Another aspect of respecting people is the idea that the process that the team uses to generate value is owned by the team. The process is what the team uses to achieve its goals. By the time things get formalized, it rapidly morphs into a situation where the team is a tool that the process uses to achieve its goals. That’s rather disrespectful of the individuals involved. It doesn’t leverage their capabilities and strengths and insights. — Tom Poppendieck Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Management
Up the Organization
You know what I saw at the bookstore this afternoon? A 35th anniversary edition of Robert Townsend’s Up the Organization! If I’ve ever read a better business book, I can’t remember what it was. Townsend was way, way ahead of the curve in both style and content . . . Highly recommended! Read more →
We Don’t Need No Gantt Charts
One challenge we’re facing is that some high level executives are now concerned over how the project is progressing and want regular updates–they are used to Microsoft Project GANTT charts, excel charts with deadlines and stop lighting (e.g. yellow light, we’re behind schedule but it’s not critical). How do we map our agile process into the traditional project plans used by upper management for their corporate planning? — Mark A. Herschberg At the Deep Agile seminar he and I did, Jeff Sutherland told of being asked for a GANTT chart or such. He asked the execs in question how accurate those charts were. They replied that they were never accurate. He declined to do them. — Ron Jeffries Read more →
The Perfect Boss
In addition to the timely pay for acceptable services he offers, there are a few additional conditions that he imposes on you, if you are one of his subordinates. These are: What actions you take, you believe in. What commitments you make, you keep, What resources you have, you use. What words you say, you believe to be true. What you create, you intend to be great. He knows that if you buy something from an expert, you are wise to let them to deliver it on their own. . . . He requires that the team credibly believe itself to be doing something great, and also insists that all involved relentlessly pursue – and always adopt – what they think is the best available idea. . . . He never allows people to say, “People say…” If unidentified “people” have something to say, they can come say it.… Read more →
The Halo Effect
The halo effect is a cognitive bias whereby people tend to make specific inferences on the basis of a general impression. It was first identified by psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920. I read an interesting article this weekend by Phil Rosenzweig, the author of The Halo Effect: … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers, on the halo effect in the business world: Imagine a company that is doing well, with rising sales, high profits, and a sharply increasing stock price. The tendency is to infer that the company has a sound strategy, a visionary leader, motivated employees, an excellent customer orientation, a vibrant culture, and so on. But when that same company suffers a decline–if sales fall and profits shrink–many people are quick to conclude that the company’s strategy went wrong, its people became complacent, it neglected its customers, its culture became stodgy, and more. In fact,… Read more →
Some People Should Be Allowed to Work at Their Own Pace
Speaking of motivation, today’s Orange County Register has a story about a guy who really knows — or knew — how to light a fire under his employees. According to the story, Woo Sung Park, a landscaping supervisor, told day laborer Ernesto Avalos that he, Avalos, was not pulling his weight on the job. The pep talk so energized Mr. Avalos that he beat Mr. Park to death with a shovel and a pickax. This happened right here in Irvine! Tragically, one of my rich neighbors is now two men short on his beautification project . . . Read more →
The Can Do Manager
Staring your boss in the face and saying June 1 when you know that even a year from June would be optimistic sounds bad. It sounds like lying. But being a Can Do manager sounds good. — Tom DeMarco, Slack Read more →
Interview FAQ: How Do You Motivate People?
In 1960, Douglas MacGregor of the MIT Sloan School of Management developed two theories of workplace motivation, Theory X and Theory Y. Theory X assumptions People have an inherent dislike for work and will avoid it whenever possible. People must be coerced, controlled, directed, or threatened with punishment in order to get them to achieve the organizational objectives. People prefer to be directed, do not want responsibility, and have little or no ambition. People seek security above all else. Theory Y assumptions Work is as natural as rest or play. People will exercise self-control and self-direction in the pursuit of organizational objectives. Commitment to objectives is a function of rewards associated with their achievement. People usually accept and often seek responsibility. Imagination, ingenuity and creativity are widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population. The intellectual potential of the average person is only partly utilized. I come down strongly in favor… Read more →
Practices vs. Accomplishments
Per our Head of Software Development, IT managers are henceforth being evaluated on the “quality” of their status reports. A little background on this: We have a weekly conference call during which managers report project status. Every week you the hear the same things over and over: We’re waiting on this. We’re waiting on that. We’re working on requirements. We’re figuring out the architecture. We’re doing the design. Very rarely does anyone say, “We delivered working software to a customer.” Even more rarely does anyone say, “We delivered working software to a customer, the customer is using it, and can’t stop raving about how great it is.” What would be our motivation for evaluating practices rather than accomplishments? When I do projects, I like to be evaluated on one thing: my ability to deliver business value to a customer. Everything else is waste. Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
The Prepared Mind
Chance favors the prepared mind. — Louis Pasteur Today is the dumbest day of the rest of your life. If you’re doing a software project, you should know at least a little bit more about the project tomorrow than you do today, the next day a little bit more, and so on. Don’t get into detailed decisions and plans at the beginning of the project. Defer decisions to the last responsible moment; that’s when you’ll have the best information available. Upfront planning is not for the purpose of generating plans, which quickly go obsolete, but for the purpose of creating prepared minds with which to face the uncertain future. Read more →
We Have Been Distracted
We have been distracted by colleges and the PMI. We’ve been told if you want successful projects, then do those things recommended by the ANSI standard for project management. What is that standard? It is the PMI Body of Knowledge®, ANSI/PMI 99-001-2000. (Did you notice the designation of the registered trademark? Trying to refrain from cynical comments let me say might there be commercial interests involved?) We’ve been told to do more of what we’ve been doing. To get more people certified by PMI, to do a more comprehensive job of creating project schedules, and to always keep our CPM schedules up-to-date. It seems to me doing more of the same only benefits the status quo: the providers of software, training, and consulting. Yet we all know of projects where they are doing everything PMI recommends, and the project is still late, over budget, missing key functions, or all three.… Read more →
Three Reasons for Software Project Failure
Jerry Weinberg‘s top three reasons for software projects going over budget or failing to meet their original requirements: The original budget, schedule and requirements were totally unrealistic, due to the inability of people to speak truth to power. The original budget, schedule and requirements were totally unrealistic, due to the inability of people to understand and acknowledge their own limitations (which we all have). Even in those rare cases that people pass those first two hurdles, they lose emotional control during the project when something goes wrong — and something ALWAYS goes wrong. In 50 years, I’ve never seen a project where something didn’t go wrong. When it does, the project’s success is determined by the leaders’ ability to manage themselves emotionally. Read more →
The Intellect of “Ordinary” Employees
It took Detroit more than 20 years to ferret out the radical management principle at the heart of Toyota’s capacity for relentless improvement . . . Only after American carmakers had exhausted every other explanation for Toyota’s success — an undervalued yen, a docile workforce, Japanese culture, superior automation — were they finally able to admit that Toyota’s real advantage was its ability to harness the intellect of “ordinary” employees. — Gary Hamel Read more →
Leaders Who Don’t Care About People
Leaders who don’t care about people don’t have anyone to lead, unless their followers don’t have a choice. — Jerry Weinberg, Becoming a Technical Leader Read more →
Four Questions to Ask a Hiring Manager
I’m rereading parts of The Psychology of Computer Programming and I notice that several of Weinberg’s “food for thought” questions at the end of each chapter would be good questions to pose to a hiring manager: How long have you been in charge of your present group? How many of the original people remain? How many people have left and what were the reasons for their departure? What sort of provisions do you make for this kind of turnover? Describe the sequence of work planned for your current project. Is the actual work proceeding according to the original plan? Do you expect it to continue in this manner? How close is your progress reporting scheme to the reality of the work that goes on? What checks do you have to find out if it corresponds to reality? What is your impression of what motivates your staff? Is it the same… Read more →
How Did Peopleware Become a Best-Seller?
I don’t know how Peopleware became a best-seller. . . . I hardly run into any managers who read about their industry, management theory, or psychology, period. I used to believe that they were overloaded with information regarding the specifics of their job, but frankly, managers still aren’t trained, or do not educate themselves, to do their jobs. — Brian Pioreck Read more →
Dishonest Estimation
I saw the following attributed to Ralph Johnson. I’m not sure if that’s the Gang of Four Ralph Johnson, but it probably is: The problem is that almost all software schedules and budgets are bogus. They are created for political effect and have little relationship to reality. Thus, whether they are met has nothing to do with the people working on the project. Who makes your schedules? Project managers? They are almost certainly the wrong people. You can’t predict how long something will take unless you are an expert at doing it. The programmers? Are they allowed to say “we don’t have enough information to make a prediction”? Are they ever told “that is too long, you’ll have to do it in six months”? The only way to get honest schedules is from people who have experience in doing the work who know that they need to get the schedule… Read more →
A Ready Answer on Diversity
From a corporate diversity report: The issue of having less diversity in the management ranks than in the aggregate among the workforce is faced by virtually every company in America and is one for which we do not have a ready answer. You don’t have a ready answer? I’ll give you one: From a management perspective, diversity, like outsourcing, is best implemented on some other sucker’s job. Read more →
Why Good Projects Fail Anyway
A September 2003 Harvard Business Review article, “Why Good Projects Fail Anyway” by Nadim Matta and Ronald Ashkenas (free summary here), says that the high failure rate of major projects — not just IT projects — suggests that either these projects are inherently unmanageable or else something is wrong with the standard approach to project management. Matta and Ashkenas argue that the standard project management model is designed to control “execution risk” — the risk that designated activities won’t be carried out properly — by means of project plans, timelines, and budgets, but ignores two other equally important risks: Read more →
Administrivia
So much of our developers’ time is wasted by managerial fiat that some days they can’t get a damn thing done. One manager asked me in exasperation “Why can’t my people ever get through their work on time?” And my answer, after observing his organization for a while was that they couldn’t get through their work because most days they never even got to their work. They were too busy doing all the administrivia that he and the organization had imposed upon them. — Tom DeMarco Read more →