Category: Blogging

Most post-mortems are elaborate rituals for burying the truth. A team gathers, a timeline gets drawn, and a list of action items emerges—most of which will never be completed. The real failure mechanisms stay hidden, ready to trigger the next incident. A post-mortem that actually produces lessons learned is not a meeting. It’s an investigation,… Continue reading How to Run a Post-Mortem That Actually Produces Lessons Learned

Organizational post-mortems are a ritual of failure. A project collapses, a release goes sideways, or a critical system blacks out under load, and someone schedules a meeting with a name that already implies the patient is dead. The term itself—post-mortem—sets a strange tone. It suggests finality, a forensic examination of a corpse. But in software… Continue reading The Autopsy Without a Body: Running a Post-Mortem That Produces Real Lessons

Software teams are obsessive about recording what happened. Commit logs, pull request descriptions, Jira tickets, deployment runbooks—all of them capture actions. We can trace every line of code to a commit, every commit to a task, every task to a sprint. What we rarely capture is the reasoning that led to those actions. This is… Continue reading Why You Should Document Decisions and Not Just Actions

Most project teams can produce a risk register on demand. Few can produce one that isn’t a wish list dressed in spreadsheet columns. The distinction matters because a wish list masquerading as a risk register does not reduce uncertainty—it creates a false sense of control. In software and IT projects, where failure modes are well-documented… Continue reading The Difference Between a Risk Register and a Wish List

There’s a particular kind of meeting that happens in failing projects. The project manager pulls up a spreadsheet, dense with color-coded cells, and announces that the risk register has been updated. Murmurs of approval ripple through the room. The document is alive. It has been fed. And yet, outside that room, the same risks that… Continue reading The Risk Register Is Not a Wish List: How to Stop Confusing Documentation with Action

Stakeholder alignment is the ongoing work of making sure everyone with a say in a software or IT project—sponsors, users, technical leads, compliance officers, and the quiet dissenters who only surface when things go wrong—holds a roughly shared understanding of what’s being built, why, and under what constraints. It sits next to expectation management, requirements… Continue reading How Stakeholder Alignment Is a Continuous Activity Not a One-Time Event

I sat in a weekly portfolio review where the dashboard had been green for six straight weeks. The engineering team knew the timeline was fiction. I knew it. The tech lead knew it—had said so in a Slack message I’d seen three weeks earlier that read, simply, ‘we are not going to make the integration… Continue reading The Status Report That Was Performing Confidence Instead of Transmitting Signal

I once watched a product manager high-five a developer after a kickoff meeting. The slides had been sharp, the roadmap looked bulletproof, and every head in the room nodded in sync. “We’re aligned,” she said, with the satisfaction of someone who’d just ticked the last box on a project plan. Six weeks later, the same… Continue reading Why Stakeholder Alignment Is a Conversation, Not a Checkbox

I once watched a project manager high-five a developer right after the kickoff. The slides had been crisp. The roadmap was pinned to the wall. The stakeholders had nodded in all the right places. “We’re aligned,” he said, with the confidence of someone who’d just finished a marathon, not someone standing at the start line.… Continue reading Why Stakeholder Alignment Is a Continuous Activity, Not a One-Time Event

I once watched a product team pop champagne over a signed-off requirements doc. They were toasting like they’d just closed a funding round. Six months later, the same group sat in a conference room, staring at a half-built feature that nobody in the business actually wanted. The document was pristine. The alignment was dead. That… Continue reading Why Stakeholder Alignment Is a Continuous Activity, Not a One-Time Event