Notes from the middle of things
Most of what I write begins somewhere in the middle of things: a thought I haven't finished, a conversation I keep returning to, a decision that seemed obvious until it wasn't.
I write when something is still bothering me a week later.
Twelve years ago a publisher paid people to tag everything by hand before it reached the platform I built. I took that for the boring part. It was the part making the rest work, and most organisations never paid for it at all.
It doesn't make the archive findable. It makes the un-findability faster.
I covered two roles for free on a small project because I was already there and it saved them a cost. The project stopped, which was reasonable. What I did not expect was what it cost me.
I could have been generous and precise at the same time.
Read the piece →Four engagements with the same underlying problem, running from a few thousand dollars to a migration in the millions. What separated the two that moved from the two that did not was not the work, and not the client.
The prototype was never the variable in any of the four.
Read the piece →We bid against a supplier that had held the contract for a decade, and their requirements document had quietly become a portrait of that supplier. On reading a tender for what it reveals rather than what it asks: where a genuinely different set of requirements comes from, what it does to the money, and when the right decision is not to bid at all.
The answer was never that we'd add their bay. It was that they shouldn't have to ask.
Read the piece →An argument I lost. A team closed an estimating gap with their nights, nobody wrote it down, and the next phase was priced as though it had never happened. On the one cost in the room that had no figure attached, and why that is exactly why it lost.
Costs without numbers do not enter the record, and costs that do not enter the record teach nobody anything.
Read the piece →I'm most at home in the middle of things, in the untidy stretch between a good idea and a working one. That is what pulls me toward the projects I take on, and it is most of what I end up writing about here.
I read a good deal more than I publish, and most of what I start never gets finished. What survives usually does so because I could not let go of it: an argument I lost, a detail that turned out to matter, a decision that looked obvious until I wrote it down.
I take on a small number of advisory engagements a year, usually the kind described above.