While I'm sure a few IT professionals wound up working in Food Service after the dotcom bubble burst, that is not really what this post will be about. Instead, I want to share a perspective on job rotation and how it makes better leaders, and how the IT world could take a lesson from the Golden Arches.

One of the hallmarks of the McDonald's training and staff development program is job rotation. Basically, one cannot manage a store until they know how to do all of the jobs at the facility. In discussing this with a colleague, I've learned that the Marine Corps does something very similar in developing command personnel.

I think this job rotation method of staff development does three very powerful things:

1. Cross training of employees. Team members learn what everyone else does. This can be difficult with knowledge workers, who rely so heavily on conceptual skills, but some experience is invaluable in knowing what goes on in a role. This enables others to pitch in during times of stress or decreased capacity.
2. Organizational perspective. If you don't know what part of your organization does, you don't know a) how they can help you succeed, or b) what you can do to help them succeed for the betterment the organization.
3. Developing talent for succession planning. It takes a special kind of person to do each of the main IT roles: user support, system administration, and development. People usually enjoy one of these roles, but rarely all of them, depending on their personality tendencies and other internal factors.
   

   Most often, the entry level position in an IT organization is that of customer support or helpdesk. These positions tend of have really high turnover, as new people come in and get chewed up by the constantly-ringing phone or endless stream of support tickets. (you're probably saying to yourself: "tell us how you really feel!"). By doing job rotation within an IT organization, you give people a break from the front lines, and can see if their talents or temperment is better suited for another part of the organization.

Finding what excites you is the difference between job satisfaction and misery, but that's really another post in itself.

An actual photo from my office:

I'm glad the I.T. group could take care of that.

Dating back to my days as a consultant in the waning hours of the dotcom era, there were two truths I came to view as fundamental:

1) Once you get to a certain point in your development as a programmer, the actual functioning of software ceases to be a mystery. The only mystery that remains is what to do next. You can pretty much build anything you can imagine, but how do you choose *what* to build next?

2) You can only do so much as an individual developer. To create something really meaningful, you need to work with a team. The whole is *truly* greater than the some of its parts.

These two beliefs fuel my interest in the software development process - tools, methodologies, processes and practices - particularly those that deal with development teams and collaboration. I'm always on the lookout for ideas that will help me choose my next project, and help me go about building it through collaboration and teamwork with my colleagues.

To that end, when I heard about the Software Best Practices Conference, I was intrigued. The title is actually a bit misleading... it's more of a roadshow, with different speakers scheduled to be at different cities on different days.

I went ahead and registered for the Pittsburgh conference, which takes place tomorrow. I'm going to try to summarize some of the more interesting ideas here throughout the day.

If the conference lives up to my imagination, I may see about attending some of the dates in other cities... several of the upcoming conference dates are in cities within a reasonable driving distance.

Stevie told me about Twitter sometime last week, but things have been so hectic I haven't had a chance to try it until tonight. It's pretty entertaining so far.

Twitter is sort of an RSSoCS - Really Simple Stream of Consciousness Syndication. It's basically an SMS/IM aware blog or diary, written one line at a time. I'm sending messages to my Twitter diary with a slick little Mac app called Twitterific.

I'm not sure anyone will actually care to know my innermost, Tourettesiest thoughts, but hey, you're reading this blog aren't you?

Eek.

I stumbled upon this in a Slashdot thread:

http://www.projecthoneypot.org

It's a project to fight email address harvesting by spammers. I think this is the first project I've seen where legal recourse is actually a component of the strategy.

Adobe just announced the winners of their Flex Developer Derby. There are some great entries, so check em out!

Flex has the potential to out-do Ajax as a platform for building expressive Web apps. I've been working pretty heavily on a Flex project for the last few weeks, and I like what I've seen. The entries in the Derby used the latest version of Flex (2.0), which has even better features than the previous version I've been working with.