Archive for April, 2008
Are there Darkworkers in your department?
The concept of Darkworkers and Lightworkers is buzzing on a couple of blogs I favor at the moment. In essence, Darkworkers align themselves to the needs of themselves, i.e. they are selfish individuals who live only for personal gain. On the flipside, Lightworkers align themselves to the needs of humanity. It’s important at this time [...]
Build an Information Catalog
Information is the basis of the modern world. It’s the Information Age (wasn’t that Oracle who had that in their strapline in the 90s?) Information is power, so they say. But how do you get your information?
This article covers how we get information from external sources, i.e. it isn’t about the coffee-machine chat. I’m talking [...]
The ‘mystery’ boss: why your bosses behavior may occasionally look strange
I’ve been intending to write about this for a while, so when it was suggested by a reader (John Lau) I feature this subject I took my fingers to the keyboard. This is a subject I’ve experienced myself and is also the cause of much stress and anxiety in a number of people I have [...]
Finding niche causes to raise your profile
Career development isn’t just about doing a great job (although mastering your craft is a solid way to build a career to the greatest of heights), it’s also about building, maintaining and developing your profile inside and external to an organization.
You can build your profile as I’ve just mentioned, by doing a great job and [...]
NFRs: The mysterious requirements of a business
Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) are often the ‘unsaid’ requirements of a new product or system. NFRs should describe an important business context. Organizations who express new requirements of an IT system or a product tend to be much better at describing how something should work rather than the conditions in which it should work. For IT departments, [...]
Creating technical innovation in a regimented world
In today’s climate of risk management, compliance, ITIL, Prince II and sophisticated management (the ‘regime’) innovation often loses out, as strict control of projects and operations demand repeatable, mature processes. A lot of investment goes into that situation, and changing them is costly and disruptive. So how inside a regime can innovation be stimulated without being [...]
How to Articulate Your Success
I’ve discussed before how developing and improving your public speaking skills can also improve your personal confidence (see here ).
On a similar vein, I’m discussing my views on the importance of good articulation skills, i.e. how you use language, vocabulary, your voice and inflections such as pauses. The reason why is through research and experience [...]
Are you restricting your own Success?
I doubt many of us can answer this question Yes or No outright, but the answer maybe lurking there if you consider how frustrated you might be about not achieving your (realistic) desires. Career success, for example, is dependent on other folks supporting you and recognising your achievements. But I’d say in most cases, it’s [...]
How to Tune Into Language as a Technical Leader
Technical professions require precision in language. We can’t express computer program code in slang, as much as we can’t express an insurance illustration without being exact. So in our profession, you’d expect all articulation and use of language to be unambiguous and precise, wouldn’t you?
Well research has shown that technical professionals can still lack precision [...]
Using Chaos to Organize large scale programs and projects
I frequently see and hear about how organizations struggle with the planning of programmes or large scale projects, as is often the case nowadays, they involve the integration of many partners, business units, mavericks, doubters and in summary complexity. The complexity, at first, creates chaos which manifests itself as overwhelming dependencies and uncertain delivery dates. [...]
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