Jim Stroup has a post about his life lessons learned in the school of hard management knocks. He was tagged by David Prouhet who started the idea. Jim passed it along to me.

I don't have a long list to add to what they've already written but one key thing I find myself repeating again and again is that managers often look for the solution in the wrong place. I often find that managers want a technology solution to problems. For example, "Gee, our cell phone software is unmaintainable, let's re-write the whole stack in Java." Leads to 3 years later... "Gee, our cell  phone software is unmaintainable, let's have a vendor re-write the whole stack in .Net." The technology solution answer to the problem becomes a repeated behavior. The same problem keeps coming back.

If technology isn't the answer then people must be. "Gee, we don't have good enough developers, let's go hire some better (read: more heroic) developers to get the job done!" Now sometimes, it is the people, sometimes the people aren't right - they don't share the correct values or are simply unskilled in the work, but mostly this is not the case.

More often than not it is the organization and process of execution that is lacking. In other words, it is poor management that is at fault. Military organizations have known this for centuries, millennia even! Great armies are trained, not born. Occasionally, new technologies have been the answer to break deadlock, but more often than not, it's been the better trained army with the best processes and the highest discipline to execute those process that has been victorious.

So it is in business too. If you look at success retailers such as WalMart or Tescos they succeed on their process and operational excellence as much as their strategy. Again, the same is true of Toyota in comparison to other auto manufacturers.

So when things are going wrong, don't blame the tools, technology or people, look in the mirror and ask, how can we manage better? How can we organize better for success? What processes can we institute to improve our performance? Then go make it happen. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson,, Jim+Stroup, David+Prouhet