Fearless Change - Patterns for Introducing New Ideas by Mary Lynn Manns, Linda Rising
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<pre>Author/s : Mary Lynn Manns, Linda Rising Publisher : Addison-Wesley Category :Design Patterns, UML, and Refactoring Review by : Ilja Preuss Rating : 10 horseshoes</pre> Did you ever struggle to introduce a new idea at your workplace that would make everyone's life easier? Did you ever wonder how some people actually manage to introduce changes? Then this book is for you.
"Fearless Change" starts by explaining why change is so hard and what we typically miss when we approach change, followed by an excellent introduction to the broad concept of patterns in general.
The "patterns for introducing new ideas" are then introduced in a sequence of chapters, each dedicated to a specific phase of the change process - from testing the waters, over getting the first people on board, to convincing the masses and finally keeping the implemented change alive. One chapter solely discusses how to deal with resistance.
Four experience reports (one about the introduction of the J2EE patterns) then show how the patterns have been successfully used in concert. The third part of the book contains an alphabetical catalog, describing every aforementioned pattern in detail.
The whole book is quite entertaining to read, every chapter being to the point and at the same time filled with clever quotations and examples from the trenches. On each page you sense it's not only the experience of the two authors that is to your disposal, but also that of dozens of people they talked with during the years.
If you want to have an impact on how things are done at your workplace, you should put this book at the top of your reading list.
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