Driving Technical Change

Creating That Something

The first step to creating something compelling is to look at your group’s pain points. Every team has them. In the movie Office Space, one of the small repeating jokes is the TPS report. It’s never explained. All you know is that the character forgot to use the new cover sheet. But every single person in the company comments that he messed it up. No one seems to care about the content, simply that he didn’t “Do it right.” More importantly, that’s a horrible process if it’s that easy to screw up.

Think about your TPS report. Maybe it’s documentation, maybe it’s expense reports, and it could even be moves to production. It’s something that takes up your time, is somehow necessary, but isn’t part of your core work. Whatever ...