I just returned from my younger daughter’s fifth grade graduation. (For those of you without children, sixth grade is now part of middle school.) It was lovely, and reminded me of how important it is for us to have rituals or ceremonies for the ends of significant work. If you’re scheduling a project, schedule […]
At a recent presentation about agile project management, I mentioned refactoring. One of the attendees said, “No, I don’t want to redesign the whole application every iteration. Agile’s not for me!” Well, I decided I couldn’t address the resistance if I didn’t first start with defining refactoring. I said, “Hmm, refactoring isn’t the same
The zeroth measure of productivity is showing up. Sorry I haven’t been showing up, but I have to admit, sleeping is good 🙂 Ok, back to business. When I tried to calculate productivity of a team, here’s what I measured for one team over the course of five releases (Apologies to bloglet subscribers; tables
When we think about manufacturing work, we measure labor productivity as the ratio of the output of goods and services to the labor hours devoted to the production of that output, output per hour. (See U.S. Dept of Labor) Remember the discussion of Project Constraints and Requirements? That’s where I said the project requirements were
In the past few weeks, too many managers have written to me, asking for help on knowing how “good” their people are. When I ask more questions, such as “What does good mean to you?”, they say they want to know who’s most productive. Then I walk through this analysis with them: Productivity is
I’m a big fan of one-on-one meetings between the manager (or project manager) and the employee. Private meetings provide the manager a chance to see project and personal status in a way that group meetings and email status reports don’t. I wrote an article for Software Development about one-on-ones. BTW, if you’re using group
Steve Smith commented on yesterday’s post, “I think managers have a tough job, especially middle managers. I think that middle managers who are respectful to their employees but choose to execute to abide with their management team’s decision are acting in a dignified manner.” Steve is right, and it’s not always easy to balance
Steve Smith challenged me in a comment to the cowardly layoff/no feedback posting: “What would you have done if you were the manager who layed off these people?” I’ve written about layoffs in a previous Software Development column, but let me address the specific problem Steve described: The manager needs the paycheck. The manager (or
I was at STAR East this week, facilitating some sessions with Esther Derby. The session was fun for us and the attendees seemed to learn a lot. For me, one of the best parts of conferences is meeting new people, making new friends, and learning about new things. Some of us bloggers got together
In the last two weeks, four different colleagues have found themselves suddenly unemployed, all for the same reason, “You didn’t do what we expected you to. Since your performance is inadequate, we’re firing you.” My colleagues and I were surprised. Three of the four people received raises and good-to-great performance evaluations in the last