Language that shapes compassionate communication

Introduction Have you ever wondered at times why you said what you said? It happened to me a couple of days back: I said something cheeky to my mother during a normal conversation in the evening and her facial reaction revealed ‘mild hurt’, but she quickly recovered and moved on! ‘Mild’ is my interpretation. I […]
Navigating Career Paths as a Scrum Master

In recent times, I’ve received numerous inquiries from Scrum Masters about potential career paths. This concern is highly relevant given the current uncertainties surrounding agile roles, with some companies even reducing the number of dedicated agile positions. Many organizations are now prioritizing roles that contribute directly to product development or business operations, moving away from […]
Middle Managers & Leadership Styles (Blogging with AI)

As you can make out from the title, I am targeting two objectives for this blog: Leadership styles depend on context, role and typical followers, do they not? So, let’s look at a comparison of senior managers and middle managers along those dimensions. Senior managers Middle managers Context: Broader market, competitor and company growth perspective […]
Technology and Business Chasm – A Techie’s dilemma

Prologue For most techies, especially those working in Tech industry – these questions ought to have crossed their minds at some point in time. Should I remain a techie all through my career? Is gaining a modicum of business perspective even relevant to me as a techie? I like my technical domain and I don’t […]
“i-fi” – A Model for Designing Your Future and Personal Change

Abstract This article is the author’s narrative based on his ongoing journey of personal change. Emphasis is on proactive personal change fueled by the desire to shape one’s future. The author progressively outlines a model that could help the readers in their journey. Many ideas are stitched together in a unique way based on author’s […]
Do we really understand Empowerment?

The term “Empowerment” has been bandied about for several decades – much before Agile approaches became popular. With Agile and self-managed teams, empowerment has almost become a sacred mantra at both a team level as well as in an organizational context. Yet, when you speak to different experts, you will hear different perspectives / interpretations […]
CHOW#299 – Expectations Management – Key to lasting relationships

Satish is a new Manager with Keaton International. Keaton is a large Financial Organization with its presence in more than 20 countries. They have a large software unit in India, where they support all the IT needs of the organization. Keaton is known for its culture of on-time delivery. They have a very competitive work […]
Chow # 283 – Objective or Key Result
One of the frequently asked questions I get from teams starting out to adopt the OKR framework – Objectives and Key results, is how to distinguish between an objective and a Key result. Additionally, how do we word these – so that there is less or no ambiguity. While a detailed treatment of OKRs would […]
Six imperatives to move from on-prem to cloud development model

For new age companies born in the cloud era, their development approach has always been in tune with the demands of cloud delivery and their user base. For software product vendors with enterprise-grade solutions, transitioning to the cloud can be quite a challenge. They need to examine the way value is created all the way […]
CHOW # 274: How to share bad news with your team member?

Sudha is a project manager with a Global IT services organization. She joined this company 8 years ago as a fresh software engineer, grew to a tech lead and now she is an architect. She has been a consistent performer over the years. Sudha’s company has been practicing an annual performance appraisal cycle. They use […]