I’ve been talking with a very sharp leader about how that person uses the ideas of risk and technical debt. I’m paraphrasing, but the leader said something like this: “We realize we need to incur some technical debt. So we explain that we choose to include the debt as part of our risk mitigation. That’s […]
Make Better Decisions When You Have Too Much Ambiguity As a leader in the organization, you have a Big Decision to make. You need more data. However, getting the data is impossible in the timeframe you need to decide. The data you want might not even exist. What do you do? You could pray. I’m
Three Secrets to Building Your Influence, Part 3, Shared Interests If you want to change anything in your organization, you need to influence at least one other person to succeed. I wrote about showing your competence in Part 1. Part 2 was about building trust. Now, let’s talk about creating win-wins with shared interests. I bet you’ve met people who
One of the familiar tensions in management is how you encourage or discourage people from bringing you problems. One of my clients had a favorite saying, “Don’t bring me problems. Bring me solutions.” I could see the problems that saying caused in the organization. He prevented people from bringing him problems until the problems were
I saw this post yesterday, A Simple Suggestion to Help Phase Out All-Male Panels at Tech Conferences. And, I wondered what I would do, if I was male. Let me provide a little more context. I had a conference call with some of the Prag editors just a couple of weeks ago. The Prags publish
Solve Problems With the Rule of Three You may have noticed in these Pragmatic Manager emails that I articulate a problem I’ve seen and then offer you a minimum of three potential reasonable solutions. Sometimes, I even offer four solutions. That’s because I use the Rule of Three to help develop these solutions—and it works.
There was a question on a LinkedIn group earlier this week about a program with teams with interconnected features and how did you know when a feature was done. After all, a feature wasn’t done until all the teams were done with it. After a few more questions, I realized the teams were architectural teams,
A number of my clients and colleagues are struggling with the problem of bringing people into their organizations. In Hiring the Best …, I recommend the buddy system for bringing people on. I wrote a little article, How2 Create a Buddy (Informal Mentoring) Program. But maybe you didn’t know that, or can’t figure out how