Leadership Insights Blog by Peter Alkema

Rewards are fun and easy to give out but do they really motivate coders to write better software?  The biggest hackathon prize money so far was $1m which was awarded to a team of 2 at a Salesforce.com event. It was later disputed because they were found to have worked on their app for a year beforehand. …

Codefests: bigger prizes = better solutions? Read More »

Avoid a case of too many hammers and not enough nails with structured ideation before your event. We all know how it works, some IT departments love a certain technology and every problem can be tailor made to reverse fit the pre-built, pre-decided solution. There is one hammer and everything becomes a nail, in fact often people …

How to get business value from codefests Read More »

Also known as the management style of leadership, its principles and Agile’s seem at odds but does it really matter? Self-organising teams, building projects around individuals, giving them the environment they need and trusting them to get the job done. These are some concepts found in the principles of the Agile Manifesto, the widely accepted founding document …

Transactional leadership and Agile; conflict or contrast? Read More »

Teach more coding, get more programmers – is it that simple or are we sacrificing quality for quantity? Becoming an employed computer programmer no longer requires lengthy formal education at the tertiary level. You can teach yourself on the internet, primary schools in the UK are introducing it and it’s becoming part of the core …

Coding and Education; bridging the gap or walking a tightrope? Read More »

It’s about rapid innovation with software, and a South African version even produced a solution that could stop patients dying in long hospital queues. One of the principles of Agile software development is to rapidly create working software rather than wait for detailed designs. The quicker you can prototype a concept, the faster you create a feedback loop between the development …

Codefests (aka Hackathons): What are they and why do them? Read More »

It’s good to be pro-Agile but it’s also important to be anti-Cumbersome You know them when you see them; unwieldy and inefficient projects that take ages to deliver and no-one really knows how to start untangling and fixing them. Many projects have to be large and complex simply because of their scope – but they can still be …

Cumbersome is the opposite of Agile; here's why Read More »

…that a hard hat, clipboard and loudhailer are also useful on the building sites of IT projects Any project manager will tell you; running projects is tough. You never feel on top of your plan (if it still reflects reality), you are always chasing people to do things and your end goal changes every day. This is …

What a project manager can learn from a construction foreman Read More »

“What are my blind spots?”; gives you new perspective, avoids danger and might help you with the 2nd most important question for your boss.. As an over-achiever you’ll be trying to please all the people all the time, and this simply isn’t possible. Your boss is the only person that has a unique perspective on …

The most important question you can ask your boss Read More »

If you manage IT teams, you’ll get better results with the latter; here’s why. All roles in IT are knowledge workers, they don’t count widgets on a conveyor belt, and they know more about their job than you do. The programmer is the most extreme example of this and counting their hours will dramatically reverse productivity. I’ve …

Are you a clock-watching boss or an output-driven leader? Read More »

If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together – but how? In two days, the world’s oldest and largest annual ultra marathon takes place in South Africa; the Comrades. The vast majority of participants tell you far more about their experiences with others along the way than …

The (Lost) Art of Taking People With You Read More »

Hoping for a career (or career change) in IT? Consider these perspectives for the major types of work you would be doing. A programmer is the most well known IT job and could be considered the civil engineer of the profession. They write lines of code (build stuff) that generates logic and typically develop specialist …

Which IT role is right for you? Read More »

All teams have a couple of projects that get all the attention and focus; make sure everyone else feels like a hero as well The Google employees that worked on Maps, Android and Gmail probably feel like superstars. The software they wrote is used by hundreds of millions, has achieved cult-like status and set entirely new …

Hero projects… and the rest of the team Read More »