The Longest Yard: Reorganizing IT for Success : Bruce F. Webster - The Diigo Meta page

• 30 Apr 08
  

  Frank Colcord

  Parachute

• 29 Apr 08
  

  Travis Swicegood
  • 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.
  • nstead, they focus on checkbox items, such as certifications and years of (claimed) experience with a given technology.
  • 12 more annotations...
  • • They seek to match keywords against what they think their needs are.
    • 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
    • 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.
    • A talented IT engineer can pick up new technologies rapidly
    • At the same time, having talent is no excuse for being a prima donna.
    • It is our observation that firms often have too many IT engineers rather than too few.
    • a direct result of management policies and politics that equate headcount with internal clout — in short, kingdom building.
    • 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,
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • Fred Brooks first laid out the need for a chief architect at length, most particularly for conceptual unity [5].
    • 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!

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