Leslie Sachs

When there is a system outage or other serious problem, most organizations have a critical incident response team to handle communication with all relevant stakeholders. But what happens when communication among the technology experts is not going well? How do you go about understanding the problem and helping each contributor work effectively with the entire response team?

Some people are born with the traits most suited to becoming an effective leader. Others may find that they have to work a lot harder to achieve success in a leadership role. But each of us has some innate potential to step up and take charge. If your team needs direction, don't be afraid to discover whether you could be the one to provide it.

While the technical complexity of real-world ALM may be substantial, sometimes the people issues present even more complex challenges. Being able to understand the personalities and work culture of the folks doing the work can help you implement ALM in a comprehensive and effective way.

There is a natural tension between development and operations. When this relationship is in balance, each side helps the other. But when there is imbalance, bad things can happen. Leslie Sachs details the pitfalls that can sabotage a DevOps team, as well as the checks and balances that will help the team achieve productivity and quality.

Communication styles vary significantly from one person to another, due to personal tendencies and cultural influences. Keeping this in mind is especially important these days, with so much global connectivity. The DevOps transformation compels us to revisit the way we manage communication and culture and be mindful of our interactions with coworkers.

How you handle a postmortem depends on your leadership approach, the culture of your organization, and, of course, your own personal strengths. This article will consider how positive psychology can help you conduct more effective postmortems that lead to process improvements and more effective organizations.

Managers often need to spend a considerable amount of time ensuring that their team members are motivated to do the best work possible. While pay, benefits, and a flexible work environment are often put forth as a key reason to apply for a job, how do you effectively motivate employees to be their best even under difficult circumstances?

Mistakes happen. But team members can engage in very dysfunctional behavior after they have made mistakes—often because their organizations punish mistakes and cause damage trying to cover them up. Here’s what we learn from positive psychology about creating an environment where employees can be empowered to address their mistakes in an open, honest manner.

Bringing different technology groups together can result in some interesting challenges. We often feel like we are doing group therapy for a very dysfunctional family, and many of the challenges encountered highlight the biases people often bring into the workplace. Leslie Sachs describes how to identify these behavioral issues and utilize positive psychology to help develop high-performance teams.

Positive psychology encourages positive and effective behaviors that help to bring out desired traits, and it applies well to many business and technical situations. Leslie Sachs explains the third pillar of positive psychology, which is related to organizational psychology and is of great interest to anyone who wants to be part of an effective institution.

Positive psychology is providing a new focus on effective ways to ensure that teams exhibit the right behaviors in a group or organizational setting. Closely related to many agile and lean concepts, these emerging practices are helping teams to improve communication, collaborate, and emerge as highly effective groups. Leslie Sachs explains what positive psychology is all about and how to start using these practices in your organization.

Leslie Sachs writes how dysfunctional operations teams are often a consequence of a dysfunctional organizational culture that breeds distrust and results in employees who just sit back and allow disasters to occur. If you want your organization to be successful, you need to ensure that you drive out any aspect of learned helplessness and embrace a positive culture that enjoys a can-do attitude!

Dealing with overly agreeable people can be fraught with obstacles quite different than those usually associated with the stereotypical stubborn geek who seems unable to bend or compromise. This article will help you understand and deal with the unexpectedly challenging aspects that you may experience interacting with some agreeable people.

One of the most difficult personality types to deal with is the person who always seems mistrustful of others. Sometimes, this lack of trust is justified, but sometimes it is really a manifestation of some dysfunctional personality issue. This article will help you understand this situation and suggest a few ways you can deal with difficult personality types like the paranoid person.

Leslie Sachs explains what to do when members of your team exhibit overly aggressive or downright combative behaviors. Because you’re unlikely to change your colleagues' modus operandi, it is wise to instead consider how your DevOps effort can benefit from taking into account some typical behaviors of people with Type A or Type B personalities.

Many professionals, while having expertise in their technical niche, are sometimes less than perfect at communicating effectively with colleagues from other departments. This can result in departments failing to work effectively together; these departments resemble silos more than a collaborative and cohesive organization. This article will help you identify and understand some of the reasons why teams operate in silos and what you can do to change that.

Leslie Sachs writes on how employees in many companies have essentially learned to no longer raise their concerns because there is no one willing to listen, and—even worse—they may have suffered consequences in the past for being the bearer of bad tidings. Leslie refers to this phenomenon as learned complacency.

The root cause of bad service may have much to do with a personality trait known as anxiety and the often-dysfunctional defense mechanisms people resort to in an attempt to deal with its discomfort. If you want your IT operations group to be successful, then you need to consider the personality issues—at both the individual and group levels—that may impact their performance and your success.

IT organizations often face challenges ranging from complex technology to even more complex personalities. DevOps attempts to address the dynamics between IT operations and highly skilled software and systems delivery teams. Read on if you would like to improve your skills in dealing with these challenging dynamics.

The year ahead likely will be filled with unprecedented challenges in terms of both technology and business demands. While technology and business needs are certainly complex, the people and personality issues may be even more challenging to deal with. This article will get you started with tackling some of these people-related challenges that you will likely encounter in the coming year.

2012 was an amazing mix of challenges, achievements, and even a few notable disasters for those in technology. Here are a few things to consider in understanding the year behind us and preparing for the peopl challenges that no doubt await in the year ahead.

Great tools and process are not the best formula for software configuration management excellence. Leslie Sachs writes that the most important resources for configuration management excellence are people—the technology professionals and the leaders who guide the team toward CM excellence. This article will help you understand what psychologists have learned regarding some of the essential qualities found among top leaders and others who consistently achieve excellence.

Configuration management focuses on software process improvement in an organization in many important ways, impacting the application build, package, and deployment. However, some organizations are more open to change than others. If you want to be successful at bringing about positive change, then you need to be able to assess and understand the personality of your organization and identify the key change agents who can help you get the job done.

Engineers know the importance of process and quality, and many engineering disciplines emphasize quality control and quality assurance. Some people enjoy the challenge of focusing on quality, while others find it a necessary but less than exciting chore. Leslie Sachs looks at some of the factors that impact process and quality.

There are many people who do not like structure. Application lifecycle management (ALM), and, even more so, IT infrastructure library (ITIL) as a framework, touch some people's buttons as being just too much structure. In this article, Leslie Sachs examines the personality factors that you need to be aware of when implementing ALM and ITIL/IT service management (ITSM).

Implementing agile and lean performance appraisals presents some unique challenges. This article discusses how to do so in a way that helps to enhance the agile and lean practices that so clearly result in excellent team and organizational performance. The good news is that agile and lean performance management is much more effective than other methods.

Personality accounts for a lot. You can tell a great deal about how someone is going to handle a situation by understanding their personality. In fact, if you get really good at this game you can sometimes predict what they are going to do. Some people just can’t manage to the see the big picture, and that is often evident in how they approach their work, whether tactical project or a strategic product. If you want to be able to work with different personalities then you need to understand what motivates them to act, or in some cases, fail to act.

Usually I write about the impact of personality in process improvement. This month’s topic of standards and frameworks suggested that I discuss the impact of the SEI’s People Capability Maturity Model on issues related to managing your most important resources—people. Unfortunately, many organizations have failed to realize that managing and developing the right team is far more important than just the products and services that generate revenues. If you forget about your human resources, then you probably won’t be in business for very long. That said, many otherwise successful technology professionals find it difficult to successfully manage human resources. This article describes an excellent framework developed by the SEI to help you establish effective people-related best practices.