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How tech bosses manage their teams for fun and profit

'Whenever I hear the word culture I reach for my org chart...'

Cargo cult Agile

This was a new term to me, but apparently is what the cool IT execs call the bad habit of applying the A-word to pretty much any process that doesn’t have the word Waterfall printed on the cover. It is often an excuse or synonym for not planning things and the wiser end of the interim CTOs now have this as a thing to be wary of (or be paid to fix) when looking at new assignments.

In fact, the word “toxic” came up several times as we covered how IT groups and sometimes whole companies apply what they perceive as Agile with little specific training and often simply see it as an excuse to kill “slow” processes like testing. Toxic Agile can create a mindset or even a culture of only ever taking easy decisions that look good short term, which is of course one reason why the time in post of top IT execs is rather lower than you might expect.

BOFHs

Of course our IT execs have encountered BOFHs who willfully obstruct or who have built code and systems that only they understand. If anything this problem is worse that it has ever been. When we were all in cost saving mode (and most of us have been in recent years) we tried to ensure that we have no spare people or unnecessary overlap and of course sometimes we were too successful and find ourselves too dependent upon individuals who often just get in the way.

The irony is that most of the holders aren’t happy with this “power” either. The consequence of being too critical to lose is that they get stuck in roles that they probably didn’t want in the first place and certainly have ambitions to move past. This means that the most realistic way of fixing the BOFH problem is with the BOFH’s cooperation, broadening their skills so they can upgrade and sharing their knowledge so that you can let them move.

But an axiom of taking over an IT group is that the best team for what you have to do next is the team you have now. All our CTOs agreed that you have to make tough decisions about how much in the way of short term deliverables you are prepare to trade for those you need a year or more from now.

There are those we need to move along a vertical business axis and those who are most suited to a horizontal move along the technology. Of course it isn’t always as smooth as that sounds. Developers often make tragically bad operations staff and vice versa.

However, as we see DevOps grow as a stream, and it does seem like the better people are gravitating towards it, either because they like the new way of doing things or because management are deploying smarter people to newer, important projects.

Part of the challenge is, surprisingly, how many people want input into the overall strategy. Any number of staff may want to offer random opinions about issues and opportunities, with fewer being prepared to colour in their own part of a formal strategy based upon their insight into local conditions. That local but deep experience in each area is critical if the overall picture is going to have any chance of working.

Bell curves

Although the IT execs talked a lot about motivating people as individuals, larger teams don’t give much time for one-by-one touchy feely interactions.

So a good part of people management (nobody called it man management, perish the thought), is just working out where people are in various bell curves for tech ability, business knowledge, commitment etc. The job is then a mix of moving staffers to the most suitable slot or occasionally along the curve.

Money

We then went into the vexed subject of money. At this point there was a little banter between the “rich end of the table”, such as those in financial services, the public sector leaders and those in startups. The cultural gaps were laid quite bare, even if there was a consensus.

First was the idea of visible fairness in pay and conditions. None of our attendees was naïve enough to believe that individual pay was as secret as modern business culture like to officially pretend. It is a regular source of friction. Having individuals who get special treatment is seen as especially toxic, not just when they earn more, but when they are seen to not be pulling their weight even if there are good reasons for it.

Although they can be a straitjacket for keeping good people, the highly structured pay systems of large enterprises were seen as an advantage since they are more transparent even when they are wrong. They are at least perceived as not unfair, though there are some tweaks around things like promotion, where instead of paying extra “acting up” money for people who take on extra responsibility, they get more when they’ve succeeded at the new level, this costs about the same but provides a better motivation.

Of course this requires a degree of trust that a successful IT leader needs to build up and maintain, since it is too easy to say “we’ll see you right afterwards” then “forget” that a verbal commitment was made. We’ve all been there haven’t we?

Money wasn’t seen as a particularly good motivator for those away from the rich end of the table and that was partly self selecting. People gravitate towards the reward structures that suit them and if you have people who care mostly about the quality of the work, or achieving things, buzz, cool tech, the social context or whatever, then you must grasp that which can be a real challenge.

They are poorly defined terms that exist in the minds of your team, rather than the objective facts of money, which for all its problems is simple. What is “interesting” work for each of your team?

One interesting view that emerged was that money could work for “doing” but was bad for “thinking”. A clearly defined objective works well with a financial incentive, but the more you want people to come up with new ideas or take risks, the worse a motivator money is.

Gamification is becoming trendy and has always been an informal part of many successful IT teams. Having some objective metric for success like transactions processed or calls handled gives people a little edge to behave better.

This of course needs a deft touch to do well, because if imposed from above it can feel very patronising. To quote the late, great Terry Pratchett “they had such contempt for the staff they actually had an employee of the month award”.

You also need to make sure the simple metric encourages the right behaviours. All incentive schemes, whether money or kudos-based, can be gamed or misunderstood, encouraging selfish behaviour or sharp elbowed attempts to get credit for each goal attained.

One tactic that does seem to work well is a drawer of “dinner for twos” where you catch the staff doing the right thing (teamwork, trying hard, dealing with a viciously unpleasant user with a smile) and you buy them a decent meal.

This is made harder by the fact that the business often wants things to be project oriented. This has never really matched the way good IT is delivered and as we move more online and more mobile and more directly engaging with customers and suppliers makes the easy option of setting rewards of “if we deliver X you will get Y” both the easy option and the worst one.

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