personality matters

Articles

Avoiding Disaster: Get Your Team to Plan for Configuration Management

Poor planning is the root cause of many problems. Planning for configuration management can significantly impact your organization's productivity and effectiveness. Many teams live in a constant treadmill of responding to emergencies that could have easily been avoided with a little bit of planning. Some people just don't have the ability or demeanor to create an adequate plan, while others don't even want to. In technology, many professionals excel at responding to crisis after crisis and become known for their skills in "saving the day." At the other end of the spectrum are professionals who plan and plan but cannot find the right balance between planning and action. Fixating on creating a plan is just as deadly as having no plan at all. Technology managers need to be able to recognize the personality traits that make for good planners in their team and provide leadership to get the job done in an effective way.

Leslie  Sachs's picture Leslie Sachs
Coach Release Management like a Winning Sports Team

Release management is very similar to a team sport that involves many essential interactions. Very often teams find it particularly challenging to work together effectively, and the end result is that they cannot manage to complete any complex tasks without making many mistakes. Sports teams are also affected by interpersonal dynamics that can either help build the team or render it completely dysfunctional. Release management involves the packaging of every component in order to successfully deliver a complete product to a customer. Your release management function needs to efficiently coordinate the work of each player on your team.

Leslie  Sachs's picture Leslie Sachs
Consider Team Members' Personalities When Creating a Change Control Group

Creating a change control group (or any other process improvement effort) can be incredibly successful—or it can get bogged down with impossible "people" issues, often due to conflicting communication styles and personalities. If you want your team to be a success, you may need to consider some of these people issues, or else risk failure due to personality issues that really matter. It's not hard to address these challenges and build a change control function that will succeed despite some of the inherent challenges in getting people who may have very different styles and approaches to work together.

Leslie  Sachs's picture Leslie Sachs
Selecting the Best Tools for Your IT Team

Tools selection should really be the most objective and straightforward task that any technology professional could be asked to work on. After all, selecting a hammer is a basic task that depends on objective criteria such as the size of the nail that you are pounding into a wall. In technology, tools selection involves a lot more group dynamics than you might expect, and it is very possible that personality issues within the team evaluating the tools could cause you to make some costly mistakes. This article discusses what you need to know to make sure that you can successfully “tame your wild tools selection process” and yield the best results for your organization.

Leslie  Sachs's picture Leslie Sachs
Can You Predict Danger?

Testers are in a position to see danger coming. Speaking up early about risks that others may not see can save a project. In this article Yogita Sahoo looks at the problem of NOT speaking up, and discusses the unique position of the test team in preventing failures.

Yogita Sahoo's picture Yogita Sahoo

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