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.
Stories by Paul Glen
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Paul Glen: The gifts and costs of working with 'them'
When two parties are in conflict, they don't have to agree in order to respect and learn from each other's perspective.
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When you've had it with a stakeholder
While you oftentimes just have to live with whatever it is you don't like, some situations call for a more forceful reaction.
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Paul Glen: Nobody wants you to be a technology vending machine
Providing a quick-win deliverable is of value only if what was asked for is what's really required.
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Paul Glen: The secret to keeping processes vital
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.
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Paul Glen: How to deal with a toxic team
Five warning signs can warn you that your project team has turned toxic.
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Paul Glen: Even if you can't measure it, you still must manage it
There are no metrics for measuring the quality of your relationships. For metrics-loving geeks, that's a problem.
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Build relationships, and career opportunities will follow
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.
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Paul Glen: Being right vs. not being wrong
To a lot of people, it seems as if we geeks are always battling for supremacy in the Always-Need-to-Be-Right Club.
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Paul Glen: Check your work, or else
We geeks must transform our eagerness to please users into eagerness to help. There's a big difference.
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Paul Glen: Assess your surroundings from 2,000 feet above
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.
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Paul Glen: Truth and project time estimates
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)
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Edgy Communication
We techies need to take the edge off once in a while.
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Words Are First Hurdle for New Tech Managers
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
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Paul Glen: The 'Low Affect' Effect
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!"
