How Can Managers Work More Efficiently with IT?

Would you rather work under someone who is an excellent developer but lacks people skills or leadership capabilities - or for someone that has excellent people skills, communicates well, and is a great leader but has limited understanding of productive coding practices? That’s not to say that the choice is one or the other but in many professional situations it does.

Managing an IT staff comes with numerous challenges, especially if the manager has no previous experience with the coding necessary for completing the project. Managing a business and IT's execution of tasks vary greatly in required skill sets, but it's important to find a cohesive and cooperative middle ground in order to see a project to its end. To fully grasp the intricacies of IT's involvement in the project at hand, managers can do the following to help further their efforts.

Get a basic understanding of coding and technical practices necessary for the project at hand by taking the time to research and practice enough to get a grip on the concept. This will allow managers insight on what their IT folks are really working on daily. Expertise in a programming language is not required, only an overview of the stuff that matters, i.e. understanding the concept of OOP (Object Oriented Programming.) Having this knowledge cannot be overlooked and will gain respect among multiple spectrums in the organization.

If you’re interested in building modern websites or applications which use ASP, XML, or mobile technology, you’ve heard of Visual Studio .NET.  It is one of the more popular suites of development tools available to aspiring programmers, as it consolidates several different tools and languages into the same development environment, which helps in turn to integrate this code across development languages.  Here are three important benefits to using the visual studio suite:

·         Use of Visual J# - This development tool is specifically oriented towards people who already are familiar with basic Java syntax, and is designed for use by those people to build apps or services which will then run on the Microsoft .NET Framework.  This is useful because it fully supports Microsoft Extensions, among other reasons.  Visual J# was developed completely independently by Microsoft.

·         Utility for Smart Devices – Another huge benefit of using visual studio .NET is the ability to immediately integrate your programming efforts with deployment across a variety of smart devices.  PDAs, smartphones, Pocket PCs, and any device which has a limited amount of resources all require a compact framework for the programming of applications it is designed to run.

·         XML Web Usage and Support – Because XML services aren’t married to any particular technology or programming language, they can be accessed by any system, and this broad-based utility has made the services increasingly popular.  Visual Studio .NET takes advantage of this by fully integrating with XML services, including the ability to create and edit them from scratch.

Jeff Nelson, a former Googler and inventor of Chromebook says on Quora, “One habit I've clung to is writing small prototypes when I'm trying to learn new concepts.
For example, I'll sit down with a book or a web page, and over the course of a few hours, write 30 or 40 programs all of them only a few dozen lines long.  Each program intended to demonstrate some simple concept. This prototyping makes it very easy to try out many concepts in a short period of time.”

Miguel Paraz, Software Engineering Student habit is to “keep a log in a text file or document on my work computer. Before trying to solve a problem, I write it down first. And then I describe the details as they happen.”

Before we go to the list do you know what makes software skills most sought-after and hence more valuable than most of the other job skills? It is simply because unlike any other skill, software skills are global and are not at all location specific! With the evolution and penetration of internet technologies, the physical distance between the client and service provider hardly matters. So, with more advancement in technology, it is indeed going to rain opportunities on the right skilled developer. I’ll take the liberty to reproduce the following quotes here to prove my claims statistically:

Demand for “cloud-ready” IT workers will grow by 26 percent annually through 2015, with as many as 7 million cloud-related jobs available worldwide.

---IDC White Paper (November 2012).

In the United States, the IT sector is experiencing modest growth of IT jobs in general, with the average growth in IT employment between 1.1 and 2.7 percent per year through 2020.

---U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.