Anything you do can become a work of art if you put passion, creativity and persistence into it. The world’s most impressive paintings, compositions or the most majestic buildings, were achieved with experimentation, planning, and learning from mistakes. Click rate, report rate, repeat offenders, emotional motivators, target group, scenario, are just some of the elements combined into a complex frame called phishing programs. Most times the process of mixing and matching to create a successful program becomes to the owner somewhat a work of art.

We all have problems in our day-to-day activities. We all need to come up with new ways to cope with those problems and find a solution that saves us time and resources. This is similar to those moments when we need to go through the morning traffic to get to work. It is similar to when we are trying to plan our weekend getaways. During this time, we're all designers of our own personal lives. You don't have to be a professional designer to improve your life. However, we can all apply the design principles into every aspect of our lives. One of those principles is design thinking.

Since we were little, we were told to search for success in all things that we do because this search will guarantee us happiness. So, how come we don’t notice an explosion of happiness amongst employees who established themselves as being successful? (employees who earn more than 75.000$/per year). We came to realize that having a successful career along with a care-free life, doesn’t necessarily lead towards the ideals of happiness.

James Bond doesn’t waste any time looking for parking spaces. In all the films, you see him getting out right in front of the hotel entrance or airport before throwing the car keys to a valet and continuing on his mission. Parking is just something other people do. Most drivers have had to do without a valet – but now that’s about to change.

I will discuss an example inspired from my current life. I have recently held a workshop about the Agile/Scrum organization of a project. What do these paradigms actually mean? They imply a lot of psychology, from client communication, dividing a project into smaller activities – workable and measurable, to retrospective and progress analysis. As an experiment, you can “steal” parts of Agile/Scrum and implement them at home. Each weekend, you can hold a reunion with the family/partner and talk 30 minutes about one thing you will work on all week. The partner/kids feel involved, and feel that their opinion matters. During this process the people give each other mutual support; they get rationally and emotionally involved.

The quality of software products is becoming higher and higher and the same trend is followed by quality assessment criteria. This diversification is the result of technology evolution and of a higher competition between various IT products and service providers.

Custom software developers sometimes anxiously wait for the maintenance period to begin. During maintenance, the software is already locally installed on the customer’s equipment and infrastructure, and the detailed job of adapting the software to the customer’s processes and needs is in almost all respects finished. If the development and implementation phases were well managed and finalized, during the maintenance phase, the software developer’s effort should be significantly diminished and the profitability should increase. With a little luck (or maybe it’s more than luck at stake), during maintenance, the developer’s work and allotted resources will be minimum, while the maintenance cost (some quite generous) will compensate for the low profitability of the project in earlier phases.

Customers are always on our minds and we often speak about how to keep them at the center of our attention at all times, about how to step in their shoes and how to win their hearts. However, we seldom do remember to also sharpen our blades for the fight against our worst enemy, our inner selves.

After fifteen years working in IT, of which ten outside Romania, one of the major conclusions I have reached is that the work-life balance does not exist. In fact, I believe you have also reached this conclusion if you worked in the industry, even for a few months. What is this endless run for the doubtful concept turning into?

“Self-discipline has a bigger impact on academic performance than intellectual talent” – This is the quote that may give us all, regular people, some hope that we can still accomplish great things, be the expert in our field of work or that the power to change is in fact in our own control.