Pragmatic Dictator

I’m a CTO, the traitorous techie that turned to the dark side of management or the unrealistic techie that won’t face up to management reality, depending on your point of view. Who am I really? I’m the man with experience on both sides of the fence. I’m the one who sees that the grass is decidedly scorched regardless of which side of that fence you sit.

1. Many geeks are obsessed with using all the latest technologies and building ultra-clever software that isn’t practical to run assuming it ever gets delivered.
2. Many managers fail to prioritise. An organisation can only ever be focused on one thing effectively at any moment. That’s because there are always bottlenecks, cash, mindset, staff, office space, the list goes on. Best identify the single most important thing you can do and go for it with all you have. Back a single horse, not the entire field.
3. Many geeks are all about the process. They’re agile, they’re kanban, they’re lean, they’re waterfall, they’re hypothesis testing. All of them miss the fundamental, which is not the process but the mindset that underpins it. Following the process blindly makes one a valueless robot, a cog in the machine, rather than an active participant shaping destiny.
4. Many managers fail to understand that dates are aspirational. One must actively work towards a date by managing scope, risk and resource, even then, there are no guarantees. What’s the value of a date anyway? Nothing. What matters is what you have to offer and whether it’s enough.
5. Many geeks fail to understand that design is a creative, subjective discipline. Design patterns aren’t the answer nor is the do it all framework. It’s knowing what to apply and when which comes from broad experience (which means you need to know more than one language, platform and operating system and will need to have worked in a number of industry verticals).
6. Many managers are obsessed with cost reduction. Fact is that to do something to a particular standard in some reasonable amount of time is going to cost a certain minimum. That minimum is largely unknowable in advance so better to decide how much you are prepared to pay and work to that number. As soon as an overshoot looks probable it’s time to step back and re-think (maybe even can) the plan.
7. Many geeks are performance junkies, optimising every part of their system based on a set of metrics that have nothing to do with the real-world. In the worst cases, there are no metrics, no one has done any measurement and the statement that something is “too slow” is pure speculation.
8. Many managers treat those that work for them as interchangeable components with no feelings, no individual strengths or weaknesses, no motivations or concerns. They then wonder why staff retention is appalling, performance is horrid and they can’t ever seem to recruit the right people.

What’s missing is a collective focus on producing something worth a damn. Producing such a thing requires caring and provides challenge, profit, happiness, satisfaction and a whole lot more. So the first question to ask whether you’re a geek or a manager is, what are we trying to do? Natural follow-ups would be why and do we care?

Whilst you’re pondering that, hopefully you’ll realise that there shouldn’t be a fence or sides…

This entry was posted on Friday, December 30th, 2011 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.