sujatad.net – Blogging about technology and leadership

Delegating

Posted on May 29, 2022 by sujatad

Successful leaders delegate well.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

I came across an interesting suggestion online regarding determining company and team culture, an exercise that one can ask a team to do. I tried this at my team meeting – went around the room asking everyone – ‘what 3 words would you use to describe the team?’. That gave us a look at the dominant qualities of the team.

Posted in Culture, Team | Leave a comment

What is DevOps?

Posted on July 7, 2020 by sujatad

I came across this great definition of what DevOps is from the folks at Amazon – DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.

Traditionally, organizations have had siloed teams – development, operations etc. but DevOps bridges both.

Posted in Technology, Tools, Virtualization | Tagged DevOps, Technology, Virtualization | Leave a comment

Recruiting

Posted on June 13, 2020 by sujatad

How do you determine the right candidate fit during recruiting? Ask additional questions that center around topics such as,

Your company and the culture around it.
Describe the position and expectations of the role and then ask questions around it. Focus also on any constraints such as working with older technologies.
Have the candidate actively solve a problem and observe how they go about solving the problem.
Have a diverse interview panel and plan questions ahead of time to avoid overlap and to cover more ground.
Ask for code samples (git hub etc)
Review their public profiles like LinkedIn, Blogs etc.
Encourage questions from the candidate – it will tell you a lot about them.
Finally do remember, to let them know what the recruiting process in your company is and the time frames on final decision on the position.

Posted in Coaching, Leadership, Recruiting | Tagged Recruiting | Leave a comment

Information Security

Posted on June 13, 2020 by sujatad

Information security helps protect an enterprise from threats and avoid customer data compromise. Every organization needs to have its security posture well defined, monitored and audited. The security posture has to keep up with threats emerging every day.

I was asked to lead an initiative on Security in our organization – to review, recommend and implement various security measures through the organization. As a first step the most current threat assessment was reviewed, and gaps identified. A working committee was established to develop standards and policies with consultation of various departments.

These standards and policies were then rolled into an Acceptable Use company policy that was then published out to the company. As part of that process various presentations, meetings and training sessions were organized. The internal web site was also updated and companies home page flashed messages on security for a short period of time to make everyone aware to keep security in the fore front daily.

Posted in Leadership, Security, Technology | Tagged Security, Technology | Leave a comment

5 Levels of Leadership

Posted on May 31, 2020 by sujatad

I came across a great article and followed up by listening on Utube to John C. Maxwell about the 5 levels of leadership. Really, liked all he has to say on this topic.

Inspriation by the book "5 Levels of Leadership" by John C Maxwell

Posted in Coaching, Leadership, Management, Mentoring | Tagged Coaching, Leadership, Management | Leave a comment

Build Conference 2020

Posted on May 25, 2020 by sujatad

I was reading about the 2020 Build Conference which for the first time was completely virtual. Can read more the details here…

Posted in .NET, .NET Framework, Azure, Conferences, Microsoft, Tech Events | Tagged .Net, Azure, Conferences, Microsoft, Web | Leave a comment

Switching to working virtually…

Posted on May 23, 2020 by sujatad

It’s been about a month and half nearly two months now of working completely virtual and staying away from the office due to Covid19. There were some initial bumps, such as,

dropped vpn connections or capacity overload
home wifi connectivity issues
missing having two monitors
issues with team collaboration tools
missed meeting by team members
video shy team members

However once things settled down, everyone began to,

appreciate the flexible schedules and no commutes
appreciate the improved team communication with the collaboration tools.
show an increased willingness to have more meetings.
laugh at people’s sartorial choices sometimes.
appreciated that the productivity stayed steady perhaps even improved.
most of all appreciated the pervasive sense of we are in this together

Posted in .NET, .NET Framework, Agile, Leadership, Management, Mentoring | Leave a comment

Leading in troubled times

Posted on March 25, 2020 by sujatad

March 2020 will be a time in our history that we will remember for ever. Almost overnight we went from a time of economic prosperity and freedom of movement to one where businesses were quickly shuttered and we were severely restricted in our movements. Masks and social distancing became part of our daily life.

Working for a smaller company and in an industry (hospitality) that was especially affected meant that there would be additional challenges to conduct business as usual. Our customers were badly hit and everyone wondered at when the recovery will happen, will it even be this year. As an IT manager, I had to, stay calm, stay positive and help my team adapt to a new changed work environment. Mostly working remote and social distancing with masks when in the office. We had to find creative ways to make working remote productive and also pause some current projects, to refocus on projects that will directly help our hurting customers. Projects that automated some of their daily activities for instance.

Posted in Leadership, Management | Leave a comment

Journey as a leader

Posted on August 3, 2019 by sujatad

I began my journey in leadership a number of years ago, starting with managing small projects and teams and slowly taking on larger more challenging projects and teams. Along the way, I took a number of management and leadership courses, read a lot of books, blogs, biographies, watched a lot of TED talks, attended conferences and even led a non-profit organization for several years. All of these helped me learn and become a better leader.

Management and Leadership are often confused as being one and the same but they are not. Managers have people who work for them and leaders have people who follow them. Managers can grow to be good leaders.

There are many definitions on what leadership is and the one I like best is ‘ is the art of motivating a group of people to act toward achieving a common goal with intelligence, integrity, honesty and humility’.