Construx has a white paper revisiting Stephen McConnell’s Software Development’s Classic Mistakes.

In it, they list ten mistakes most likely to produce catastrophic or serious consequences.

Half of them speak more to executive and product management than development:

• #1 unrealistic expectations
• #2 weak personnel
• #4 wishful thinking
• #7 lack of sponsorship
• #10 lack of user involvement

Given my experience of organizations that means projects are marked for failure well before agile methods are even applied.

Under these circumstances, we can hope frequent delivery will either morph the project into something more valuable or cause it to die a quick and merciful death.

A better answer disperses transparency, collaboration and continuous improvement from the team room out to sponsors, stakeholders, support units, suppliers, customers and end users — from development and project management to economies.

Posted: May 16th, 2008 under development.
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 Ways to justify power over others:

1. Divine right
2. Consent of the governed
3. The lack of rebellion

Do you feel entitled to the authority you wield over others?

Does your power derive from willing support of those you lead?

Or is consent simply that people show up and do what you say?

Posted: March 9th, 2008 under personal.
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Team managers should till the soil with their teams.

Anything else is waste and waste must be rooted out.

Still it is hard.

Luke Melia wrote about how he performed as functional manager and dedicated 75% of his time pairing.

There are two tremendous challenges with this.

The first is limiting distractions in order to remain a reliable contributor.

Luke has tremendous reserves of focus and enthusiasm. As his manager, I did everything I could with our scrum master, Salim Divakaran, to support him, remove distractions and share workload.

The second challenge is being both the boss and a peer.

Luke recruited most of the team, he held weekly one on ones with each person, he insisted on unvarnished feedback, and is worthy of respect as both a peer and a manager.

So, here is the pattern: An experienced coach with people skills and authority over development practices pairing in with the developers. An experienced scrum master. Functional management residing in one or the other or divided up in some sensible and easily described way among the two of them.

This enables direct participation in the work, management attention to the team, and strategic contribution to the rest of the company.

Posted: January 28th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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An excellent software developer’s creativity emerges from a passionately felt “higher need” to become their fullest self.

“The specific form that these needs will take will of course vary greatly from person to person… It is not necessarily a creative urge although in people who have any capacities for creation it will take this form. The clear emergence of these needs rests upon prior satisfaction of the physiological, safety, love and esteem needs.”

– A Theory of Human Motivation, A. H. Maslow (1943)

When an employment situation does not ensure a person’s basic needs (family security, self-esteem), sustained invention goes out the door.

“The urge to write poetry, the desire to acquire an automobile, the interest in American history, the desire for a new pair of shoes are, in the extreme case, forgotten or become of secondary importance. For the man who is extremely and dangerously hungry, no other interests exist but food…”

Posted: January 21st, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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Management structures are often designed to avoid failure. An unintended consequence is undermining top performers.

Marcus Buckingham describes this in First, Break All the Rules based on Gallup Research across a range of professions.

…in numerous job functions the best and the worst performers shared some, but not all, traits. Both the best and the worst salespeople have call reluctance; the mediocre performers did not. Both the best and the worst nurses had a personal connection with their patients; mediocre nurses stayed aloof. What was important is what the top performers did about this strong emotional link; they used it to empower and motivate them. The poor performers used it to shrink from effective action. Those with no emotional attachment lacked the motivation to excel.

Hospitals rotate shifts so that nurses cannot form personal attachments to patients. Prevents poor performing nurses from burning out. Doesn’t impact mediocre nurses who don’t engage anyway. Prevents the best nurses from giving the kind of care that improves patient outcomes.

Compulsory testing and centralized lesson plans are designed to ensure poor teachers raise poor student performance but makes it much harder for great teachers to innovate and personalize instruction and bores precocious students ready to go beyond core instruction.

If the core difference between poor and excellent performers is that the best are motivated and empowered by their emotional engagement to their work, then it follows if you demotivate and disempower your best performers you remove the distinction.

Under a poor leader, the exceptional will under-perform the mediocre.

Posted: January 19th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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Paul from Oracle AppsLab has a post on whether viewing all employees as free agents would contribute to better knowledge management within an organization.

So if we found a way to enable people to build their own personal brand through activities we want to incent (like sharing, collaboration, etc), both employees and employers could be substantially better off…

For me the high-concept is less interesting than how a management team would translate it into action.

For me, individuals should be rewarded for group performance allowing peers to recognize the outstanding contributions of individuals.

Knowledge sharing and creation springs from an environment of high trust and fair reward. This is best fostered in an organization composed of self-directed, cross-functional teams that demonstrate progress frequently and visibly against clear priorities. Rewards should be based on both team and organizational performance.

Team rewards motivate individuals to collaborate within their team and the team to raise up each other’s performance or eject members that can’t carry their weight. Individual rewards or advancement should result from a process that solicits input and obtains buy in from peers.

Organizational rewards motivate teams into healthy “bounded cohabitation”, bringing the best new learning to the rest of the organization, rather than dysfunctional “balkanization” where one team’s failure advantages another.

This requires management to take a coaching, facilitating role and senior leadership to set ambitious goals while embodying the values they expect others to embrace.

Posted: December 15th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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I’m a fan of The Gallup Organization’s research and management writing. Marcus Buckingham has a 2001 Fast Company interview on his site.

“There’s a juicy irony here,” says the 35-year-old Cambridge-educated Brit. “You won’t find a CEO who doesn’t talk about a ‘powerful culture’ as a source of competitive advantage. At the same time, you’d be hard-pressed to find a CEO who has much of a clue about the strength of that culture. The corporate world is appallingly bad at capitalizing on the strengths of its people.”

He lists “five attitude adjustments that redefine the essence of leadership in business.” To senior executives, he says:

1. Measure what really matters… Averages hide the fact that within any company are some of the most-engaged work groups and some of the least-engaged work groups. But this range is what is most revealing.
2. Stop trying to change people. Start trying to help them become more of who they already are.
3. You’re not the most important person in the company. (T)he single most important determinant of individual performance is a person’s relationship with his or her immediate manager.
4. Stop looking to the outside for help. The solutions to your problems exist inside your company.
5. Don’t assume that everyone wants your job — or that great people want to be promoted out of what they do best.

He provides some good detail and the conclusions are supported with methodical quantitative research.

Posted: December 12th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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Today was my boss’ last day at the company.

I’ve worked for him seven years.

The road to hell is paved with fools who’ve underestimated him.

He is a shield under which we built an amazing team.

Prosaic but heartfelt praise — Steve Morgan is a good human being.

Why his IT team got him a Chucky doll I’ll never know.

Posted: December 12th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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The acquisition is done.

We are retained. “(O)ur jobs are unaffected.”

“(We) have a choice.”

To co-workers who’ve left or are soon to go:

I miss learning from you. I miss laughing.

You will create products.

You will build teams.

I look forward to it.

Posted: December 11th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1

I just watched “The Heart of the Game“, a documentary about the Roosevelt Roughrider’s girl’s basketball team (my old high school).

At key moments, the coach called a closed circle meeting where the players went off by themselves coming back with resolution or a group decision.

In the first example, the team worked through tension between players resulting in dramatically better play — going from tight games to blowing out opponents.

In the second example, the team rallied around a player at the risk of forfeiting their season.

As reward for their camaraderie and commitment, the coach made sure every player received game time during the close-fought final championship game. What’s more, the starters rallied around his decision. The younger players not only held their own but played above themselves.

There’s a lot of hype about teamwork in business and self-directed teams in agile practice. A lot of managers look to sports as an example. Rarely do we pull it off.

At the end of the day, it’s about actions that value the group as much as the individuals and actions that source from trust to earn trust.

Posted: December 2nd, 2007 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1