I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me (but it always does) when people inherently believe in the value of what they are doing, without being able to connect it to how it benefits anyone else. The reason is abundantly clear. Each of us has invested in learning, in some skill, some competencies. Those skills become our…
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The Nature of Work and Performance
In physics, a force is said to do work if, when acting, there is a displacement of the point of application in the direction of the force. There are there components here: force, acting and displacement (movement). In an employment context, there is effort that is like force, there is activity, the application of effort…
Heroes of Change
Let’s face it. Middle managers are not that glamorous. They get stuck with some pretty odious responsibilities, like figuring out how to reduce costs, telling RIF victims bad news, and enforcing policies that they may not always agree with or understand. All the glory tends to go to the executives, along with the good compensation. …
Estimation Purposes Beyond The Customer
In my last post about Estimation Purposes – I spent a little time talking about the reason that our customer might want to estimate, and how estimation informs our conversation with the customer. But the reason for estimation goes beyond the customer, and into our own management and leadership. Listening to the #NoEstimates conversations that…
A Buck Stop
Caution: Rant Ahead! E-mail chains. Ken sends a note to Carole, his boss: “I need to know what systems our teams use for client servicing activities, can you help”? Nothing wrong with asking for information. Unless you’re asking people who don’t have a reason to know about what you’re asking. Carole forwards the note to…
IT Internal Strategy
So in prior posts about IT Strategy (The Goal of IT, Enterprise Application Value) I have talked about IT’s “Outward Facing Strategy”. So this post will be more about what are we doing to help ourselves deliver against our outward facing strategy. At the top level of our Internal IT Strategy is our values: What…
Estimation Information
A recent exercise at the job around improving the accuracy of estimate for software delivery projects caused me to have a minor epiphany! When doing agile software delivery, we generally get value from having more information sooner. But this plays differently in managing the backlog. We have been working on writing basic stories for all…
Enterprise Application Value
This is a continuation of the last post, The Goal of IT where I tried to separate out how IT as a business function contributes to the goal of a company. Most of my experience is in Enterprise IT – that is IT is a function of a larger business enterprise, not specifically creating IT…
The Goal of IT
I recently re-read a book called “The Goal” by Eliyahu Goldratt. I had read it years ago, and at the time it had resonated deeply in my mind. Sometimes it is beneficial to review concepts that resonate. For years, I have been working in the application development domain within IT. Most of my views on…
Goal Strategy Policy
IT Strategy – what do those two words mean together? What do we mean when we say that we are working on IT Strategy? In a prior post Vision Strategy Policy I talked about the relationships between Vision and Strategy. I also talked about how goals can relate to vision or strategy, and what I…