Managing Product Development

In one of my classes earlier this week, one project manager explained that he spent an entire day each week working the Gantt chart in a scheduling tool. He has a project of roughly 20 developers, a few testers, and a few other people (I’ve forgotten the details).

I asked if he had one-on-ones with everyone every week, even just an informal checkin to see how things were going. No, he depends on his technical leads (4 or 5 of them) to do that. He then integrates everything into the humungous WBS.

That’s not my style. I’d much rather have a less detailed schedule in the scheduling tool (or hire some administrator kind of person to manage the WBS) and spend time with the people. When I spend time with the people on the project, they are less likely to stretch the truth about their real status. I can see demos or other visible progress. And, I’m much more likely to hear bad news early.

This fellow seems to be succeeding, but I don’t think spending a day a week on a WBS is a scalable idea. I prefer to do rolling wave planning and only plan for a few weeks at a time, and block out the rest of the schedule, and keep talking to the people. And, when I work for people who require a long detailed WBS, I hire a project administrator, who has a full-time job keeping the schedule.

My first choice (and second and third choice is to manage the project in a way that the WBS works for me, not the other way around. And I choose to work for the people on the project, not the schedule.

I’m teaching project management (and some hiring) workshops in Israel. I’ve caught up with timezones, so I may even be able to post this week.

I attempted to explain why pair programming works to some skeptical project managers last week. I explained that in the best environments, a person can work 6 hours a day on technical work. And that person creates defects as well as creates work product. When pairing, the person can work for about 2 hours at a time, 2 or 3 times per day. But the created defect rate is much lower. The skeptics in my class pounced on the time spent working. I think I dealt with that question. But the real question that stumped them was how to do performance evaluations and give raises to pairs.

The problem I have is this: how do these managers give performance evaluations and give raises now? No one writes code or tests or whatever in a vacuum. All software is interdependent. So why is pairing somehow different? If we always performed peer review or inspections, wouldn’t it be the same problem?

I need more words or ideas to help explain pairing more successfully. Or, I need some more arguments to help people overcome their fear/resistance to this new-to-them idea. Got any words for me?

I’m in lovely Perth, Australia this weekend, staying with some friends of mine. The husband was explaining how he makes sure his department buys coffee, tea, milk, sugar for everyone in the department. “It costs us about $2000 to supply the department for a year. In return, people congregate around the coffee, discussing work. They feel as if the department cares for them as people.” Contrast that with a friend of mine whose company (in the US) who doesn’t supply coffee. “I make coffee, paying out of my own pocket. People used to come in when I was in a meeting, and sneak coffee from my supply. I finally had to go to a single-serving coffee maker.”

Here’s the scoop (sorry, pun intended). When companies make a reasonable effort to make the workplace easier to work in, their employees appreciate it. Coffee, tea, and water are the minimum requirements. Providing juice and soft drinks is nice, and can be quite expensive. And, when you stop providing it, people grumble. “The company is changed, they don’t love us anymore,” is a comment I heard at one client.

If you’re organizing a workplace, consider how people will drink their morning’s hot/cold drinks and where they will eat lunch. Companies who plan for a place where people can congregate to get coffee and eat their lunches will have the extra benefit of people continuing to work through lunch — but in a way that benefits the whole company’s productivity, not a single person’s.

When you provide a local (on every floor) coffee station (ok, for those of you in tea-drinking countries, a tea station), you’ve provided easy access to something people will spend time acquiring anyway. When you make it easy to get that cup of coffee or tea, you’ve reduced the non-working time. And, you might find that people talk about work at the coffee station. Sure, they’ll talk about sports too, but in my experience, the work conversations outnumber the sports conversations.

A cafeteria is even more important. When people have a place to eat together, they tend to discuss the funny things that happened on their projects, or the pieces of work that were challenging, or they’ll take the time to explain how something works to someone in another group. When I was a developer, I had lunch with other developers who told me about their gotcha’s. In one company where I was a tester, I always had lunch with the developers, who frequently told me something interesting that I could use for my testing work. When I was a project and people manager, other people would take me aside and let me know things they didn’t want to tell me in my office.

So, don’t let the price of tea and coffee and water prevent you from supplying it to your staff. And, if you can, create a lunchroom for people to congregate. You’ll find overall productivity goes up. Who wouldn’t want that?

Workforce Management has tons of articles full of content. So I gotta wonder why they posted Forced Ranking Could Improve Business Performance. In the article, it says,

“Forced ranking, the study finds, is more successful in the first several years of implementation.”

Well, duh. If you force rank — even once — the people who find this offensive leave. (I did when I worked for a VP who believed in forced ranking.) So, you quite successfully build a culture where forced ranking is valued. In my experience, you create a cut-throat culture, where it matters more who gets ahead rather than making great products. If you continue to force rank, it’s possible you can improve the the generate state:

• You actually do improve the productivity of the people who are left because you got rid of the people who weren’t performing.
• You obtain feedback about your hiring so you hire fewer people who need to be fired.

But here’s what I’ve seen most often with forced ranking:

• People working in a CYA (cover your tush) way.
• People not taking risks — because to take a risk exposes the very real possibility of being fired.
• Managers consciously hiring not-so-great employees every so often, so they’d have someone to fire.
• People working to maximize their review/evaluation, not for the good of the company or the product.

I find it incredible that these professors published conclusions based on a simulation. What would be worse is to use forced ranking because some academics (whom are not subject to forced ranking) probably need a paper to publish.

Managers need to provide effective feedback weekly to their employees. If you give feedback, coaching where appropriate, and use a reasonable evaluation system, you don’t need to use forced ranking. Forced ranking delivers precisely what you don’t want: people working for their own betterment. Forced ranking is the coward’s way to manage people.

You’ve probably seen these elsewhere, but since this blog is for me too, I don’t want to forget about them:

Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work: 6 Lessons. I particularly liked the origins of the 40-hour work week.

Conquering the Cubicle Syndrome. I liked the idea of talking to people, building those relationships. Like Esther says in Quality results come from quality interactions.

In Who Wants to be a Technical Lead? I promised I’d talk about succession planning.

Here’s the general idea: as someone who works for a living, your job should be to work yourself out of your current job by learning, practicing, and mastering some new skills. The less work experience you have, the easier this is to do. With more experience, it’s possible you have fewer — or more likely different — areas of interest, and you’re already on your way or have mastered several areas of interest. As you work yourself out of your current job, you work yourself into a new job.

As a manager, you may need to be more purposeful in planning who will take over your role or pieces of your role so you can do the next great thing. That means you have to know what you’re doing. One of the suggestions I make to managers is to write down everything they do in a week or two. That includes dealing with the people issues. If you have an employee who’s indispensable, it’s time to have that employee drop that area (ok, transition out of it in a week or two if necessary) and learn something new. If you have an employee who’s never been challenged to try something new, it’s time.

Not everyone will enjoy the opportunity to learn something new. Some people will reject all of your attempts to have them try something new. Then it’s time to ask yourself if these people are truly contributing what you need contributed to the organization. Successful managers are successful because they deliver results while improving capacity. If people on your staff refuse to improve their capacity, maybe they don’t belong in your group. Similarly, if you have someone who refuses to be anything other than indispensable (because he or she won’t learn something new), read Ready, Aim, Fire!

If you’re a new manager, the way Rich is, consider this possibility. You’ve reorganized the group, you may as well reorganize the work. You could ask for volunteers to lead specific areas. You could ask people to work in a more agile, self-organized team way. You could ask for other options to change the way you’re working, because the one thing you know is things aren’t working well enough now.

If you aren’t in transition, start using your one-on-ones to talk with people and see where they’re headed. If you’re not considering who could take over from you sometime, you’ll never be able to move out of this job. You’ll always be too valuable where you are.

The most effective employees (although not always the easiest to manage) are the people who are constantly learning. They don’t have the same year of experience several times; they have years of experience, mastering different parts of their jobs. The most effective managers hire people who are willing to and are successful at learning new things. It’s easier to plan for succession (whether this is management succession or technical contributor succession) when you can see people practicing new and different skills.

So, how will you work yourself out of your current job, into a better one?

Via Pragmatic Marketing, I found In Search of Overhead Heroes” by George Tillman, who advocates thinking like a business even if you’re supporting the business, not contributing directly to revenue. Certainly, you’re supposed to align yourself and contain costs. But here are the questions I felt were most important for any organization to answer:

• What is our purpose?
• Who are our customers?
• What do different customers want and need to be more effective in their jobs?
• What services and products should we, and can we, provide?
• Are we satisfying our customers?

Whether you’re in an organization that supports the bottom line or contributes to it, these are great questions to ask and answer.