Information Technology Dark Side

This blog is, at the time of writing, hosted by GoDaddy.com. I didn’t choose GoDaddy because of their commercials, which I think are pretty stupid, but because they were the cheapest hosting I could find at the time I switched.
I wish IT infrastructure groups were more like GoDaddy in a couple of ways. Here they [...]

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A few months ago I was asked by the Association for Software Testing to act as the managing editor of their newsletter. If you know me, you’re probably saying “what the %$#& does Dave know about testing?” That’s exactly the reaction I had too, but Mike Kelly made the case to me that AST had [...]

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Here’s a question a reader sent recently:
I am responsible for mentoring staff with aspirations to be project managers. I’ve given them assignments to help them develop, but I’m not sure what else to do. Any suggestions?
I like to use one-on-one meetings to help new project managers grow. If done well, these meetings can be valuable [...]

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Undernet - resources on or related to the internet that facilitate the commission of a crime or enable vice generally considered to be bad for society, or just using the internet in a way that is generally deceptive or really, really irritating. The undernet includes:
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The person who controls access to your boss.
The person who controls access to your building.
The person who cleans your workspace.
And then there’s everybody else - you should be nice to them too.
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Bob Sutton, author of The No Asshole Rule, has a very good blog. His most recent post about innovation really hit home for me, maybe because I so often get caught up in the religious debates about how organizations “make” innovation happen.
Check his latest post out. I am particularly happy with a quote he references [...]

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Nobody throws parties when project teams finish requirements documents. Or design documents. In fact, there is something incredibly anti-climactic about completing these deliverables when they are also set up as milestones in a phase-based development project. Nothing is as earth-shatteringly exciting as delivering a finished requirements document to a business partner in an IT project. [...]

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Many organizations have compensation structures & processes that reward “high performance” employees more than regular joes. Usually, these high performers are a group of people with the performance ratings in the 90th percentile, or the top 10%. Conversely, some organizations automatically fire the bottom 10%.
A few months ago, I was lucky enough to find [...]

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I’ve picked up a couple of new phrases from reading and meetings lately that put nice tags on concepts I’ve understood but couldn’t name easily. Here they are:
Seagull architect is a term I picked up from Johanna Rothman’s book, Manage It! (awesome read - I’ll review it soon). A seagull architect swoops in, poops out [...]

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This video of Bill Gates getting punked by Napolean Dynamite made me wonder if I wasn’t attending the wrong events. Not a mashup!
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