I'm interested in why sensible people, acting reasonably, still end up somewhere nobody wanted to go. Most of what I notice comes from rooms where something is being decided with incomplete information, and most of what I write here is an attempt to think it through slowly, after the fact. I write when something is still bothering me a week later.
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 →A request arrives fully formed, and it is the last line of a discussion nobody invited me to. Somebody has already weighed the options, met an objection, and settled it, and by the time it reaches me the reasoning has been compressed out. What got dropped along the way is usually what breaks later.
Unanswered objections do not stop being true; they wait.
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.