Stories about: Hungry Minds

As I mentioned in my last column, establishing an effective, self-regulating group culture offers a tremendous benefit to managers: It allows you to effectively guide the group by managing the culture rather than micromanaging the team members.

Few group managers and technical leaders spend much time thinking about group culture, but establishing an effective, self-regulating group can be a giant step toward achieving the positive project outcomes that are critical for career advancement. Such a culture will relieve you from having to micromanage, which can detract resources from the higher-level management tasks that are essential in guiding the project to success. Micromanaging is also typically resisted by group members and ultimately ineffective.

One of the most difficult career decisions that an IT professional must make is determining when it's time to leave his current employer and start anew at another. Many people in the industry change companies fairly often because they believe that the best way to increase their value is to be well rounded, versatile and prepared to on take any project. I believe that the opposite is actually true: It is the most specialized developers who are most valuable.

It's not uncommon for standout techies to move up the ranks to IT management. Management assumes that techies are fully prepared to lead the group because they excelled in their previous position and know the ins and outs of the group and projects that they're being asked to manage.

The key to success in working with subcontractors and outsourcers is to treat them as extensions of your own organisation. This means that you must communicate as effectively with them as you do with your in-house teams, and ensure that they comply with the same policies you set for your own organisation. It doesn't matter if you are working with a large outsourcing operation offshore or a small subcontractor on the other side of town: If they're not following your standard policies and/or you misunderstand each other, the project is unlikely to succeed.

When you first hear that your organisation plans to outsource IT projects offshore, it's difficult to look on the bright side. If you're like most people, your initial reaction will probably be to worry about your job security and start looking into other employment prospects. However, if you choose to embrace outsourcing rather than resist it, you will have the chance to benefit from a prime opportunity for career advancement.

Reports of IT job losses and outsourcing trends have been in the headlines for several years now, so it's no surprise that even the most experienced and talented IT professionals have started to worry whether their jobs will be the next to go overseas. There's no doubt that more IT professionals will lose their jobs to outsourcing. However, although outsourcing may seem widespread, the jobs of many IT professionals are difficult to outsource and essentially immune to it.

In a previous job at a large refining company, IT director Bob Ghirlanda spent a year putting together a plan to install a computerized maintenance management system. With the system specifications and ROI analysis in place, Ghirlanda went to work implementing the project. Then things started to go wrong.

Perl is an open-source scripting language whose syntax is similar to that of C. Created by a single programmer in 1987 to simplify systems administration tasks, Perl has evolved into a powerful and flexible programming environment. It has strong text-manipulation capabilities and is especially useful for developing Common Gateway Interface programs.

Trying to figure out whether your Web site needs a redesign? Stop measuring hits and start measuring customer experience

Nobody misses the network - until it's down. When a corporate network crashes, its damaging ramifications often sweep across national headlines, wreaking havoc on the company's bottom line and throwing a fiery spotlight on its CIO.