Book Review: Difficult People at Work

Success in any business setting is going to involve dealing with difficult people. Bell and Smith have written an engaging field guide to several different types of difficult people and how to deal with them.

The first half of the book presents a modified Meyers-Briggs type of personality assessment. The labels chosen for the different axes are different from the standard, which I found to be confusing. (On the other hand, I have heard other people complain that the original labels are confusing. For those people, the labels chosen by Bell and Smith may be more accessible to them.)

I was a little disappointed that more was not done with tying the personality assessments to the types of problem employees presented in the second part of the book.

In the second section, we are presented with several identifiable types of problem people, a strategy for dealing with them, and a story about a real-world sighting of each type of problem person. The descriptions were recognizable, the strategies were reasonable, and the stories were interesting.

This is a quick and enjoyable read.

Sources of Power within an Organization

Success in any organization is going to be built on reciprocal relationships. Cooperation is needed in order for everyone to really succeed. When you need someone to cooperate with you, part of building a successful long-term relationship with them will involve sharing something of value with them.

Here are several examples of the sorts of things you can share, whether or not you directly manage the person in question:

• Inspiration. Explain why what you need is really the right thing to do. Most people want to do a good job and to contribute in a meaningful way.
• Resources. This may be money, or it may be access to equipment, expertise, or space that the other person would find useful.
• Learning opportunities. Technical people like to learn new skills.
• Faster response. Can you arrange for the something to be expedited for the other person?
• Information. Is there information the other person needs that you can share?
• Recognition. Thank you messages with the other person's boss cc'ed are free and very effective.
• Visibility. Is your task something that is being watched by higher-ups?
• Contacts. Can you introduce the other person to new, valuable contacts?
• Team membership. Everyone wants to be part of a successful team.
• Ownership. Can you provide an ownership opportunity to the other person?

Withholding any of the above is a negative currency you can use in negotiations. Try to avoid that. Positive interactions are more likely to get you the sort of cooperation you actually need.

The value of each of these items may be different from person to person. Try to select something that works for the person you are dealing with. Just because one particular currency is more valuable to you, that doesn’t mean that the other person feels the same way.

From Techie to Boss ebook Available

The final version of the From Techie to Boss ebook is available from the Apress web site:

From Techie to Boss Description

From Techie to Boss has been released!

Sometimes it feels like non-technical managers just don't understand what we do for a living. The good ones try really hard and stand up for their team, but they just don't feel it in their bones. If technology is not stamped into your DNA, you just don't get it.

So that means that only technical people should manage technical people, right?

Here's the problem: technical people frequently do not make good managers. It isn't that they aren't smart enough; usually the best technicians are the people who are asked to step into leadership roles. But the skills that make a good techie are not necessarily the skills that make a good leader.

When you become a leader, the focus shifts. It is no longer about what you can accomplish as an individual contributor. You will be judged by your team's accomplishments.

Good technical people have developed good study habits, a sense of responsibility, and a solid work ethic. All of these are important, and can translate into skills that will help you be a good leader. But you will only be an effective leader when you inspire your team members to reach their potential.

Moving into a leadership role can be a bumpy ride. But it can also be hugely rewarding. Make sure to approach it from the right frame of mind. It isn't about you anymore. It is about your team.

This book lays out some of the lessons I have learned during my own transition from a front-line techie to a manager. The technical community has always been all about sharing what we learn. I look forward to hearing you share your own stories and lessons from your own journey.

Book Review: Influence without Authority

Any project manager knows how hard it is to get things done when the people you need don't report directly to you. You're responsible for getting things done, but you haven't been given the organizational authority to carry it out directly.

Cohen and Bradford lay out strategies and techniques that you can use to make sure things get done. Different people require different techniques, and the authors explore different ways to work with different types of people.

The skills laid out in this book are something that every project manager needs.

PaaS Decisions

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is one of the types of cloud services that you can purchase.

Information Week produced an excellent buyers' guide evaluating different PaaS vendors and contrasting their offerings.

As contrasted with IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS provides a in integrated programming platform. Usually this includes the underlying infrastructure layer, either directly from the PaaS vendor or from a partner.

The contrast with SaaS (Software as a Service) is that PaaS provides a level of transparency, configurability and programmability that is greater than SaaS provides. PaaS needs to provide a stable platform capable of running arbitrary customer code reliably.

As a practical matter, a PaaS vendor will need to offer only a limited number of Operating System/Database/Application Server/Web Server version combinations in their offering. This may result in increased vendor lock-in, since it may be difficult to match that stack even if the elements are industry standard (eg LAMP).

A differentiator between PaaS vendors who use the same stack may be an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). This may include things like a code versioning system, a test environment, libraries, or an online community.

Some PaaS vendors provide access to a proprietary platform. (One leading example is force.com.) These PaaS vendors are offering increased configuration capability over what would be offered from a straight-up SaaS vendor. Lock-in is a given for this type of vendor, since the customer's programming and configuration efforts will not be portable to another vendor.

As with any other sort of cloud vendor, make sure that security, auditing, and monitoring requirements will fit within your corporate standards. PaaS may allow you less flexibility for monitoring, especially performance monitoring, than IaaS will.

SLAs (Service Level Agreements) will almost certainly not provide penalties large enough to compensate for the real costs of any outage. Find out what the availability history is for the vendor candidates, and probe into the architecture underlying their offering to judge what the expected reliability will be. Then make sure that SLAs include penalties large enough that the vendor feels that they have skin the game when it comes to your uptime.

Turning Around a Team in Trouble

When you take over a team, it is likely to be one of the following situations:

• Start-up: You are building a new team, possibly from scratch.
• Turnaround: This team is in serious trouble.
• Realignment: The team has been successful in the past, but needs to change to sync up with the overall organization's direction.
• Sustaining success: The team is already successful and aligned with the overall direction.

Each of these scenarios has particular challenges and needs a somewhat different mindset.

In some ways, a turnaround is both the biggest challenge as well as the biggest opportunity. The challenges are apparent, but everyone recognizes that things are going to have to change.

Part of turning things around is to find early wins. What shape these take will depend on the exact situation, but the team needs to become accustomed to setting goals and accomplishing them. As the team succeeds and is recognized for success, a culture of accomplishment will start to replace the culture of failure.

Examine the causes for the teams failures. Be honest, but try to address the causes for failure in as non-judgmental a way as possible. A culture of failure is often associated with a culture of blame. Move away from the blame game and towards an honest evaluation of what events occurred when, and what the underlying causes were. Focus on the "what" and the "why" rather than the "who."

Create a culture of honesty, openness and respect. People want to be part of successful teams. Work with your team to define what success looks like, and how to get there. Spend time with your team members to find out what is getting in their way, and help them find ways to overcome it.

At the same time, seek to create a culture of accountability. Once someone accepts a task, he or she owns it. That means that person gets credit for the success, and the responsibility to make it succeed. Turnaround teams are too used to failing. Help the team member find a way to succeed. That doesn't mean that you take over the task; that means that you mentor the team member to identify ways to move forward and succeed.

Model the values you think your team should embody. Things like honesty, openness, continuous improvement, and respect should be evident in how you do your job. If you model good behavior, team members will gravitate towards the values you need the team to embody.

Book Review: Being Geek

The author of this book writes the popular "Rands in Repose" blog. IT people will recognize the situations Lopp describes, and may find some of his advice and insights to be useful.

The chapters are strongly influenced by posts on the blog. While the chapters are interesting of themselves, there is little coherence between chapters, and some of the chapter headings are not a good description of the contents.

Lopp's other book, "Managing Humans," may be a better choice for many readers. In that book, the chapters are more coherent, and the stories are more on-point.

This was an enjoyable, quick read, which is why I gave it 4 stars. I just think the other book is better, which is why I gave that one 5.