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  How to increase the productivity of your IT team

 As a manager, when your team isn’t completing as much work as they should be and you’re feeling the pressure from those higher up, it can be difficult to know what to do. The whole team is stressed and productivity is taking a huge drop. When this happens it’s time to take a step back and assess where the issue lies. Here’s how to increase the productivity of your IT team. Have clear goals and rolesAt the start of every project have a meeting with everyone involved. Explain the vision and the end goal. Then break down each stage, activity and task. Giving bac...

955 0       IT TEAM BUSISNESS PRODUCTIVITY


  Productivity is just work

The other day, I wrote a post declaring that I will no longer try to increase my productivity. This doesn't mean I won't read productivity blogs, and tweak things, and manage my "system". It means I no longer think about any of that stuff as having anything to do with productivity.Productivity is what happens when you're doing work. Enhancing your productivity is what happens when you do a lot of work, for long enough to get better at it.Look, throw all your stuff in Dropbox, live your life out of plain text files, use gmail to communicate, turn off tasks and chat, leave things in their de...

2,510 0       PRODUCTIVITY WORK ENHANCEMENT


  Sustainability

When I was in business school 25 years ago, I don't recall the term sustainability used. Maybe it was, but it certainly didn't register in my brain. The mantras that I recall were return on investment, shareholder value, revenue growth, and driving efficiencies in the business.But as I look at many of the challenges facing businesses today, it seems to me that the focus on performance and efficiency often comes at the cost of sustainability. This talk by Clay Christensen really drives that point home. The recent history of the steel industry in the US is a case study in managers doing everythi...

2,578 0       EFFICIENCY PRODUCTIVITY SUSTAINABILITY


  Revenue = X

We've been experimenting with app prices for quite some time and again and again we've noticed a funny effect:No matter what price we choose, we always make the same revenue.I attached two charts to illustrate that. I recently lowered the price of the iPad app (http://bit.ly/92xWv1) from 5 to 1 Dollars. At first the sales spike, then they even out to previous levels. Meaning: By cutting the price by factor 5, I am selling exactly 5 x more apps. Then we lowered the price of iA Writer for Mac (http://bit.ly/jfsHdZ) from 10 to 5 Dollars. And the exact same thing happened. There was a short i...

2,673 0       SOFTWARE INVESTMENT PRODUCTIVITY REVENUE PRICE DISCOUNT


  Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

The most productive programmers are orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers. But salaries usually fall within a fairly small range in any company. Even across the entire profession, salaries don’t vary that much. If some programmers are 10x more productive than others, why aren’t they paid 10x as much?Joel Spolsky gave a couple answers to this question in his most recent podcast. First, programmer productivity varies tremendously across the profession, but it may not vary so much within a given company. Someone who is 10x more productive than his colleag...

2,180 0       PROGRAMMER SALARY EFFICIENCY PRODUCTIVITY NOT MATCH