Driving Technical Change: Why People On Your Team Don't Act On Good Ideas, and How to Convince Them They Should - Softcover

Ryan, Terrence

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1934356603 ISBN 13: 9781934356609

Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2010

Synopsis

Your co-workers' resistance to new technologies can be baffling. Logical arguments can fail. If you don't do politics, you will fail. With Driving Technical Change, by Terrence Ryan, you'll learn to read users' "patterns of resistance"-and then dismantle their objections. Every developer must master the art of evangelizing. With these techniques and strategies, you'll help your organization adopt your solutions-without selling your soul to organizational politics.

Finding cool languages, tools, or development techniques is easy-new ones are popping up every day. Convincing co-workers to adopt them is the hard part. The problem is political, and in political fights, logic doesn't win for logic's sake. Hard evidence of a superior solution is not enough. But that reality can be tough for programmers to overcome.

In Driving Technical Change: Why People On Your Team Don't Act on Good Ideas, and How to Convince Them They Should, Adobe software evangelist Terrence Ryan breaks down the patterns and types of resistance technologists face in many organizations.

You'll get a rich understanding of what blocks users from accepting your solutions. From that, you'll get techniques for dismantling their objections-without becoming some kind of technocratic Machiavelli.

In Part I, Ryan clearly defines the problem. Then in Part II, he presents "resistance patterns"-there's a pattern for each type of person resisting your technology, from The Uninformed to The Herd, The Cynic, The Burned, The Time Crunched, The Boss, and The Irrational. In Part III, Ryan shares his battle-tested techniques for overcoming users' objections. These build on expertise, communication, compromise, trust, publicity, and similar factors. In Part IV, Ryan reveals strategies that put it all together-the patterns of resistance and the techniques for winning buy-in. This is the art of organizational politics.

In the end, change is a two-way street: In order to get your co-workers to stretch their technical skills, you'll have to stretch your soft skills. This book will help you make that stretch without compromising your resistance to playing politics. You can overcome resistance-however illogical-in a logical way.

About this title

About the Author:

Terrence Ryan currently works as an Evangelist for Adobe Systems. He focuses on the promotion of ColdFusion, Flash, Flex and AIR. As an evangelist his job is to encourage people to try new tools and techniques. Before that, he spent ten years in higher education overseeing the work of a team of developers, running code reviews, pushing standards, and trying to convince co-workers to come around to new tools and techniques.

Review:

""At its core, Driving Technical Change is a fantastic book about design patterns. In it, Terrence Ryan clearly outlines common, problematic personalities--"skeptics"--and provides proven solutions for bringing about progressive change. It is certainly an unfortunate fact of human behavior that people are oftentimes resistant to implementing best practices; however, using Terry's book as a guide, you will now be able to identify why people push back against change and what you can do to remain successful in the face of adversity.""--Ben Nadel, Chief Software Engineer, Epicenter Consulting

""Politics is one of the most challenging and underestimated subjects in the field of technology. Terrence Ryan has tackled this problem courageously and with a methodical approach. His book can help you understand many types of resistance (both rational and irrational) and make a strategy for getting people on board with your technology vision.""--Bill Karwin, Author of "SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming"

About this edition

• Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1934356603
• ISBN 13: 9781934356609
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 146