Ten often-overlooked principles of technology leadership

1. Often-Overlooked Principles of Effective Technology Leadership
The following are some basic principles that I have found useful in leading technology
teams, but which are often ignored. Most are things that technology leaders are not
immediately rewarded for, but which are essential for long-term success and consistent
delivery of real business value. I make no claim to be a management expert. The
principles below have little to do with management science and everything to do with
managing technologists.
1. Pick up a shovel
The more you understand about the day-to-day challenges and activities of your team, the
more you can be counted on to make the right decisions and to get the team to support
your decisions. Of course, this requires that you invest in learning the technology that
your team works with and that you get some practical experience working with it.
Production support and release management are areas where leaders can often learn a lot
about the systems that their teams work with. Documentation and test plan development
are other areas where you can "roll up your sleeves" and bond with the technology and
the team.
2. Grow the vision
Technologists do not like to accept strategies or solutions that are forced on them "from
above." A team vision that is grown from within is certainly more likely to be supported
by the team and generally better informed than one based on pronouncements from you.
If education and "rumination time" are required to grow the vision, you need to buy the
time necessary to make this happen. In the long run, you will save time by getting the
team to share the vision. In some situations, you will be forced to "align" your team with
a strategy that is imposed by your business or technology environment (e.g. contractual
obligations or enterprise technology standards). Even in this case, you need to grow the
alignment vision within the team. If this is not possible, you need to challenge the
strategy.
3. Grow the team, but not too fast
Your long-term success largely depends on how well you succeed at human resource
planning and development. Unfortunately, near-term pressures often force suboptimal
resourcing decisions from the standpoint of human capital development. You need to
take the short-term heat in order to build the team. You need to understand and accept
two basic facts: 1) it can take years to develop strong technical resources and 2) business-
critical projects are not suitable for on-the-job training. This means that you have to take
the long view, adding team members in advance of demand, with the full knowledge that
their contribution may be minimal for quite some time. You must resist the pressure to
"ramp up quickly" with green resources on business critical projects. You must also resist
-- at all costs -- the "add more bodies" approach to project acceleration. The real (durable)
work always gets accomplished by small, focused, well-trained, well-equipped teams.

2. 4. Show real commitment to quality
Technologists (correctly) assume that most management discussion of quality is lip
service. When things get tight, budget and delivery dates always force compromises in
quality. This is the common body of experience shared by technologists (especially web
technologists) today. To get real quality from technology teams today, you have to start
by digging your way out of this cultural hole. The only way to do this is to demonstrate
that you will NOT use quality as a control variable -- i.e., you will take the heat when you
encounter budget, scope or date crises and force one of these to give instead of quality.
You need real concrete, visible examples showing your own intestinal fortitude. You must
also establish and religiously adhere to rigorous standards and quality control processes
for your team. It is essential that the standards and processes be of the highest quality
themselves -- i.e., you do not waste anyone's time and the technical strength of the
standards and the reviewers must be unimpeachable. Finally, you need fair but effective
means to ensure personal accountability and consequence management.
5. Solve the real problem
Technology is a wonderful thing. So wonderful, in fact, that it can distract attention from
solving real problems. Software vendors are particularly adept at pushing
"transformational solutions" that can "transform" a well-conceived technology project
with a strong business case into a multi-million dollar waste of time. You need to
constantly reorient yourself and your team vis-a-vis the real business context of your
efforts. Technology can sometimes create new business value and/or new business
opportunities. This is the exception, however, not the rule, in spite of what the vendors
and consultants may say. Most successful technology projects succeed by solving simple
problems with straightforward solutions. You need to keep your team focused on the
real business problems that they are trying to solve.
6. Ask hard questions
Your team -- and your technology partners -- should be prepared to answer probing and
difficult questions from you. Beyond "how exactly will this work?" you need to
constantly ask "how will this fail? how will we know when it is failing? what are the
key risk points?" Any signs of flakiness, lack of confidence, or lack of technical
consensus need to be probed and questioned aggressively by you. You obviously need to
do this in a friendly, understanding and supportive way; but as I always say, "it's better to
deal with the hard questions now, among ourselves, than later on a service restoration
bridge." You need to establish a culture and understanding on the team that expects and
welcomes hard questions.

3. 7. Listen to the real experts
Unfortunately, most technology "experts" have no real, recent and relevant
implementation and deployment experience. If you let the high level box-drawers drive
your key technology decisions, you are guaranteed to waste lots of time and money, you
are likely to alienate your team and there is no guarantee that the solutions that you
develop will work. The key is to find a few real experts and use them to set your
strategic direction and to identify the other real experts among your technology partners.
There is a certain "bootstrapping" problem here -- until you have this core of real experts,
you will not know how to identify who the real experts are. This is really a situation
where "it takes one to know one." Once you have built the core, you need to extend this
to a network that spans your technology partners. Finally, you need to listen to the real
experts and base your decisions on their consensus.
8. Change your mind wisely
Even with the best experts advising you, you will make lots of suboptimal decisions. If
you constantly change direction, you will never make progress and you will lose the
confidence of your team. On the other hand, if you hold maniacally to a course that is
doomed to failure, you will also lose the team's confidence and you will waste a lot of
time and money. You need to change your mind wisely, always focusing 100% on the
lowest cost and lowest risk path to meeting your business objectives. Never worry too
much about what people outside of your team will think about your decisions. Make the
right decision first and then worry about explaining it to the rest of the world.
9. Limit the rah-rah
Real technologists despise slick demos and other forms of self-congratulatory nonsense.
You definitely need to celebrate the accomplishments of your team, but it is essential that
you make it real. Never overstate or "hype" your team's accomplishments. Remember
that they know exactly what they have done and your job is to show pride in their real
accomplishments. If you present their work as more than it is, you are essentially telling
them that what they have delivered is not good enough (or worse, that you have no
concept of what they have done). The consumers of your technology solutions also know
exactly what has been delivered to them. If your team achieves excellence, the facts will
speak for themselves. If you are still on the path to excellence, celebrating/advertising
small successes for what they are will help you along and establish credibility with your
business partners.
10. Empower production support
I have saved the most important principle for last. There are lots of statistics about how
much more maintenance costs than development. This is obvious. The people who know
the most about maintenance, performance, availability and required hardware resources
are those involved in production support. Effectively empowering production support
requires two things: first, you need to staff your production support team with your
strongest resources and second, you have to let them have a strong influence on design
and development. If you do the first, the second may happen by itself, since among real

4. technologists, the strongest emerge as de facto leaders. You need to accept the fact that
some of your strongest leaders and technical resources are going to have to be pulled out
of development. If you take the view that your strongest resources should be focused
where the most money is at stake, then it is obvious that you need to do this.