management – Page 2 – In Search Of

IT Staffing Strategy Considerations

Posted on August 20, 2013Leave a comment

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 divide along lines of administration and delivery. Sometimes delivery is divided between support and development. For product organizations that don’t support installed customer platform, administration includes platform or infrastructure. For enterprise IT delivery includes platform or infrastructure. For product companies that also host their product on shared infrastructure, platform may be divided between administration and delivery.

Occasionally, IT organizations will have a sales or relationship function, separate from administration and delivery. Sometimes an R&D function will included, separate from administration and delivery. Sometimes both of these are included in the delivery organization.Continue Reading

Staff Forecasting for Software Delivery

Posted on August 13, 2013Leave a comment

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 leader, I need to have practices in place that work equally well with larger organizations as with smaller organizations (scalability).

In observing how the construction industry scales to do projects there are lessons IT can learn, but they don’t apply directly.Continue Reading

IT Staffing Strategy Terminology

Posted on July 23, 2013Leave a comment

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 information technology for over twenty years.

Earlier posts on IT Strategy including Goal Strategy Policy and Vision, Strategy, Policy are the beginnings of where these thoughts come from.

What are you leading?

Posted on July 16, 2013Leave a comment

Differences Between Classes of Leadership

What are the essential differences between the act of leading an initiative and the act of leading a staff, a team, or an organization.

Hypothesis: the differences center around the goal against which that leadership is expressed.Continue Reading

Heard in the Aisle

Posted on April 10, 2012Leave a comment

Over the last few weeks I have overheard a couple of things that really tickled me, because of their brutal portrayal of some business truism, and because of the skill of the speaker in articulating:Continue Reading

Product Management

Posted on February 20, 20123 Comments

Product Management is something that should be easy to understand. The highest level goals of product management should be easy to articulate.

1) build a valuable product
2) maintain the value of a product relative to its customer community
3) manage the investment in the product, to ensure the best possible returnContinue Reading

When Firing Is Better

Posted on February 13, 2012Leave a comment

Sometimes it would just be easier, and better for all parties if we were honest and just “Fired their sorry asses!” It would be easier for management, because there is less corporate drama around firing and hiring than around a reorg, or implementing alternative staffing models, and RIF’s are either good (when the economy is going down) or bad (when it is going up), from a market analysts perspective – but firing ineffective employees and hiring new talent is always good.

Product Centric

Posted on February 6, 2012Leave a comment

I work in an environment that is somewhat dominated by a project governance mentality. What does this mean? What it means to me is this – that our diligence is focused on spending rather than on asset creation. Why is this significant? Because it changes how we focus the decisions in the process of software development.Continue Reading

Product Portfolio Management

Posted on January 31, 20122 Comments

Product Portfolio
If you want to manage a portfolio of software products, it is necessary to understand the organizational goals that are met by those software products. The product portfolio is a vehicle for understanding the ongoing investment in development or deployment of software assets. It requires an ability to measure the value of software assets separate from their cost (rarely done in industry today), and an ability to measure the cost of ongoing support and maintenance of software product. Continue Reading

Team Vs. Me

Posted on November 29, 2011Leave a comment

This week I have been reflecting on the relationship of ego to team, and how to deal with clashes of ego’s as teams form, and reform.

Over the last few months, I have watched a project that I am playing a key role on transform from an outsourced staff model to a hybrid staff model, to a staff aug model, to a hybrid aug model, and each transform has required changes in project leadership.Continue Reading