Technology, Strategy, People and Projects

Tyner Blain – “Specializing Generalists’

by Eric D. Brown on February 16, 2008 · View Comments

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I just read an interesting article at Tyner Blain titled “Specializing Generalists and the Politics of Agile“that is a good follow up to my “Better to be a Generalist or Expert?“article. An excerpt is:

By staffing a team with people who have an area of expertise, but can do anything, you can maximize the value of each delivery cycle. In our example, where all of the tasks for a release are UI tasks, they can be interchangeably assigned to any of the developers. The UI expert may suggest an implementation approach, do code reviews, or provide guidance to all the other developers. But every developer (including the database guy) can sling code effectively to get the job done. Specializing generalists.

Go read the article…very interesting.

[tags] Expert, Generalist, Specialist [/tags]

Written By Eric D. Brown

Eric is a Consultant, Entrepreneur and Doctoral Student focused on helping organizations cross the chasm that exists between Business & IT. Eric writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at http://ericbrown.com. In addition to this blog and his consulting work, Eric is an avid & passionate photographer and writes about photography, shares photographs and reviews products at Photography Minute.