Skill – The ability to execute a practice, process, or procedure successfully; the ability to accomplish. Competence – The ability to increase or acquire skill over time; the ability to grow in capacity. Talent – The ability to decide which skill is best to apply, and/or invent and execute practice, process, or procedure, where no…
IT Strategy
IT Staffing Strategy Considerations
What are the elements of a staffing strategy? What are the the things to consider when developing a staffing strategy? These are the questions I want to address in this post. Division of work: What is that taxonomy into which you divide the work into that helps you decide how to staff? Often IT organizations…
Staff Forecasting for Software Delivery
One thing that IT managers – and many managers whose work consists of projects struggle with is staff forecasting. Project work can often require elastic staff scalability. I have more projects, or bigger projects, or tighter deadlines therefore I need to increase staff (elasticity) to a larger size to complete them on schedule. As a…
IT Staffing Strategy Principles
Posting about staffing strategy. I think that staffing strategy applies at any level of the organization chart, and there are some basic principles that are universal and intuitive. I think that in Information Technology we sometimes lose sight of those basic principles, and skew our staffing strategy or worse, don’t understand or misapply the principles.
The Right Position for Product Organizations
What is the purpose of a product organization? Thinking generally, it is to increase the value of a product “in the eyes” of the customers, consumers, or users of the product. It doesn’t matter whether the product is toilet paper or software. The product manager has decision rights over what the product will become. The…
IT Staffing Strategy Terminology
I am thinking about IT staffing strategy. In order to share my thoughts, I need to define some aspects of that strategy, and perhaps explain why I think they are important. I am not an OD guy, nor do I play one on TV. I have, however, observed and participated in management and leadership in…
What They Want…
How do we get Enterprise IT to align with our customer? The questions we ask our customer are indicative of our assumptions. Those assumptions are correlated to our relationship with our customer, and our understanding of that customer’s pain points or frustrations with IT. But how do we get past assumptions, and how do we…
IT Patterns and Practices
In my prior post ( ITStrategyInternals ) I explained a little about patterns and practices. Patterns and Practices within IT go hand in hand, in that we have an established solution, and a body of knowledge and expertise around that solution. I think that we sometimes think that by selecting a tool, we have defined…