Information Technology Dark Side

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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Who doesn’t need a USB refrigerator? Or a USB doomsday button or foam rocket launcher? Hello! Everybody.
Check this CIO article out. You’ll be glad you did. You might even make a purchase…
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In a recent post, Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks (my team!) talks about writing notes by hand. Apparently, he hadn’t had to do that for a while and the experience made him wonder if he had just forgotten how to write.
“I literally couldn’t take notes fast enough because as I wrote, I [...]

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Dave Christiansen is the founder and managing editor of
TechDarkSide.com. He manages projects for a Fortune 100 financial services company and writes and talks about project management. dave@techdarkside.com.
I’ve had a battle with spam lately, and I think I’ve made improvements that will prevent the deluge of spam comments. So… I’ve turned comments back on. We’ll try [...]

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Dave Christiansen is the founder and managing editor of TechDarkSide.com. He manages projects for a Fortune 100 financial services company and writes and talks about project management. dave@techdarkside.com.
TechDarkSide is getting killed by blog comment spam. Therefore… I’m turning it off. You now must be a registered user to post comments.
Sorry.
~Dave
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