New Tech Won’t Fix Bad Management

This post is going to be a little different as I’ve got a bone to pick. I’m wrapping up a consulting gig where I was brought in to review system architecture and scope out the development of a team to support it. I’ve now firmly concluded something which I’d started to identify early in my management career: you can’t simply improve your capabilities with technological solutions if you have management issues at your core. That’s a broad statement, so let me be more specific. I’ve been brought in several times now in varying capacities as a fixer of sorts. Some of the time it was known that poor management was affecting a team’s ability to deliver value, but most of the time the focus was on the output itself. This may have been in the form of systems suffering frequent production outages, slow deliveries, or both. Now, it’s not exactly <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">bike-shedding</a> to focus on the tech as the problem, but I find that software engineers, being the tech-oriented folks that they are, often like to blame the technology. It’s easy to see why: PagerDuty, Jira, and more will all directly quantify bad things, and these stats can be quickly compared to the work of other teams to indicate where the bad is. From there, it’s pretty easy to open up the code and see problems glaring back. Et voila; you’re a genius, spotting the problems that no one on the inside could, right? <a href="https://medium.com/@nowucblanco/new-tech-wont-fix-bad-management-14f252e8ba69">Visit Now</a>