Having had a bit of a break over the Christmas holiday and spending some downtime with family and friends, as well as having space to think and reflect on the last year and the one to come, can give you an opportunity to get some perspective on things.
Seems an obvious thing to say really, but it's important to actually reflect on what you've got, acknowledge and appreciate the relationships and material things that are right there in front of you and which you often take for granted every day.
When it comes to taking things for granted, I'm definitely one for needing to be more careful about acknowledging what's around me and reminding myself regularly of the value of what I have and really stop and take the time to appreciate things in general.
Considering this, shall we call it a discipline of really 'knowing and understanding' things, draws me to think more clearly about this matter in the professional sense. From a technical perspective, knowing what you've 'got' is really important and often critical in understanding whether what you're developing is actually going to meet the requirements it needs to, ensuring the specification enables it to function.
In product development, being exceptionally analytical and really looking at all the detail, is key to succeeding, with it often being difficult to really understand what's happening when something doesn't perform as expected and produces what are often undesirable results.
In these situations, we get 'really fussy' about how we collect and interpret the data, which is often a more involved and complicated process when we are asked to assist later in the development cycle. We need to ensure that we can start building a picture of where the product is now to help us in finding solutions to resolve the issues, by carefully creating and reviewing various sets of information that is provided and often that we need to gather ourselves.......really knowing and understanding what we've got!
