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: […]
Managers have an obligation to coach employees to help employees obtain better performance. However, managers choose when and whom to coach. Managers also have an obligation to provide feedback — which is not a choice. Every employee deserves feedback about his/her work on a frequent (weekly) basis. I’ve never met a manager who didn’t
In his comment, Rich explains, “I am directly managing 12 employees and 14 contractors doing application support and maintenance for something like 12 or 15 software products. I have most of my old team, and 6 other teams. I have been asked to develop a plan to cross train these individuals to build out a
I just got off the phone with a colleague who discovered his boss is reading his email. The employee, whom I’ll call Dave, is hurt, unhappy, angry, and frustrated. “Yes, I know my email isn’t private, but what did I do that would prompt my boss to read my email?” The more he talked,
The two articles I found most telling about Carly Fiorina’s departure from HP are Worst. CEO. Ever. and Carly Fiorina and management. High tech organizations require a vision (from the CEO), a budget, and room for innovation. Maybe I missed it, but Fiorina didn’t provide any vision, except for cost-cutting. When will senior managers
In the Hiring Geeks That Fit book, I wrote this (p. 261): Functional managers organize the work of similar people (people performing a given function). They hand off their deliverables to another group. Project managers coordinate the work of numerous people to deliver a product to the organization. Matrix managers manage people of a similar
I gave a talk at the local PDMA group called “Setting Expectations Between Engineering and the Three PMs”, attempting to clarify how the roles of product management, program management, and project management are sometimes confused, and to suggest practices that help people unconfuse them. I set up teams of people to create a little
Last week, Effern of The Vision Thing interviewed Hal Macomber, Clarke Ching, and me about project management. He made a podcast at The Sound of Vision: 02/04/2005. I was pleasantly surprised at how well Hal’s, Clarke’s, and my conversations meshed. We didn’t rehearse our answers. Effern, I appreciate you for the time you took
I’m familiar with managing defects by severity (how bad the problem is for the user if the user encounters the problem), and by priority (what’s the business value of fixing this problem), but I had lunch yesterday with some folks who use frequency of occurrence to also manage defects. They started this because they
I’m on an around-the-world trip in March. I’m speaking at the Software Development conferences in Wellington on March 15, and in Sydney on March 17. Any bloggers interested in getting together for a dinner on March 15 or March 17? I’ll be in Perth for the weekend, and then travel on to Israel (Mar 23-31),