Esther just called me from the Orlando airport to tell me she heard a fascinating rumor: Supposedly, she and I aren’t talking! After I was done laughing out loud, we examined this a little. We’ve facilitated sessions together at previous year’s STAR conferences, but I’ve been unable to attend last fall’s STAR and this spring’s […]
Two different colleagues wrote me with similar conundrums. Their managers wants a “technical” project manager. One colleague was a hardware person, the other was a tester. They have both been managing software projects for several years. No one has told them they were ineffective. (I’ve discussed this issue before: The Difference Between Project Managers and
I was reading You Are Possibly Very Annoying and realized I hadn’t posted Esther‘s and my six steps to effective feedback. (This is in the management book, starting publisher editing.) Here they are: Make sure you’re giving feedback about the work or the working relationships. Especially avoid clothes and other personal appearance issues (unless
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.
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
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
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:
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
I just received this in email: Pledge Our company is completely and absolutely committed to quality. * * Except on time-critical projects and during adverse cash-flow situations. When else would you need to be committed to quality? (Not to zero defects, but to an appropriate level of quality for the product you’re trying to