I am an engineer, organisation builder, and entrepreneur at heart and that makes me capable of a lot of things. Yet making real, disruptive change has ultimately relied on more than just those capabilities, and I've not always been effective at it. It fundamentally required a capabiliy that I yearned for - to bring others on board with my ideas on how to run a software engineering effort. This has proven true in organizations in which I've worked large and small, startup and established. I've had to sell capability and organisational ideas upward and to sell the corresponding technical ideas downward, and up and down a number of management levels it can be tough to create broad consensus.
In leadership roles I've trodden a thin line at times trying to finesse this, and at times and with the best of intent, have over-trodden. No matter what though, I have sought to find a way to get developers to believe in my ideas for how to contribute to a quality platform and to get the executives to want to pay for it. These people need to hear the message differently because they listen to and care about different things, and there-in laid my difficulty - I was an engineer and didn't have business credibility. I have come a long way since then, and through my desire to become more effective in this realm and through years of introspection, I am now happily in my second stint as a Chief Technology Officer.
This blog site is dedicated to the sharing of my experiences and growth over my career that is the product of dozens upon dozens of technical designs, architectural justifications, sales pitches, vision statements, policy documents, hirings, firings, restructurings, budget proposals, and hard-fought boots-on-the-ground experience in senior leadership positions. Irrespective of the employer, client, industry, or purpose, a multitude of lessons have consistently shone through. This site aims to illuminate and discuss those with the hope of allowing the reader to reflect, and maybe even reduce some of the time and trials of learning these the hard way.
If I won the lottery tomorrow, I'd still want to run a development department.
Shane Cheary
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