Apologies for the writing gap, but being busy is a great thing. As promised, I want to fill you in on the wooden frying pan, and its ability to help me correctly focus on the right things -Doing the Right Things Right.

All too common, many of us have tried “outsourcing” multiple times; likely for financial reasons only and thus we went about building an “outsourced team” – the wrong way. It goes without saying, none of the teams outputs were consistent with expectations of employees, customers and company leadership. In fact at Intent we have removed the word "outsourcing" from our vocabulary. It results in a negative connotation from both our clients and our team members. Instead we talk about the partnership we form with our clients. Splitting hairs? Maybe, but once our clients try our model they don't want to work any other way, regardless of what we call it.

For years I had a picture of a wooden frying pan over my desk next to the IBM “THINK” sign that was given to me by Jack Sweeney. Those two images couldn’t be more contradictory to one another. The wooden frying pan represented the well-crafted object created by an "outsourced" team that used the written requirements only for delivering results. Essentially the team members didn’t “THINK” and didn’t fill in the requirement gaps with what would be considered common sense development.