Here is a management technique I've found useful when evaluating the performance of my employees. I've found it especially useful when working with employees who think they are performing well, but in reality are failing to attend to their core set of responsibilities. It is based on the following ideas:

Each of us has a set of specific job responsibilities (our "box").

Most of us, especially those who want to move ahead, take on additional work ("outside the box").

Software is a young science, and those of us in it are constantly using different tools and techniques to try to improve our processes. This is true in both strong and weak organizations -- weak organizations need to improve to avoid project failures, while strong organizations need to become stronger in a competitive market. But people don't like change. Change means moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar, and unfamiliar means uncomfortable. We are afraid of anything different.

Companies these days are falling all over themselves to get "dot-com'ed." Stock prices of Internet merchants are running wild, and IBM is running a mass media campaign offering to help you and your company become the next Web-based success story. But before you venture out into the e-commerce world, you need to examine a few hard truths that are often overlooked, then ask yourself some hard questions.

Recently, a colleague of mine forwarded the following headline to me via e-mail. It read:

The current upsurge of component-based development (CBD) reflects the attraction of the plug-and-play metaphor in software development. A component is a black box that talks to its customers through its interfaces alone. Simply plug the boxes together, and there's an application. Great! So why is CBD not the cure-all that some folks would have us believe? There are lots of answers to that question. Right now, I'd like to focus on one piece: specification.

I recently moved my bank account to a new institution because the customer experience at my current bank was so painful that it was starting to cost me money (in terms of my time and energy level) to deal with them. When I went in to close my account, I expected the service representative to ask me why I was withdrawing every last penny I had in their institution (I had previously closed out my retirement savings, my mortgage, my business account, and a small personal savings account).

At a recent conference on software measurement, several industry experts, including Tim Lister, Tom DeMarco, Bob Grady, and David Card, were asked to discuss the software triangle: should the focus be on people, process, or technology? The ensuing discussion with the experts and audience participants was fast-paced and opinionated, with views ranging from equilateral triangles (focus evenly on each component) to 3-D pyramids.