Below you'll find a list of all posts from 2004
Mintzberg makes some scathing remarks about the Strategic Planning industry. A lot of it seems to come down that the planners are (A) taking the power away from managers and (B) it doesn’t work in practice. I’m wondering if a similar argument can’t be made about software project management.
Top Consultant reports that management consultancy salaries have increased and fee rates are firmer now than they have been for 3 years, and there is a bit more money to spend on salaries. All firms reported a shortage of good candidates, and those that gave October salary reviews awarded increases of around 5%, reflecting the need to attract new staff …
The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems, a publications of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Management Information Systems, has devoted an entire issue to IT Outsourcing. Jens Dibbern, Time Goles, Rudy Hirschheim and Bandula Jayatilaka take over the entire issue for a journal-length review of everything that has been done. One of the interesting things was that they did …
The previous discussion about Henry Mintzberg’s “Quiet Leadership” led me to read some of his newspaper articles. “Africa’s ‘Best Practices’” is from the Daily Times of Pakistan (March 9,2004), although it has been published elsewhere earlier. Mitzberg asks the important question: do we or even can we develop leaders? Perhaps we don’t develop leaders so much as foster the conditions …
Jon pointed out “Managing Quietly” [Leader to Leader, 12 (Spring 1999): 24-30], one of the few articles by Henry Mintzberg available online. It talks about the fact that the loud, glossy CEOs who become darlings of the business press, do not in fact perform all that well. Quiet leaders, whom you never hear about, do much better. It’s worth a …
If people had any idea what real management leadership looked like, the idea of self-managed teams wouldn’t be thought of as anything so radical.
Since I’m having a tough time with my case study, I’ll try putting down some things that I think are true about organization change in general. Forrest’s Postulates on Organizational Change
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Robert McDermott has written an excellent (if aged) introduction for people who don’t yet understand Communities of Practice (CoP). He compares and contrasts them to teams, and describes how a community of practice can complement teams in team-based organizations in a way that the Matrix Organization (“does the Matrix have YOU?”) does not. Matrix organizations are almost always a bad …
In the last post on implementation, APFG commented that the middle layer in the company is where you have most of the problems. Since almost everyone says this, let’s take a look at why. Let’s admit that it is not always true: the middle layer in a company isn’t always the source of the problems. There are often people at …
I’ve avoided talking about implementation for awhile. So let’s get into it! I’ve got some questions and thoughts that I’ll be posting over the next few days about the general problems associated with “implementing RO”. Although I think that the whole idea is kind of whacked. It sounds a bit like “how do we get these people on board with …
