What's in a name?

I've been in the IT industry for - well, you don't need to know, but suffice it to say many years. There has been such huge technology change in that time: when I started as a trainee, there were no personal computers, only monolithic mainframes which you programmed by writing code with paper and pencil, and then sat at your desk and effectively executed the program line by line on paper. When you were happy, you sent this to a room wherein young ladies of the type much admired by male trainees typed onto punched cards for loading onto the mainframe.

But it's not so much the technology change, constant and amazing though it is, which I am interested in exploring here; it is the continual change in job titles. Thus I was a Programmer, but these days of course you don't have Programmers, you have Developers. You don't have Programmers because you don't write Programs any more, you write Software. I don't know why the change arose, because despite the technology now enabling code writing and testing to be done online and in real time, it is still essentially the same job of producing logic instructions to achieve a business requirement.

In the main, however, the issue driving changes in job titles is essentially one of 'job inflation'. When I started my career, a company was administered by the Board (as it still is today), but headed by a Managing Director, assisted by the Finance Director, Operations Director, Sales Director and so on. Then there was the management layer, where the managers were all called - well, Managers. At the Project level, you had a Project Leader running the show, and within the Project there were Teams, each led by a Team Leader.

Then it was decided that being called a Manager was not sufficiently important sounding, especially if you were in Sales, and if you were called a Director you sounded much more impressive to a prospective client. That in turn meant that the Board's important titles were diluted, because you couldn't tell if a Director was really important or just moderately important.

Much the same thing happened in the States, where Directors were known as Vice-Presidents. A few years back, I encountered the delightful title of "Vice-President of Blue Sky", which I gather meant he looked for new business markets. (So were existing customers, by implication, Grey Sky?)

So the Board members became Chief Officers, and the Managing Director as a title now means the head of a subsidiary or division.

Interestingly, there is now a trend where the management layer is populated not by Managers or Directors, but by Heads of Department. My own favourite job title, which I came across recently, is "Head of Web", a title I now espouse when assisting the technologically challenged amongst my family. They of course, in their ignorance, still think a Head of Web is what you find in those corners you don't dust as assiduously as you should.

Now, large developments are not just big Projects, today they are Programmes, and Leaders have become Managers (since the Management layer no longer needs the term, and it sounds more impressive than Leader). Except that even quite modest developments are now Programmes, so that what used to be a Team is now a Project. Thus the leader of a small team is now a Project Manager, and quite possibly has no Project Management training or accreditation. It is getting harder to decide if it is better to present myself as a Project Manager, a Programme Director or a Head of IT Implementation.

We have also started to see that the leader of some project teams is known simply as 'Lead'. Thus the head of the Testing team, who has recently been known as the Test Manager (Head of Testing is obviously too grand for what is an essential but regrettably unglamorous role), now seems to be increasingly termed 'Test Lead'. Clearly this is not the same as Test Leader, because we don't want to go back to the past, and Lead sounds more modern - or at least, with the use of an adjective as a noun, more American.

So, where next? I suspect that the next round of title inflation is overdue, that the Director will become a Chief of something, if not a Chief Officer, and all Project Managers will become Project Directors. This will only be acceptable to the Board members if they in turn have their escalation route mapped out.

I have a suggestion: how about Minister? After all, the important Government ministers are now all Secretaries of State, so their importance can still be maintained. And I would love to go into a meeting with my Board level boss and be able to agree by means of a simple "Yes, Minister!"

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Management by Targets

There's been quite a lot in the news over the past year about the management styles of the banks that led them to reward the wrong behaviour and drive them to the brink of insolvency. That started me thinking about the way that management style has changed in the past three decades I have been working.

When I began work in the seventies, the office environment was quite different. There were no office computers for a start (the only ones used by business were in large rooms tended like temple gods by priests and priestesses behind locked doors, and used only for applications with high returns given the then astronomical cost of computer power). There were in relative terms large numbers of secretarial staff, as all documents needed to be typed. Businesses communicated by phone, letter and occasionally by telex.

The management environment for staff was different too. Staff expected to change jobs less often. The emphasis was in doing well, and employers encouraged staff to improve - there was much focus on training, development of individual capability in the right directions for the business, and getting staff to the point where promotion could be envisaged.

Staff performance assessment consequentially was more qualitative than quantitative. This had the drawback that assessment was more subjective, but usually there were enough people involved in the review processes that there was little scope for personality clashes to spoil a person's career. What we didn't have were individual targets (sales personnel excepted), but I don't think that made us any less committed to do well. We did have bonuses, usually related in some way to company performance, and relatively modest in scale compared with today's incentives.

Today of course every member of staff in all the companies in which I've recently worked have individual targets, and often large bonuses, based largely on achievement of their own personal targets. These targets are by their nature short term, and so increasingly are corporate objectives - show revenue and profit growth not just this year, but this quarter or even month, and we'll worry about next year when we get there.

The results are predictable. Managers drive their reports rather than lead them, often with unpleasant "macho management" (at least the real bullies of old are now curbed by modern employment law). Staff work in stressed conditions, focus single-mindedly on their targets even when it becomes clear these are not in the company’s interests (the company being powerless to change them once committed), and matters of true good performance and development of capabilities are lost. How many staff in, or aspiring to, management grades work the contracted number of hours per day or week? Many routinely work up to a couple of hours a day extra, with getting in a bit early, cutting lunch hour, and leaving an hour or more late - and this is not paid overtime.

It certainly riles me to go into a staff assessment interview, and have a discussion on the lines of:

"You didn't achieve your targets."

"No, but they became less important due to x and y, and I couldn't achieve them. I think I am good at my job, don't you?"

"That's not for me to say: you didn't achieve your targets."

This inability to recognise competence unless it is measurable - and only targets are measured - is one of the reasons why I've focused more and more on contract work than employment, where you are judged on performance and "results" (in a general sense) and not on targets.

There are of course some notable advances in modern management methods. In particular I would note the improved way that women are treated nowadays, which in most of the offices I've worked in recently is genuinely on an equal footing with men.

However there is no getting away from the fact that target based staff management rather than competence based rewards does seem to me to be a doubtful improvement - one the victims of the excesses of the city traders and bankers might well agree with.

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