Paul Glen: Motivating the mercenaries
To get your projects done, you'll need to motivate your people to perform, no matter where their loyalties lie.
To get your projects done, you'll need to motivate your people to perform, no matter where their loyalties lie.
When two parties are in conflict, they don't have to agree in order to respect and learn from each other's perspective.
While you oftentimes just have to live with whatever it is you don't like, some situations call for a more forceful reaction.
Providing a quick-win deliverable is of value only if what was asked for is what's really required.
As long as a problem seems present, gnarly and intractable, we enjoy following the process that solves it. But once the problem has been solved, it's not so interesting to us anymore.
Five warning signs can warn you that your project team has turned toxic.
There are no metrics for measuring the quality of your relationships. For metrics-loving geeks, that's a problem.
Your future success in the IT industry depends on embracing one simple, but hard-to-accept idea: There are no more jobs. I don't mean that there's no more work to do. Of course there is. Nor do I mean that you won't get hired to do things. Of course you will.
To a lot of people, it seems as if we geeks are always battling for supremacy in the Always-Need-to-Be-Right Club.
We geeks must transform our eagerness to please users into eagerness to help. There's a big difference.
You can tell a lot about what matters in a community from the vantage point of a small plane. That's figuratively true of all organizations.
Geeks are devoted to Truth, with a capital T. The question 'When will it be done?' feels like a request to lie. Insider; registration required)
We techies need to take the edge off once in a while.
New managers struggle. They also don't get much help -- or sympathy. My last column elicited a lot of heartfelt reader emails about the difficulty of, and lack of support for, the transition from technical work to management. My conversations with those
In my exploration of the differences between technical and business people, nothing surprised me more than this: Business people tend to think that we don't care about anything. One of their biggest complaints is that we don't share their passion for the business. When-ever I hear this, I have an immediate, visceral reaction of outrage: "How could you possibly think I don't care about anything? I work like a dog to try to turn your visions into reality!"