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Month: January 2018

Reduce Provisioning from 5 Hours to 5 Minutes: Infrastructure as Code as a Service

Reduce Provisioning from 5 Hours to 5 Minutes: Infrastructure as Code as a Service

I built my career on IT infrastructure. About a year ago, I was given the opportunity to lead software development too. I love infrastructure. I love code. I really love Infrastructure as Code (IaC). IaC is this end-state nirvana where all of your infrastructure can be provisioned, configured, and maintained programmatically, rather than manually through interactive consoles. It’s only been a recent phenomenon that this is even possible. Infrastructure administrators and engineers all learned how to do their jobs via management consoles,…

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Do or Do Not. There Is No Try: Coach Your Team like Yoda

Do or Do Not. There Is No Try: Coach Your Team like Yoda

Coaching means a lot of things to a lot of people. Of course, there are sports coaches. In my personal life, I’m a Lego robotics coach. There are also business coaches and life coaches. I’m not a professional coach, at least not as my primary job function. I’m a technology leader. However, to do that effectively, I often need to play the role of a coach. I’ll get into what that looks like shortly, but first, I’d like to take…

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Live the Adventure: Leadership Lessons from Richard Branson

Live the Adventure: Leadership Lessons from Richard Branson

I recently read the latest autobiography of Richard Branson, Finding My Virginity. For those of you that don’t recognize his name, Richard is best known as the founder of the Virgin Group, a conglomerate of Virgin brands such as Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Mobile, Virgin Galactic, and 400 other companies. Sir Richard Branson is also a knight of the United Kingdom. In addition to being a billionaire entrepreneur, he’s an adventurer, philanthropist, and all-around troublemaker. I’m not as capable…

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You’re Doing It Wrong: What to Do When Incidents Escalate in Reverse

You’re Doing It Wrong: What to Do When Incidents Escalate in Reverse

Enterprise technology groups have a lot of responsibilities, but their primary mission is incident resolution. Incident resolution typically happens through the forward escalation process, but sometimes it is invoked in the reverse order. In this article, I will explore the pitfalls of this predicament, and offer some solutions. Forward Escalation This is the normal mode of incident resolution. The best-case scenario is a user that can achieve incident resolution via a self-service portal or a good knowledge-base. If not, then…

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