SJGP Software

SDM Insights: Revise your definition of Success In celebration of my fourth anniversary as a Software Development Manager (SDM), I've written a series of reflections on some lessons learned. See the full list here . Separating the two halves of my IT career is a 9-year hiatus, most of which was spent as an Anglican priest in a small, rural parish. Despite knowing better, I internally defined my success by the attendance and financial health of the parish. So as people aged and died, and weekly attendance and giving slowly shrank, my frustration and sense of failure grew. The fundamental flaw was that I was using the wrong definitions of Success. As a developer, my definition of Success was more oriented toward the tasks I was assigned. Was I delivering them on time? Was I increasing the test coverage as I did so? Was I meeting and exceeding my targets for fixes and new features? Was I out-performing the other developers? Those definitions were a mix of qualitative and quantitative,...