The world of technology moves faster than the speed of light it seems. Devices are updated and software upgraded annually and sometimes more frequent than that.  Society wants to be able to function and be as productive as they can be as well as be entertained “now”.

Software companies must be ready to meet the demands of their loyal customers while increasing their market share among new customers. These companies are always looking to the ingenuity and creativity of their colleagues to keep them in the consumer’s focus. But, who are these “colleagues”? Are they required to be young, twenty-somethings that are fresh out of college with a host of ideas and energy about software and hardware that the consumer may enjoy? Or can they be more mature with a little more experience in the working world and may know a bit more about the consumer’s needs and some knowledge of today’s devices?

Older candidates for IT positions face many challenges when competing with their younger counterparts. The primary challenge that most will face is the ability to prove their knowledge of current hardware and the development and application of software used by consumers. Candidates will have to prove that although they may be older, their knowledge and experience is very current. They will have to make more of an effort to show that they are on pace with the younger candidates.

Another challenge will be marketing what should be considered prized assets; maturity and work experience. More mature candidates bring along a history of work experience and a level of maturity that can be utilized as a resource for most companies. They are more experienced with time management, organization and communication skills as well as balancing home and work. They can quickly become role models for younger colleagues within the company.

Unfortunately, some mature candidates can be seen as a threat to existing leadership, especially if that leadership is younger. Younger members of a leadership team may be concerned that the older candidate may be able to move them out of their position. If the candidate has a considerably robust technological background this will be a special concern and could cause the candidate to lose the opportunity.

Demonstrating that their knowledge or training is current, marketing their experience and maturity, and not being seen as a threat to existing leadership make job hunting an even more daunting task for the mature candidate. There are often times that they are overlooked for positions for these very reasons. But, software companies who know what they need and how to utilize talent will not pass up the opportunity to hire these jewels.

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Being treated like a twelve year old at work by a Tasmanian-devil-manager and not sure what to do about it? It is simply a well-known fact that no one likes to be micro managed. Not only do they not like to be micro managed, but tend to quit for this very reason. Unfortunately the percentage of people leaving their jobs for this reason is higher that you would imagine. Recently, an employee retention report conducted by TINYpulse, an employee engagement firm, surveyed 400 full-time U.S. employees concluded that, "supervisors can make or break employee retention."

As companies mature, their ability to manage can be significant to their bottom line as employee morale, high staff turnover and the cost of training new employees can easily reduce productivity and consequently client satisfaction.  In many cases, there is a thin line between effective managing and micro managing practices. Most managers avoid micro managing their employees. However, a decent percentage of them have yet to find effective ways to get the most of their co-workers.  They trap themselves by disempowering people's ability to do their work when they hover over them and create an unpleasant working environment. This behavior may come in the form of incessant emailing, everything having to be done a certain way (their way), desk hovering, and a need to control every part of an enterprise, no matter how small.

Superimpose the micro manager into the popular practice of Agile-SCRUM methodology and you can imagine the creative ways they can monitor everything in a team, situation, or place. Although, not always a bad thing, excessive control, can lead to burnout of managers and teams alike.  As predicted, agile project management has become increasingly popular in the last couple of decades in project planning, particularly in software development.  Agile methodology when put into practice, especially in IT, can mean releasing faster functional software than with the traditional development methods. When done right, it enables users to get some of the business benefits of the new software faster as well as enabling the software team to get rapid feedback on the software's scope and direction.

Despite its advantages, most organizations have not been able to go “all agile” at once. Rather, some experiment with their own interpretation of agile when transitioning.  A purist approach for instance, can lead to an unnecessarily high agile project failure, especially for those that rely on tight controls, rigid structures and cost-benefit analysis.  As an example, a premature and rather rapid replacement of traditional development without fully understating the implications of the changeover process or job roles within the project results in failure for many organizations.  

A project manager acts as the primary link between business and technical teams. A project manager is responsible for maintaining the project schedule, developing project estimates, working with external teams and tracking project issues. The project manager belongs to either the technical team or the project management office (PMO). The project manager works with business teams, technical teams, business counterparts, testing resources, vendors and infrastructure teams.

A project manager is often challenged with diagonally opposite views from the business side and technical side. A project manager’s success depends on balancing the needs and emotions of both sides.

Understanding the Requirements
A project manager must familiarize with the project’s requirements as defined by the business or product managers. This will help you understand the business vision behind the project. You will need this knowledge while negotiating with the technical teams.

Understanding the Technical Landscape
A project manager must also understand the technical systems, resource skills and infrastructure capabilities available for the project. Business teams come up with expectations that are sometimes beyond the capabilities of the technology team. It is the responsibility of the project manager to understand the technical capabilities available to the project.

Walkthrough of Business Requirements
This is a critical step in the project delivery process. The project manager must invite members from the business team, technical team, testing team, infrastructure team and vendors. The project manager must encourage the various stakeholders to ask questions about the requirements. Any prototypes available must be demonstrated in this meeting. The project manager must find answers to all questions resulting from the requirements walkthrough. The project manager must get the final version of the requirements approved by all stakeholders.

Managing Conflicts in Timelines and Budgets
All project managers will face the conflicts arising from shortened timelines and limited budgets. Business teams typically demand many features that are nearly impossible to deliver within short timeframes. The project manager must work with business and technical teams to prioritize the requirements. If the project is executed in a product development organization, then the project manager could utilize agile methodologies to deliver projects incrementally. In this case, the project manager may be required to act as a scrum master to facilitate scrum meetings between various stakeholders.

The Art of Saying “No”
As a project manager, you may be forced to say “no” to demands from both business and technology teams. However, it is important to create a win-win situation for all parties when you are faced with conflicting demands. You can work with the stakeholders individually before bringing all parties together. Most stakeholders prefer to work together. The success of a project manager depends on how effectively he or she can bring out the best in everyone, driving everyone towards a common goal.

Finally, the job of a project manager is not to satisfy the demands from all corners. The project manager must identify the essential deliverables that will meet the business needs, with a solid understanding of what is possible within the limits of technology.

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F# is excellent for specialties such as scientific computing and data analysis. It is an excellent choice for enterprise development as well. There are a few great reasons why you should consider using F# for your next project.

Concise

F# is not cluttered up with coding noise;  no pesky semicolons, curly brackets, and so on. You almost never have to specify the kind of object you're referencing because of its powerful type inference system. It usually takes fewer lines of code to solve the same issue.

Convenient

Common programming tasks are much easier in F#. These include generating and using state machines, comparison and equality, list processing, as well as complex type definitions. It is very easy to generate powerful and reusable code because functions are first class objects. This is done by creating functions that have other functions as parameters or that combine existing functions to generate a new functionality.

Correctness

F# has a strong type system, and, therefore, prevents many common errors such as null reference exceptions. Valuables are immutable by default which, too, prevents a huge class of errors. You can also encode business logic by utilizing the type system. When done correctly, it is impossible to mix up units of measure or to write incorrect code thereby decresing the need of unit tests.

Concurrency

F# has number of built-in libraries. These libraries help when more than one thing at a time is occurring. Parallelism and asynchronous programming are very simple. There is also a built-in actor model as well as excellent support for event handling and functional reactive programming. Sharing state and avoiding locks are much easier because data structures are immutable by default.

Completeness

F# also supports other styles that are not 100 percent pure. This makes it easier to interact with the non-pure world of databases, websites, other applications, and so on. It is actually designed as a hybrid functional/OO language. F# is also part of the .NET ecosystem. This gives you seamless access to all the third party .NET tools and libraries. It operates on most platforms. These platforms include Linux and smartphones via mono. Visual Studio is integrates with F# as well. This means you get many plug-ins for unit tests, a debugger, a IDE with IntelliSense support, other development tasks. You can use MonoDevelop IDE on Linux.

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