SEP Blog

We’re curious people by nature. And we love to teach others what we’ve learned. So explore our blog to gain fresh insights from our expertise in areas ranging from culture to AI.

SEP Wins TechPoint’s 2024 Innovation Service Partner of the Year Mira Award

SEP Recognized as Indiana’s Top Innovation Service Partner, Winning TechPoint’s Prestigious Mira Award Westfield, Indiana – SEP has been named the Innovation Service Partner of the Year by TechPoint at the 25th annual Mira Awards. The Mira Awards, Indiana’s largest…
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Collaboration versus Competition part 2

In my previous post I discussed the problem of expecting a candidate with a competitive mindset to work in a collaborative environment. This time I would like to focus on the experiences that have led to a successful integration. I ended with a few notes on Team-Think. The goal of Team-Think is to alter the […]
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Builds should fail sometimes

Reposted from my personal blog “Well, you don’t want your builds to succeed all the time…” I remember hearing that for the first time a year or two ago and thinking to myself “that’s probably one of those counter-intuitive truths that make a lot of sense in the context of Agile. This guy is probably some kind […]
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Collaboration versus Competition

Working with others is never easy. It takes hard work and the proper mindset to accomplish. This is a lesson taught to small children with varying degrees of success. I learned from an early age that sharing was important. I was taught to play well with others and to understand that others have needs that […]
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Tech Lead Training

One of the goals that I have set for myself over the past several years was to start to train engineers in a semiformal manner. This goal would accomplish a few things: Long term team viability Not everyone will want to stay on the same project long term Not everyone will want to stay on […]
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SEP hex pattern overlay of person working on laptop

[Review] Agile Estimating and Planning

Agile Estimating and Planning, a book written by Mike Cohn (who writes an excellent blog you should all follow), is the de facto “classic” book for learning about Agile Planning. With great examples, illustrations for learning, and just the right amount of detail, Agile Estimating and Planning is a book I’ll be coming back to […]
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Running Lean Startup Experiments Internally

When building a business or software, it is easy to make assumptions about what the market will want or how users will interact with your product. Recently, the concept of the Lean Startup Experiment has emerged to help us explicitly acknowledge these assumptions and construct small experiments to validate our assumptions. Here at SEP, we […]
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SEP History Lesson: When an Enthusiastic Newbie Convinced Us to Get a Fish Tank

I’ve had several people tell me they liked the new fishtank design (thank you!), and it was suggested that I do a write-up about the tank.  I’m always happy to talk about it!  I’ll start with some history… How it Began It all started around 10 years ago.  I was interviewing for a position at SEP, […]
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Getting even more value from your daily standup…

Many teams around here are familiar with the “famous 3” standup questions… What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? What impediments do you have? This is a good way to get the team in the habit of communicating each day. A few of my teams have gotten even more value out of our […]
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Striving to Be Replaceable

In the book, The Passionate Programmer, there’s a section about making sure you’re replaceable. Several of us here at SEP read that book during a book club. When my group first started this section we were taken aback. Finally, I think we teased apart two different ways of being replaceable. Bad Replaceable: Basically just be a cog in […]
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