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
I’ve been thinking a lot about some of my clients’ problems managing their projects. Two of my clients are stuck on the notion that there is a silver bullet, one right way to solve their problem. Then I read Steve Norrie’s blog entry this morning, and saw this quote: “Nothing is more dangerous than an
I’m not big on information hiding. I’ve always wanted to know what was going on in other parts of the company, so I could better understand how to do my job. I recently read Laurent’s post on Information Hiding, and realized that I when I recently spoke about open book management, some people didn’t understand
I was extremely fortunate in my choice of companies and work early in my career. I developed in assembly language and microcode and Fortran for a few years. Then, I moved to object oriented languages, primarily at Symbolics, using LISP. At Symbolics (I left in 1990), we practiced incremental development, iterative planning, and some
Many project managers (and senior management) still have the mindset of “How much can we fit into this project?” instead of “How little can we do?” How-much thinking carries these assumptions (even if your managers don’t agree): People are a scarce resource, and that we should put all of them to use immediately, working
I ended up in the hospital last weekend (facial cellulitis – yuck). On my floor, we had people who were not too sick, who needed a few days to recover from an acute problem. Everyone’s prognosis was good, and the average stay on the floor was 3 days. Recovering from an acute illness takes
I had dinner last night with a CIO who’s working on outsourcing a significant part of his development and testing. He suggested that any senior manager who’s not thinking about outsourcing and how to make it work is missing the boat. “When you’re in a fixed cost development situation, and people are most of