a career or a calling consider making a change. If you have longed to start your own business the folks at 37Signals has some advice for you to evolve your idea from a side project to full time. If you think its a terrible time to start a business, reconsider, there are a lot of reasons that might make now the perfect time. And once you’ve take the leap consider Paul Graham’s 13 sentence advice to startups.
4. Product Delivery Nightmares – Many of our clients complain about not being able to get products and new features out the door as fast as they would like. Usually the first, an in our opinion, incorrect attempt at fixing this is to start changing the SDLC to/from Agile, Extreme Programming, Waterfall, etc. The software development methodology is almost never the problem. The first step towards correcting this is to make sure you have realistic expectations and then work on developing detailed plans that incorporate feedback from each previous cycle for continuous improvement. Measuring is difficult and often controversial but it is essential in order to incent success and reward people appropriately. Not blaming the methodology is not an excuse for poor coding practices. As Jeff Atwood explains in his “The Bathroom Wall of Code” post, cutting and pasting flawed code from the internet can lead to disastrous results. We are all probably guilty of “cut and paste coding” but if the code gets checked in it becomes our code for better or worse. Code reviews are one such required engineering practice that will produce quality products and better engineers.
5. People Problems – If you are leading a team there are almost always personnel issues to deal with. Some problems are unforeseeable and just take time and energy to resolve but others can and should be screened. We came up with a three part series on how to interview engineers in order to avoid some of these pitfalls after the hire. If you already have your team, put a plan in place to seed, feed, and weed. Continuing with the plant analogy, people like plants will seek the path of least resistance, meaning that we prefer to perform tasks that we are good at. Without a development plan in place helping push your team members to practice their weaknesses, they will not get better and you will continue to suffer for it.

Declare your independence from these or other problems that have plagued you for the first half of 2009 and end the year on an upswing.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 4th, 2009 at 6:41 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.