Transcript INFO 324 Team Process and Product Week 10 Dr. Jennifer Booker College of Information Science and Technology Drexel University Copyright by Gregory W. Hislopwww.ischool.drexel.edu Introduction.

INFO 324
Team Process and Product
Week 10
Dr. Jennifer Booker
College of Information Science and
Technology
Drexel University
Copyright by Gregory W.
Hislop
1
www.ischool.drexel.edu
Introduction
Agenda
• Paul Maritz interview
– Leadership and management style
– Team roles
– Hiring
– Learning
• Professional development
– Drexel is only the beginning
• Interviewing thoughts
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Corner Office
• New York Times interview series
– Mostly CEO’s
– Many tech companies
– http://projects.nytimes.com/corner-office
• Lots of interesting comments on
leadership and management
– Being successful, getting hired, etc
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Essential Team “Types”
• Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware
• Relevance in the context of this course
– Leading teams
– Being a productive team member
– Professional development
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Maritz: Managing
• Manager’s role changes with group size
– 10 vs. 100 vs. 1,000 vs. 10,000
• As size grows, more about
– Getting the best from others
– Setting a framework to let others succeed
– Being a symbol and representing the mission
• Less about
– Being a specialist
– Knowing the details
– Making concrete contributions
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Maritz: Management Style
• Positive or negative
– Positive works best
– Negative: critique, criticism, intimidation, etc
• Goal: creating loyalty
• See: Dale Carnegie: “How to win Friends
and Influence People”
– Published in 1936; still in print
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Maritz: Team Roles
• Visionary – sets overall goals
• Classic manager – internal focus to get the work
done
• Customer champion – understanding, empathy,
and ability to represent the customer
• Enforcer – pushing decisions and creating
forward motion
People tend to think they can do all of these,
but generally they can not
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Team Roles
• Know what you do well
• Know that you don’t do everything well
– Go with your strengths
– Improve your weaknesses
• Find team members to balance your
weaknesses
– And value the contributions others can make
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Maritz: Hiring
• Guidelines for hiring and being hired
• Attributes
– Intellectual skills
– Record of actually getting things done
– Thoughtful, self-aware, and learning
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Maritz: Learning
• “Almost at any level, the really successful
people in organizations are the ones who
try to structure their lives to learn and get
feedback and be self-aware. That’s not
necessarily a natural thing to do, so you
have to be very mindful of it.”
• Professional development
– It means life-long learning
– No one will make it happen unless you do
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Why Professional
Development?
• School through a Bachelor’s degree: 17 or
18 years
– Including kindergarten
• Working career after college: 40+ years
Look back 40 years to get some perspective on
what a career’s worth of change might be like.
… and change in the next 40 might be greater!
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IT 40 Years Ago: mid-1970s
• Mainframes dominate (e.g. IBM 370)
– Water cooled, raised-floor rooms
– Monochrome character based terminals
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IT 40 Years Ago: mid-1970s
• Leading edge
– 1973 – 10,000 component chip; 4k bit DRAM
– 1974 – first WYSIWYG interface (Xerox PARC)
– 1975 – first PC kit available, Altair 8800
– 1977 – Microsoft founded, Apple II announced
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Why Professional
Development?
• Bottom line: What you know now won’t carry
you to retirement
– Knowledge you need will change with promotions and
industry sector change
– Technology change will be huge
– To graduates in 40 years the slickest technology of
today will be clunky and antique
• Your goal is to ensure that you don’t seem antique too
There’s a reason this is called “Life-long Learning”
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Who Makes Professional
Development Happen?
• You
•
Your employer (maybe. If you’re lucky.)
When Does Professional
Development Happen?
• When you have no time for it
• No canned curriculum to follow
• But you do it anyhow
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Employer Responsibility
• Strictly speaking: there is none
– Very different from your years in school
• Practically speaking: make this a key
factor in evaluating job opportunities
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Personal Responsibility
• No one will care about your development
as much as you do
– Except perhaps your mother, and she’s
probably not in IT
– Employers will care more if they know this
is a priority for you
– No one will care at all unless you do
• Any learning opportunity increases in
value if you are highly engaged
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What To Do
• Define goals
– Pick one or two
• Make a plan
• Follow through
• Revise and repeat… until you retire!
– Even if you switch from IT/IS to another
career
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Define Goals
• Define several goals
– Near term and long term
– Consider all the areas relevant to your job
• Write the goals down
– Periodically review progress and update goals
• Break goals down into particular tasks
– Achievable within a few months
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Areas of Development
• Narrow technical areas
– Particular programming languages, tools,
applications
• Python, Java, SVN, Oracle, SAP, etc
• Broad technical areas – history, trends
–
–
–
–
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Hardware capacity and price
IT vendor industry segments and key players
Rate of change in technology
Convergence trends
Emerging technology
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Areas of Development
• Application environment
– Learn about the environment your work
supports
• For-profit, non-profit, government
• Industry segment, e.g., medical, chemicals,
communication
• People, teams, management
– Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology
– General business literature on teams,
managing, collaboration, etc.
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Areas of Development
• Knowledge of the world – politics,
economics, families, living, etc.
– Things that might affect your organization
– Things that will affect people you manage
– Things that will make your life better
– Things that will affect your clients
Art
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Make a Plan
• Choose ways to learn
• Find good learning resources
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Resources for Learning
• Employer resources
– Courses, books, etc.
• Professional societies
– Seminars, online courses and books, publications
• University libraries
– Privileges at Drexel as Alumni
• Open source communities
– Code and other artifacts
• General Web resources
– Tutorials, artifacts, etc.
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Resources for Learning
• Formal learning channels
– Vendor courses
– Training and seminar companies
– University courses and degrees
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Ways to Learn
• Read
– Especially books
– Blogs and short pieces tend to be to fluffy and
lack context and depth
• Apply and practice
– Skills require practice to become expert
• You can’t learn to ride a bicycle by reading about it
– Contribute to an open source project
– Take on extra work that’s not time critical
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Ways to Learn
• Learn with others – humans are social (even us!)
– Informal learning together
• Share learning with a colleague or friend
• More brain power
• Additional source of motivation
– Formal learning through groups
• Professional societies (ACM, IEEE/CS, AIS, AITP, SIM)
• Local professional groups (Linux user groups, Oracle, etc.)
– Hang around with people who are intellectually alive
• Learning habits rub off
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Ways to Learn
• Reflect
– Especially by writing – journal, blog, notes
• Teach
– Prepping to teach takes a lot of learning
– Explaining and answering questions forces new
ways of thinking
• Create time for learning
– Give it priority – there will never be an easy time
– Consider allotting 30 minutes every work day
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A Final Perspective
• Professional development as career
evolution
– It’s a jungle out there!
• Natural selection
– Survival of the fittest
– Specialization and
generalization are
key
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Specialization and Evolution
• Specialization
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–
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Greater success in a given environment
Higher survival rate
Greater efficiency
Life is good!
• Limits of specialization
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Reduces adaptability
Less able to expand to different environments
Risk extinction when environment changes
Life is not so good!
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Specialization and Evolution
• “A human being should be able to change a
diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn
a ship, design a building, write a sonnet,
balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone,
comfort the dying, take orders, give orders,
cooperate, act alone, solve equations,
analyze a new problem, pitch manure,
program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight
efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for
insects.”
– Robert A. Heinlein
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Specialization in IT
• Specialization - defining a career by a particular
technology
– COBOL programmer - headed for extinction
– Python programmer – headed for extinction… just not
so soon
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Specialization in IT
• Generalization
– Define a career by things that last
• Software developer
• Human and organizational knowledge and skill
– Acquire and discard particular technologies as
needed
Always remember that there are unemployed IT professionals
… but also a lot of unfilled IT jobs
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Planning your Next Job
• Starts the day before you accept each
position
• Not an obsession, just an awareness
– As a habit, include regular career review
• Is there an exit strategy?
– If this job vaporizes, do you have good
options?
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Being Hired
• Focus on the job
– How you’ll spend your time
– Who you will work for and with
– How satisfying the work will be day to day
– Opportunity to learn and advance
– Hours and expectations – work/life balance
– Salary and benefits as last consideration
• Get paid what you’re worth
• But it’s not the key issue for a job
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Being Hired
• Prepare – about you
– Current, accurate resume
– Careful thought about your accomplishments
• Summary, analysis, clear description
– Explanation about any trouble spots
• Prepare – for the job
– Know the company, the people, the industry
– Have a list of questions you want to ask
• To get the answers, but also to show your
understanding
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Being Hired
• Presenting yourself – always professional
– Dress the part – conservatively
– Mind your manners
– Be positive
– Sell yourself, but accurately and low key
• Including attitude and interest in the job and
organization
– Tone matters
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Being Hired
• Negotiating terms
– Offers are a usually starting point
• But the end point is not miles away
– Focus on the work first
• The job, the opportunity, the growth potential
– Salary last
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•
•
•
But don’t skip over it
Salary distributions are almost always skewed
Know what you’re talking about – collect data
Almost always ask for an increase
– But only in a positive way and keeping focus on the job
– Be realistic
– A compromise is often the best result
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Hiring
• Hire for qualities that don’t change easily
– Brain power and ability to learn
– Energy
– Drive and passion for work
– Positive attitude
– Interpersonal skill
– Personal chemistry
– Foundation technical knowledge
•
People can learn new technologies
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Hiring
• Don’t assume candidate knowledge
– Ask detailed questions that have factual
answers
– Drill down until you find the extent of expertise
• Look for real expertise in something
• Don’t expect expertise in everything
• Sell the job – both parties are “buying”
– Present yourself well
– Present the job and your organization
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Perspective
• Careers are journeys
– Final destination is almost never known at
the start
– Detours are common; in fact, expected!
– Breakdowns and other problems are not
the end, merely interesting challenges or
opportunities
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In Your Future...
• Please fill out the course evaluation!
– I read them and make changes based on
them
• Assignment #10: Professional
Development Plan
– Optional, replaces your worst grade from the
other nine assignments
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