I have received some wonderful feedback from some of my managers. Back when I was a young engineer, one of my managers gave me the feedback at an annual review that I didn’t quite finish my projects. “Oh, you mean on the project I just finished last week?” I wanted to know if it was […]
I’ve met many managers who were in the wrong position. Sometimes, it was the Peter Principle. Sometimes, it’s managers who have been founders or who have been technically great and got promoted into management positions. Because they are so intelligent, and because they do not read about management, they don’t know or don’t care about
I had a boss who was great at saying, “Terri did this. Jen did that. JR did this other thing.” We all knew who had learned about different areas of the system, who had succeeded at which parts of testing or development or project management. It was great. She didn’t just tell us. Nope, our
In my first management role, I “managed” one person. My managee didn’t need much management. He guided me into how to manage him more than I managed him. He saved me from making too many mistakes. It was great practice for me. Later in my management career, I managed a “team” of 15 testers. They
I was in the midst of an assessment when the CIO came to me, and shut the door. “I have a serious question for you.” I nodded for him to continue. I put aside my papers to show him I was providing him my undivided attention. “I’m thinking of offshoring all the testers. What do
Every so often, managers want to compare teams. You’ve heard this in several ways: Managers want teams to “normalize” their story points, so they can better predict the cost or schedule for the rest of the backlog in large programs. This doesn’t work, but managers want to do it anyway. Managers want to compare teams
Bad management is easy. Well, let me rephrase that. It’s easy to perform management badly. But, it’s not so easy to perform management well. From the outside, it can seem as if management is effortless. But that doesn’t mean that good management is easy. Early in my management career, I returned home one day, plopped
Many years ago, I started a job as a contract manager, and it became clear I had a big problem. I had developers who knew one area of the code well. I had testers who knew not much of any area of the code well, even though they had worked for the organization for many
I gave a talk last week at Better Software/Agile Development, called Exploding Management Myths. This is my first talk based on some of my management myths. Yes, the ones I’ve been writing for the last 18 months. Yes, I have more in me 🙂 I have posted the slides and the audio from my talk
Long ago, when I was a young developer at an anonymous company, one of my managers was disappointed with my progress. “I know how long the work should take. If I was doing the work, it would be done by now,” he huffed at me. “Really?” I could have stopped there. I didn’t. “If you