15
It's Not the Play, It's the Player

This book contains chapter after chapter on processes and techniques to improve IT success. But given a choice between all of this or a disorganized, chaotic department staffed with spectacular people, I'll take talented people every time. I've seen teams with a disastrous organizational structure drag themselves to success with herculean efforts. I've also seen extremely well-organized teams fail when they didn't have the necessary skill to deliver the results. After all, a project plan can't configure a firewall.

In my experience, the best programmers are 5 to 10 times more productive than an average programmer. Average network engineers may never be able to debug a complex spanning tree issue,¹⁰ no matter how hard they work and how many engineers you have. Would you take four average engineers over two amazing ones? I wouldn't. Want to improve productivity, quality, and morale while decreasing the budget? Consider a team with fewer, better people.

Refer to Figure 15.1 to rate individual contributors based on speed and quality.

Figure 15.1 Speed and Quality Rating Matrix

Plot each employee on this chart based on the speed and quality of their work. This is not a secret evaluation, unlike the more complex tools commonly used for reviewing talent; show your employee where you have them on this chart. Have the employees place themselves on this chart and compare results.

In the bottom left, we have employees who take a long time to get their work done; and when they finally finish, it's inaccurate. This is an obvious skill mismatch, and these people need to be replaced. In the top right, we have our superstars. They work quickly, and the work is of high quality. Fill your team with these people. If the best of the best are five times better and only cost 25% more, it's smart money to pay at the top of the range for this employee. The low-quality/fast-result crowd (top left) are the toughest employees to coach. They look down on the slow, high-quality employees, but I'll take slow and right over fast and wrong every day of the week. Remember, if it's not right, it's not done. Rework destroys timelines. Production bugs erode customer satisfaction. Critical errors put an organization at financial risk. The meticulous crowd that produces high-quality results at a turtle's pace (bottom right) are fine employees if deployed properly. Assign these employees to financial systems, payroll, and similar systems where quality is paramount and speed is secondary.

Once we've identified our top talent, team members who are both fast and good, we need to work hard to keep them motivated, engaged, and on our team. In the next chapter, we'll explore what we can do for them.

Note

1. 10. The Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) is a network protocol that ensures a loop-free topology for any bridged Ethernet local area network.