The pressure to deliver is great nowadays (bit). Utilize time-proven software engineering techniques like reuse of accomplishments and artifacts (tip).
Classical example of this is called WORM: write once, report many. For example, you write an article once and report the number of views every month. Of course, the article needs to be popular enough to report.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -
Yesterday in a local Dun Laoghaire bookstore I stumbled upon this book:
Who Gets Promoted, Who Doesn’t and Why: 10 Things You’d Better Do If You Want to Get Ahead
Initially I hesitated but finally bought it. I wasn’t disappointed when I started reading it that evening. This book finally puts an explanatory system around career promotions and it really fits well with my observations in 15 companies I worked for during past 15 years. This doesn’t mean that I changed the company ever year 
The longest relationship with a company was 7 years and my current relationship with Citrix approaches 5 years. I just worked for some companies in parallel or just for a few months. This book also teaches some important vocabulary such as:
- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -
Reflecting on my old software engineering days I remember working for one of the biggest software factories in Russia and noticing IE windows on workstations when I was passing by. Then working for one of the biggest software factories in telecommunications domain I noticed the same screens whenever I entered engineering offices. People there obviously had plenty of time for browsing, reading and typing (not in some programming language of course). At that time I started calling them Process Parasites and their relationship to a team and an organization as Process Parasitism which (paraphrasing Wikipedia definition) is:
a type of symbiotic relationship between an employee and an organization in which one, the process parasite, benefits from a prolonged, close association with the processes in the organization.
What kind of benefits a process parasite gains? Obviously one benefit is time: free time to do whatever a parasite wants or needs but irrelevant to business goals. This especially happens when there are process inefficiencies and underplanning of resources.
One manager reading this post noticed the curious similarity between the word “website” and the word “parasite“.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -
Have you ever felt doubt assigning or distributing “meets some”, “meets all” or “exceeds performance” ratings across your team members when delivering feedback during performance appraisals? This is the problem for high performance team leads promoted to management positions. They compare other team members to their past performance and feel that all fall under “meets all” category at best. However they should take the mean of performance indicators and rate team members according to that mean value. For example, your team members had goals to write knowledge base articles (without specifying the predefined number of them). Sure when you were the team lead you wrote 20 of them during one night. That’s why you were promoted Now you see that Adam wrote 1, Sophie wrote 3 and John wrote 5. Hmm, they look all underperforming for you. However, this team without you as an engineer is the new team. So calculate the mean value (1+3+5)/3 = 3. Therefore, it would be fair to say that Adam “meets some”, Sophie “meets all” and John “exceeds performance”.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -
