Skip to main content

The Longest Yard: Reorganizing IT for Success : Bruce F. Web...

Popularity Report

Total Popularity Score: 0
Loading...
Loading...
Loading...
Loading...
Loading...
Loading...

Rank

URL Tag Cloud

Bookmark History

Saved by 2 people (-1 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-04-15


Public Sticky notes

Managing talent and skilled workers is a key success factor in the 21st century across all industries, not just technology-based industries. However, many of our organizational practices originated in the 1800s with railroading and the rise of the Industrial Age. Your average Gen Y programmer bears little resemblance to the unskilled and semiskilled laborers of the past.

Highlighted by tswicegood

nstead, they focus on checkbox items, such as certifications and years of (claimed) experience with a given technology.

Highlighted by tswicegood

They seek to match keywords against what they think their needs are.

Highlighted by tswicegood

And they tend to believe, unconsciously or explicitly, in the mythical man-month, thinking that the larger their IT staff, the quicker they can complete projects

Highlighted by tswicegood

They recognize that they have a limited number of slots on the team, and they may also be operating under financial constraints, either due to the team’s own resources or a league-imposed salary cap.

Highlighted by tswicegood

A talented IT engineer can pick up new technologies rapidly

Highlighted by tswicegood

At the same time, having talent is no excuse for being a prima donna.

Highlighted by tswicegood

It is our observation that firms often have too many IT engineers rather than too few.

Highlighted by tswicegood

a direct result of management policies and politics that equate headcount with internal clout — in short, kingdom building.

Highlighted by tswicegood

All Pages engineers made recommendations as to which candidates to bring in for interviews, either from incoming résumés or from their own professional network. When a candidate was selected to come in for interviews, every Pages engineer would conduct his or her own one-on-one interview with that candidate,

Highlighted by tswicegood

We only had a certain number of slots, and we were going to be working very long hours together for years, so we chose carefully. The result was a very stable and talented development team that had almost no turnover over a grueling four-year period.

Highlighted by tswicegood

The quarterback is the most visible player on a football team and is responsible for leading the offensive team to get the ball into the end zone. The equivalent position on a software team is the chief architect.

Highlighted by tswicegood

Fred Brooks first laid out the need for a chief architect at length, most particularly for conceptual unity [5].

Highlighted by tswicegood

For example, one project we consulted on had 30 engineers developing network management software for a global telecommunications project — but no architect (or architecture) at all!

Highlighted by tswicegood