The 10,000-Hour Rule

by John Stout

A good friend recently referred Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers to me. The theme of this book is the amount of time an individual must devote to developing a skill in order to attain a world-class level competency.
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Data Warehouses: Special Considerations

by Matt Wickey

Business today runs much like it has for millennia. Historically, most businesses have been run more by gut feel than any actual metric, other than gross and/or net profit. Sometimes even the net profit picture was difficult to determine. For example, in the first half of the last century, Ford Motor Company famously determined the price for products by weighing invoices on a scale. The invoices were large stacks of paper with hundreds of pages, so going through them in detail wasn’t practical.
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The Fine Art of Project Estimation

by Peg Bogema

As a consulting company, we don’t have the luxury of working without a defined project scope. For whatever silly reason, our customers always want to have a clear idea of how much something is going to cost and how long the work will take. Go figure.
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WHAT IS IT YOU WANT, ANYWAY? Part 2

by Matt Wickey

SYSTEM ARCHITECT

Software today is complex…really complex. In any technology stack there are choices to be made about tiers, middleware, communications mechanisms, interoperability, design patterns, etc. And there are a number of competing technology stacks available (.NET, JEE, LAMP), all supporting different versions of these concepts.
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WHAT IS IT YOU WANT, ANYWAY? Part One

by Matt Wickey

For a company looking to acquire IT consulting services, it can be difficult to determine just what services it, in fact, needs. Of course that depends on the kind of opportunity we’re talking about. If a company knows it needs a .NET developer for 6 months, those requirements are already well-defined. A simple request to a reputable technical staffing agency can get that slot filled quickly. As a rule, the better defined the requirements, the easier it is to fill the open slot. But the problem gets more complicated when considering company needs on a more abstract scale. (more…)