From the category archives:

Communication

Starve your voice mail, feed your e-mail

June 17, 2008

I’ve touched on this topic briefly before, but here’s a lengthier discussion on why, in general, I find e-mail to be vastly preferable to voice mail for communication in the business world. Here’s my stance: voice mail works reasonably well on a small scale in the home (i.e., personal voice mail implemented usually with answering [...]

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Executive questions, IT answers, pizza parlors, and speed chess

May 24, 2008

Let’s mix some metaphors today, and attempt to relate them all to the world of information technology and project management.I have a good friend and colleague, one of the top IT consultants I know.  He’s able to execute crisply at the detail level while keeping the big picture in mind; he’s especially good at balancing [...]

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Why status reports really do matter

May 13, 2008

Do a poll: many IT folks regard doing status reports as their least favorite task.  My point here, though, will be that a lot of people, management and workers alike, don’t fully understand the real purpose of status reports, and that status reports should actually be a “must-have” arrow in your management quiver.  How a [...]

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Using feedback loops to improve IT department service

April 15, 2008

As I’ve written here before, I strongly advocate thinking of IT in general as a service organization to the rest of the business. Any service organization needs one or more forms of “feedback loop” to be able to gauge whether it is successfully accomplishing its mission.  However, I’ve observed relatively few IT organizations that actively [...]

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CIO pet peeves: small drains on personal productivity

March 26, 2008

I promised a while back to write more about some of the pet peeves I’ve developed in the CIO/CTO role. So here are a few more. We all have pet peeves. Working as an executive in IT seems to present a lot of opportunities to develop a long list of these. They’re minor grievances, to [...]

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“Channeling”: a technique for preparing IT presentations to management

March 14, 2008

The Skeptic’s Dictionary tells us about a concept called channeling: “Channeling is a process whereby an individual (the “channeler”) claims to have been invaded by a spirit entity which speaks through the channeler. ” Lest anyone misunderstand, I’m not recommending that anyone get invaded by a spirit entity. But I am recommending that you learn [...]

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More Peterisms: lessons learned on IT practices

March 9, 2008

More pithy sayings that (at least in my view) I reuse in an attempt to succinctly express key concepts and lessons. Or, perhaps in many cases, to annoy my staff via tireless repetition. I have several dozen of these sayings, most likely (I haven’t actually counted), and for many of them I can no longer [...]

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The flip side of common myths: how some are perpetuated by IT

March 4, 2008

As promised, I’m going to follow up on my last post (“Optimism, resilience, stamina: the make-up of the CTO/CIO“), covering the myths IT deals with on a regular basis, by talking about its flip side: the ways that IT itself can unfortunately perpetuate or contribute to some of the myths I’ve been discussing. Here’s a [...]

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