Tag: Professional Development
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How To Do Well in Your Next Job Interview
Recently I read an editorial about job interviews. It was breezy and funny, but not very helpful. Given that millions are out there looking for work, I want to help by giving my perspective on how to “win” the interview. I do a lot of interviewing, from both sides of the desk. As a consultant…
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Jürgen Klinsmann’s Waterfall to Agile Transition
How does this sound as advice for an app dev manager leading his or her team from waterfall to Agile? Clearly articulate a compelling end-state vision Work from a position of authority Weather the storms Reward creativity while fostering improvement A post at scrumsource.com lists leadership, organizational culture, and people as three of the five…
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Followership IV: How to criticize your boss
This is the latest entry in an occasional series on followership. The premise, as stated here, is that not everyone gets to be a leader, and most leaders are also followers in their own right. The project manager follows instructions from the project sponsor, the CEO from the board, the politicians from the polls, and…
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Relational DB Pros: The Times They Are A-Changin’
Recently I read a thoughtful post at the PASS Business Analytics Conference site discussing how different the world is now for database professionals. Author Chris Webb focuses on the data science side in this post. His analysis made me think of the challenges and opportunities “big data” serves up to relational database designers. To me these…
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What Driving Dogs Tell Us About Learning
Recently the BBC posted this video. On first view it is just funny, but watching those dogs learn to drive really reminded me of personal experiences with IT teams making big learning transitions. To represent those real situations let’s consider a fictional team of SQL developers facing the daunting task of deploying a functional Hadoop-based…
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Learning to learn
“A child of five could understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five!” – Groucho Marx Recently my colleague Sara Shelton posted an article listing non-technical things we IT specialists need to do to maintain our careers. Each of the nine items on Sara’s list is a key to IT professional success. One…