Team members get defensive when they get signals of lack of trust. As managers, one of the crucial things is to trust our people. Every plan we lay out, every control mechanism we identify and every decision we take in a project – there has to be an element of trust. When we work on […]
Agile is everywhere these days – my quest was to find out implications of using agile development methodologies in offshore model. Agile in offshore model has been a topic of debate primarily since offshore and distributed development does not foster face-to-face human communication during the project lifecycle. My quest lead me to read some interesting […]
I have written earlier about the importance of managing expectations all around in project management – same applies to our work as well. I recently stumbled upon one such situation. We had to release a version of application for client review in the evening and the developer working on the administration module left for the day without updating […]
Via Seth Godin’s blog post “That Moment“: “When you are sitting right on the edge of something daring and scary and creative and powerful and perhaps wonderful… and you blink and take a step back. That’s the moment. The moment between you and remarkable. Most people blink. Most people get stuck. “
Guy Kawasaki’s marketing lesson from Tam’s Art Gallery is “Do one thing right”. This is also a professional lesson as I look at it. Just like organizations, people also have to focus on doing one thing right or specializing in one area of work. Sure, we all multi-task between many different functions in an organization – […]
My earlier post revolved around the subject of effective writing. Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book ‘The Writer and the Reader’ by Neil Ewart. It is a great collection of great thoughts on writing and reading. The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new. […]
Jeffrey Phillips hits the point when he says “Writing well is an underappreciated skill“. I fully agree. Ability to write well is one of the most important skills one should have, especially in IT/software where paradigms of work have changed with internet and offshore outsourcing. On projects, people communicate requirements, plans, decisions, expectations and issues in […]
Seth Godin has an excellent post again – “Who should you hire?”. Managers and Leaders are often responsible for this challenging task of hiring people and this post surely a good reference for hiring people in your team as well as for doing some introspection ourselves. Seth says – “There is a fundamental shift in […]