#management (168 links)
- Collective Genius hbr.org
Google’s astonishing success in its first decade now seems to have been almost inevitable. But step inside its systems infrastructure group, and you quickly…
In a recent article here on the AxBlog I extolled the virtues of the accrual of technical credit and provided several examples of how we think the strategy has…
- Five Leadership Hacks randsinrepose.com
MIT has a storied history regarding hacking where the act is viewed as a “clever, benign, and ethical prank or practical joke” at the University. Hack is also…
- The Government IT Self-Harm Playbook medium.com
2014: the high point of government’s war on Big IT Are we really this stupid? At a time when other governments are getting a grip on their IT , the UK is in…
- The Three Infrastructure Mistakes Your Company Must Not Make firstround.com
When Avi Freedman was getting ready to graduate Temple University in 1992, there was no way to buy internet service in Philadelphia. Literally. If you wanted to…
- Backwards Mapping and Connecting Outcomes | Theory of Change Community theoryofchange.org
After the first step of laying out the long-term goals and a simple change framework, comes a more detailed stage of the mapping process. Building upon the…
- Legacy Code for Developers: Managing your Manager - NDepend blog.ndepend.com
Here’s a campfire horror story of legacy code that probably sounds at least somewhat familiar. One day, your manager strolls by casually, sipping a cup of…
- Five years, building a culture, and handing it off. - Laughing Meme laughingmeme.org
After 5 years, the time has come. This is my last week as Etsy’s CTO. Five years ago I joined a tiny site, with a struggling software product. I wasn’t sure how…
- GitHub: Scaling on Ruby, with a nomadic tech team | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
Key bits of the world’s infrastructure still run on a bunch of flimsy shell scripts that seem like they’d break all the time but don’t. If a computer program…
Sam Lambert joined GitHub in 2013 as the company’s first database administrator, and is now the company’s director of technology. In this interview, he…
- Why Valve? Or, what do we need corporations for and how does Valve’s management structure fit into today’s corporate world? | Valve blogs.valvesoftware.com
The current system of corporate governance is bunk. Capitalist corporations are on the way to certain extinction. Replete with hierarchies that are exceedingly wasteful of human talent and energies, intertwined with toxic finance, co-dependent with political structures that are losing democratic legitimacy fast, a form of post-capitalist, decentralised corporation will, sooner or later, emerge. The eradication of distribution and marginal costs, the capacity of producers to have direct access to billions of customers instantaneously, the advances of open source communities and mentalities, all these fascinating developments are bound to turn the autocratic Soviet-like megaliths of today into curiosities that students of political economy, business studies et al will marvel at in the future, just like school children marvel at dinosaur skeletons at the Natural History museum.
The “management team” isn’t the “decision making” team. It’s a support function. You may want to call them administration instead of management, which will keep them from getting too big for their britches.
You're so busy, doing everything yourself. You know you need help, but to find and train someone would take more time than you have! So you keep working harder, until you break.
- The Management Myth - Magazine - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
The world of management theorists remains exempt from accountability. In my experience, for what it’s worth, consultants monitored the progress of former clients about as diligently as they checked up on ex-spouses (of which there were many). Unless there was some hope of renewing the relationship (or dating a sister company), it was Hasta la vista, baby. And why should they have cared? Consultants’ recommendations have the same semantic properties as campaign promises: it’s almost freakish if they are remembered in the following year.
- Rands In Repose: How to Run a Meeting randsinrepose.com
There are two useful types of meetings: alignment and creation. Briefly, alignment meetings are tactical communication exchanges that rarely dive into the strategic. These are fine meetings that have a weekly cadence, and while there are lots of ways to screw up these meetings, their tactical repetition often keeps them on the rails. Creation meetings — diving into solving a hard problem — involve, well, more creativity. Each hard problem requires a unique solution, and finding that solution is where creation meetings can go bad.
- Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money | Software by Rob softwarebyrob.com
More money isn't one of them.
- Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule paulgraham.com
When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
Beautiful. Need an iPhone version.
Via russelldavies.
The way we do this is by having a 1-hour meeting every Tuesday morning where my manager presents a PDF report that outlines these figures and colours the report either Red (we're in trouble and we better do something about it), Yellow (We're in danger, but it's fixable) or Green (we're on track to achieve our goals).
A systems integration framework, built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure.
- Dunning-Kruger effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org
"An example of cognitive bias in which "people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it". They therefore suffer an illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average."
- Best Buy shows the importance of culture in the modern corporation | The Equity Kicker theequitykicker.com
It turns out that Best Buy has embraced the use of social media to empower it’s employees and reaped massive productivity gains as a result.
- scottberkun.com » Looking for project management slang scottberkun.com
Basecamp for bands. Nice idea, but pricing looks a bit skewiff.
- THE FEATURED ARTISTS COALITION featuredartistscoalition.com
The Featured Artists' Coalition campaigns for the protection of performers' and musicians' rights. We want all artists to have more control of their music and a much fairer share of the profits it generates in the digital age.
- Mr. Yuk Says Project Roadmaps Are Poisonous codesqueeze.com
For some time now, I have thought that high-level project roadmaps (Gantt charts in particular) are one of the most worthless documents that a software project team can produce.
- SXSW: Lessons Learned at 37 Signals - ReadWriteWeb readwriteweb.com
- Fire the workaholics - (37signals) 37signals.com
Here’s another take on that: Fire the people who are workaholics!
- ProofHQ, proofing made easy proofhq.com
An online proofing system that helps you manage the way that you and your team review, proof and approve documents.
- Slashdot | Best Practices For Process Documentation? ask.slashdot.org
I know that this is all a waste of time if there's no follow-through from management. But assuming that the required support is there, how do you guys do process documentation?
Some people are naturally wide, some people are naturally deep. But the assumption is, in most business contexts, that you can — and should want to — jump between the two as the need or situation dictates. But this is a load of crap.
Articles on how design is managed, with practical ideas and real-life examples of design being used for business success.
- The Information Architect as Change Agent - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design boxesandarrows.com
How many projects have you worked on where the implementation team gave any consideration to the way people would be affected by the changes the new system would impose on them?
- Founder's Syndrome: How Corporations Suffer -- and Can Recover managementhelp.org
This syndrome occurs when, rather than working toward its overall mission, the organization operates primarily according to the personality of a prominent person in the organization, for example, the founder, board chair/president, chief executive, etc
- Test Early » Fire your best people…reward the lazy ones testearly.com
It’s the difference between troubleshooters and troublepreventors.
- How To Bootstrap Your Startup readwriteweb.com
"What skills you’ll need, how to write your requirements, how to source developers and designers, how much to budget, how to agree a development contract, how to manage your vendors, how to plan your release, all the documentation you'll need, and much
- Managing Humans - An Introduction managinghumans.com
This book isn't just about management, it's about creating places where people can comfortably build stuff.
- Time Management for Anarchists: The Movie nomediakings.org
Based on the paradoxical notion that anarchists have to be more organized than average if they don’t want to depend on power structures, and presents some ideas on how to kick the boss habit.
- James Shore: Successful Software jamesshore.com
You can Change Your Organization or Change Your Organization.
What project management (PM) is and what it isn't, [...] basics of the project lifecycle, [...] tools that you can use to make your projects run smoother, faster, and easier
- George Dinwiddie’s blog » Studying patterns for Fearless Change blog.gdinwiddie.com
3×5 notecards for studying the patterns in the book, Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas
- 10 mistakes managers make during job interviews articles.techrepublic.com.com
"Conducting effective interviews requires a balance of instinct, insight, and some solid preparation. It also helps if you don't make certain blunders, such as monopolizing the conversation, asking leading questions, or applying too much (or too little) p
- Fractals of Change: Morph of a Nerd CEO - The Power of Silence blog.tomevslin.com
Negotiation is not debate.
- Adobe edits the development cycle | Reg Developer regdeveloper.co.uk
For years the Adobe Photoshop team has been trying to get away from the traditional death march to a more agile development style. For its CS3 release, it made the jump, with the help of VP Dave Story.
Planix is a hosted application that enables project teams to consistently and accurately estimate the resources, scheduling and cost of their software development projects.
- Geek | Manager » Starting Out in Project Management blog.geekmanager.co.uk
"One of the difficulties for a first-time project manager is that being a great project resource (i.e. team member) is what gets you the job as project manager, nine times out of ten. Unfortunately, the characteristics of a great project resource are not