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Driving Technical Change: Why People On Your Team Don't Act On Good Ideas, and How to Convince Them They Should 1st Edition
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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.
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 the Author
- ISBN-101934356603
- ISBN-13978-1934356609
- Edition1st
- PublisherPragmatic Bookshelf
- Publication dateDecember 28, 2010
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions7.5 x 0.47 x 9.25 inches
- Print length146 pages
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The Pragmatic Programmers publishes hands-on, practical books on classic and cutting-edge software development and engineering management topics. We help professionals solve real-world problems, hone their skills, and advance their careers.
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Product details
- Publisher : Pragmatic Bookshelf; 1st edition (December 28, 2010)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 146 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1934356603
- ISBN-13 : 978-1934356609
- Item Weight : 11.1 ounces
- Dimensions : 7.5 x 0.47 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,683,707 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,103 in Computer History & Culture (Books)
- #5,653 in Computer Science (Books)
- #9,522 in Business & Finance
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About the author

Terrence Ryan currently works as a Flash Platform Evangelist for Adobe Systems. 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.
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First, a disclaimer: I have a lot of experience in this area, as I worked somewhat recently with a team that was resistant to a lot of changes. I, along with a small handful of other members, repeatedly tried to get buy-in on tools and techniques. Occasionally, we were met with success, but more often we were met with failure.
This book made a LOT of sense of what happened at that company. After reading it, I have a much better understanding of why we failed and succeeded when we did, and what we could have done differently.
Driving Technical Change is a patterns book. Rather than design or architecture patterns, it contains people patterns. The author, Terrence Ryan, argues that most people who are resistant to change fall into one of seven patterns of skepticism. Each pattern is different, and must be dealt with in different ways. As with design patterns, a lot of the patterns are just common sense, but because Ryan gives a very specific name to each pattern, it is useful as a shared vocabulary among forward-thinking techies. It's not immediately obvious from the titles of the patterns exactly what they all mean, so it's helpful to read the book; when I looked at just the titles of the chapters I couldn't decide what one particular co-worker was, but after reading the book I completely knew.
The rest of the book is devoted to different strategies, and which ones are effective against which skeptic patterns. This portion of the book is also useful, though occasionally it feels a bit padded due to structure. Again, it's a lot of common sense, but the author words it in a way that makes it really hit home. There are only a few books that I feel really help tech-minded developers grow the soft skills that they really need to thrive in the industry, and I wouldn't hesitate to add Driving Technical Change to that list.
Though a lot of it is common sense, it can be argued that most of the seminal The Pragmatic Programmer is also common sense. Both are worth reading. Driving Technical Change still gave me some moments to think about and some good advice to internalize, and I'd recommend it for someone forward-thinking in the software industry.
Some people might argue that the book's attitude, which effectively categorizes those who resist changes you are trying to implement at work as enemy combatants, is antagonistic. In an ideal world, all technical change would be a group decision, and the entire team would drive things forward together. It would be nice if this were true, but anyone who has worked in the industry for a little while knows that this is a naive viewpoint. The fact is, when you're certain that a particular tool or technique would help your team and your product, there are sometimes people who put barrier after barrier in your way. It's nearly unavoidable to see these people as enemies (or at least, obstacles). This book doesn't pussy-foot around this fact, it acknowledges it and provides strategies for defeating hostile co-workers. If this seems too harsh to you, I'd recommend giving the book a second look two or three years from now when you'll see things more as they are.
One of the key take-away's from this book is that being successful with IT change requires the building of relationships. Nearly each approach starts from the premise that success flows from understanding the needs of others and how your solution maps to those needs and to the benefit of the enterprise. This work must be in the effort to achieve results, not intended to just inflate your own ego.
The structure the book uses provides clear sections that allow you to break up the reading into approachable blocks. The final module, "Putting it into Practice", is an ideal book end for each chapter. The one distraction in the book is that the examples and situations he uses for illustration do not speak to me. I agree with him that the illustrations could be transposed to many other IT situations. I just wished he had varied into a broader range of IT examples.
The structure the book uses provides clear sections that allow you to break up the reading into approachable blocks. The final module, "Putting it into Practice", is an ideal book end for each chapter. The one distraction in the book is that the examples and situations he uses for illustration do not speak to me. I agree with him that the illustrations could be transposed to many other IT situations. I just wished he had varied into a broader range of IT examples.


