Driving Technical Change: Why People on Your Team Don't Act on Good Ideas, and How to Convince Them They Should

Finding cool new languages, tools or techniques is easy---you get great new ideas every day. But convincing co-workers to adopt these ideas is difficult. Logic doesn't work. Playing politics doesn't work. Even hard evidence of a superior solution is not enough. You need to identify where the resistance is coming from, and blow it out of the water.

In this book, you'll doscover the resistance patterns that block people from accepting your ideas, from the Uninformed to the Herd, The Cynic, The Burned, The Time Crunched, The Boss, and The Irrational. From there you'll learn battle-tested techniques for over-coming their objections. By understanding the patterns of resistance and learning how to apply techniques for vanquishing them, you'll win the buy-in you need.

In Order to get your co-workers to stretch their technical skills, you'll have to stretch your soft skills. This book will help you make that stretch without playing politics or relying on luck.

You can overcome resistance, no matter how illogical or unfounded, in a clear, rational, and straight-forward way.

Terrence Ryan is an evangelist for Adobe Systems, encouraging people to try tools and techniques. Before that, he spent ten years in higher education overseeing developers, running code reviews, pushing standards, and trying to convince co-workers to come around to new tools and techaniques.