A study pointing to the increased productivity from investments in computers and IT.
Management
Archived Posts from this Category
Productivity through interruptions
An interesting article at ComputerWorld that investigates how individuals get more productive using IT – by finishing more projects but not by getting specific projects done more quickly. The interesting part to me is the correlation with communications, where high-touch, high-tech individuals end up being the most productive. And I really liked the examples of Betweenness and Reach in networking referenced here…
Lessons? Cultivate the communicators, and help everyone grow their networks to drive more efficiencies…
Technorati Tags: productivity, betweenness, reach, network
February 23, 2007: 4:25 pm: MatthewApplications, Business, Management, Software Development, Technical
An overview – with a possible scoring system – for picking which open source projects will survive and thrive. A good set of characteristics and something that I mostly follow but not so well thought out as theirs. Something useful for future evaluations…
Technorati Tags: open+source, business+software
Ways to improve software quality
An article (a bit self-aggrandizing) on how to improve software quality. Most interesting is the Software Testing Maturity Model (S-TMM)… I’ll have to read more about it.
Technorati Tags: S-TTM, software+quality
I use this log to track articles I find interesting and useful, but I don’t think it is the best way to share knowledge. The tagging phenomenon is interesting, though I still don’t have a good way to leverage it without it being a lot of work. IBM is looking into ways to share knowledge in groups through social bookmarking within a business, and I think that could be really useful… now I just need to be a part of a business who will agree that it could be useful.
Spaf’s first principle of security administration
referenced in a Slashdot book review:
[I]f you have responsibility for security but have no authority to set
rules or punish violators, your own role in the organization is to take
the blame when something big goes wrong.
This is not just a security principle. It’s equally applicable to other fields. The corollary given in the review?
Any security group or security manager placed in such a situation should likely start working on their resume.
An interesting point.
Technorati Tags: security, authority, responsibility, resume
XP advocates/authors on management
From an interview with Kent Beck and Tom DeMarco:
Kent: … I think of managers as people with more experience, a broader perspective, perhaps more wisdom about what’s going on and good people skills. And looking at the connections between if a manager has nothing better to do than to come and tell me I haven’t written enough tests that day — to me, that’s not a lot of value to be added there. That’s not about me and my relationships to other people or the team and its relationships to its customers and suppliers. I mean to me that’s where the value of having somebody with a step back with broader perspective is.
Tom: I think the key phrase here is, if the manager has nothing better to do. I think if you replace that with, if the manager has nothing easier to do, then that would lead you a slightly different direction. Because coordination is the relatively easy thing, what Cindy was talking about is managers could manage, that’s hard stuff, that means involves motivation, it involves interpersonal relationships. So I think that is the distinction between real managers and imposters who find themselves pushed into that position and end up looking for the easy stuff to do. And the easy stuff is what people will do on their own if you don’t do it.
That’s what it’s all about.
Technorati Tags: software+development, management, xp
A neat ACM Queue article about Amazon’s infrastructure, where the people who create a service are also responsible for its operational support. An amazing idea in a corporate environment where projects are usually thrown over the wall and the operations team bears the brunt of bad code and bad design.
Technorati Tags: amazon, acm+queue, support
August 2005, Fast Company… “The Once and Future Consultant”, an interview with Dave Ulrich:
“[When people set] new goals, ‘My tendency is to let them fail,’ he says. Why? Because Ulrich sees failure as a by-product of setting high goals.”
Time for me to move the bar upwards another notch… for myself as well as those around me.
Application Development lessons
To ponder and utilize: What Corporate Projects Should Learn from Open Source
