Trying to gather what I can from Bob Woodward’s column in the NYTimes, 10 Take Aways From the Bush Years. Basic management advice extracted the hard way from the record of our first MBA president. Among the lessons:
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:
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.
Ways to justify power over others:
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?
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.
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…”
