Peer Reviews Help Everyone
Always request reviews of your work (code, documents, designs, plans, etc.) and make time to review others work when asked. Reviewing and being reviewed improves the quality of our work and our capabilities as consultants.
Reuse Applies to Everything
Developers learn to create and apply reusable objects in their code to improve efficiency in development and maintenance. This also applies to designs, project plans, matrices, etc. Look for templates and examples before creating your own and ask others in your organization if they exist if you cannot find them. While it will almost always be necessary to modify it for a specific project, starting from something that already exists will save time and provide inputs that you may not have come up with on your own.
Monitoring is Mandatory
Murphy’s Law is your friend. Use it plan what will be monitored, how it will be monitored, when automated alerts will be generated and bot the process and frequency of reviewing monitoring history and metrics. It is great to have common tools across the enterprise and important to be specific for each component how the tools are utilized. The systems are not static so the monitoring process cannot be if it is successful.
Keep it Simple
Whenever possible, make it (solution, design, steps, instructions) simple to save time (effort, thought, debugging, explanations) for when it can’t be simple. And remember that what seems simple to you right now may not be to someone else or even yourself in the future.
© Scott S. Nelson