It's all about asking the right questions.

"New ideas often come from asking new questions and being a creative question asker. We fixate on solutions and popular literature focuses on creative people as being solvers, but often the creativity is in reformulating a problem so that it's easier to solve."

Sounds simple to me.

From: Guy Kawasaki's blog,
Ten Questions with Scott Berkun, Author of "The Myths of Innovation"

Agile systems administration

Today we are working to try and become more agile systems administrators. I have a special interest because I am a trained and certified systems administrator so I have some background. I'm also excited about agile development practices and principles we use in our daily design and development work here at Brains4All.

Here are some of the things we learned:

* Sysops have more interruptions and more fires to put out then developers
* Interruptions are bad for productivity
* If we have smaller tasks interruptions are not as bad
* We prefer to have one flow of tasks instead of having one set of every day sysop tasks and one set of sysop project stories.
* We can split up most stories into tasks
* We cannot always know if we have all the tasks,thats okay. If we learn stuff while researching we can add more tasks to a story later.
* When we have fires to put out there is a kind of default order.

We are here to facilitate - we are service oriented. We are here to keep people and their systems happy and in good working order.

* Make sure important systems work
* Make sure people can work
* Make sure automated processes work
* Make sure data are safe
* Take preemptive actions to ensure the above in the future

We have a nice list of stories/tasks that we are going to try and estimate and prioritize together with our customer tomorrow.