Team Building And Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development

While team dynamics are messy and can never be fully encapsulated by a model, Tuckman’s four stages of group development offer a vocabulary and structure to help us understand how to move teams forward to more productive work.

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Writing Your Own Performance Evaluation: Tips To Make It Not Suck

Managers often ask employees to write a first draft of their performance review. If you’re expected to draft a performance summary, here are a few ideas to mitigate the stress of self evaluation and to help your manager help you.

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People Aren’t Stupid Just Because They Don’t Understand Tech

As technical people, we spend immense time and energy mastering the nuances of specific technologies. Esoteric knowledge is our currency, and we often measure our personal value against the yardstick of technical nuance. And sometimes (maybe lots of times) we gauge other people with the same yardstick, and dismiss those who don’t measure up. This […]

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Bridging The Gap Between ‘Default Yes’ And ‘Default No’

I’ve encountered two basic philosophies for responding to requests to join a project. One philosophy I’ll describe as “Default Yes”. The argument goes, “If someone brings you a request, say yes! You only grow with challenges and if you say no too much, people will stop asking.” The second philosophy could be called “Default No.” […]

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Project Escalation Is Good! How To Identify Stakeholders And Escalate Well

When tackling technical projects, every organization needs a system to make decisions, resolve conflicts, and chart alternative paths when plans go awry. Effective escalation is key, but the prospect of escalation can make engineers anxious. We need to reframe our view of escalation as a tool to help move a project forward.

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Asking Meaningful Questions: How To Break Negative Patterns

Unconscious patterns of behavior can impede our professional progress. For example, you might watch others capitalize on ideas you have but don’t act on. Or your abrupt delivery of “the facts” alienates your colleagues and creates friction that can be detrimental. As I’ve recognized patterns in my own life and career, I’ve developed ways to […]

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Asking Meaningful Questions: What Problem Are We Trying To Solve?

At some point in your career, you’ll likely participate in a project that is a technical and implementation success but is still a failure. That’s because the wrong solution was implemented. For example, after weeks or months of hard work you might successfully deploy a client-based VPN solution, but because of application latency requirements a […]

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Short Take – Practical Career Advice

In this Network Collective Short Take, Russ talks about practical concepts network engineers need to know to succeed in their careers.

Russ White

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From SMB to Enterprise: Taking the Leap

After working in small business IT for over a decade, I made the leap to a large healthcare enterprise. Although I had been very successful in providing solutions in the SMB space, I didn’t know how well my skill set would transfer into a larger environment. Three years into my experience in the enterprise, I’ve […]

Author information

Eyvonne Sharp

Eyvonne Sharp is a senior network engineer for a large healthcare enterprise where her focus is security and data center architecture. Before working in the enterprise, she spent 10 years working for small VARs and integrators in the SMB space. Eyvonne blogs at esharp.net and you can connect with her on twitter @SharpNetwork

The post From SMB to Enterprise: Taking the Leap appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Eyvonne Sharp.

Cisco ASA Virtualization with Mixed-Mode Security Contexts

The Cisco ASA firewall has supported multiple security contexts since version 7 was released in 2005. This feature allows you to configure multiple independent logical firewalls in the same ASA hardware.  When version 8.5(1) released in July 2011, support was added for mixed mode firewalls in which both routed and transparent contexts can reside on […]

Author information

Eyvonne Sharp

Eyvonne Sharp is a senior network engineer for a large healthcare enterprise where her focus is security and data center architecture. Before working in the enterprise, she spent 10 years working for small VARs and integrators in the SMB space. Eyvonne blogs at esharp.net and you can connect with her on twitter @SharpNetwork

The post Cisco ASA Virtualization with Mixed-Mode Security Contexts appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Eyvonne Sharp.