Organizational Alignment

Where are we all aligned? There was agreement amongst all the managers that there are problems in each other's organizations 

Usage of IT Tools

A process is not written around a tool, because:

"A fool with a tool is still a fool"

How to Fail Quickly

"Nothing like a shotgun approach to failure"

On learning from our mistakes

"We won't make the same mistake a second time. We'll make a different mistake."

Moving to the Cloud

"Let's put everything in a t-shirt gun and shoot it into the cloud!"

"Counter-intuitive is better than intuitive because it's the opposite of doing nothing"

Weekend System Deployments

We make a decision to deploy our code during a holiday weekend with deployment starting at 2AM for a non-mission critical system. Really? We think we'll have better results with everybody super-tired and hungover from Friday evening celebrations?

Tribal Knowledge

"Get rid of tribal knowledge? Then I'd be out of business. And what do you do with the Indians?"

Understanding the business

From a colleague:

I asked if we needed to do any business/process analysis before the final product/vendor selection; a business fit analysis. 

 The answer “we will need business analysts during implementation, but you don’t need to know how the business works to select a product."

Competence vs. Negligence

Me: "I can't tell if this person was grossly incompetent or grossly negligent"
Co-Worker: "You have to be competent to demonstrate gross negligence."

Securing Security Products

The security product that we bought, to manage security entitlements, doesn't have any authentication or authorization to its management service. We had to pay the vendor to add security to their own management interface.

Sheeple

We excel at hiring sheeple. You lead them to their office and they don't do much except graze; they agree to things without much critical thinking.

A recursive statement

Seeker of the obvious - "We should definitely clarify what we want to clarify."

Complying with Email Signature Guidelines

Internal communications sends out a note about following brand guidelines in email signature blocks. Great - I'm all for it! A unified brand image is important.

The note doesn't have the right link to the guidelines though, and I request clarification from them. They send me the info, and I notice that the person in communications uses an email signature that... doesn't follow the brand guidelines.

NDAs and Audit Reports

Heard from an industry analyst:

One customer working with a cloud provider wanted to see the audit report (SAS 70). The provider said "OK, sign the NDA." The customer signed the NDA, and the provider refused to send them the report.

"We signed the NDA" said the customer. Provider: "Yes, but you didn't read it. It says that we may choose not to send the audit report to you, and if we choose not to, you can't tell anybody that we refused."