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’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
The Pragmatic Manager, Volume 1 #3 Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Choosing Facilitation Announcements On the Bookshelf Want to hear more from Johanna? Want to read more of Johanna’s writing? =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Choosing Facilitation Meetings are a fact of our lives. Most of the time we don’t need a facilitator to help move our
In Sunday’s Boston Globe View from the Cube column, Lisa Liberty Becker claims “Telling the truth can be hazardous to your job”. She goes on to talk about her husband, a performance test engineer, whose manager buried his reports, because “they [the reports] reflect poorly on the job he’s done.” The result? Bad product performance,
If you’re like most IT managers, you have a couple of open reqs. You’d like to make the most of your reqs, and you don’t want to take a long time to hire. To hire the most suitable candidate who aligns with your strategy and needs, find candidates with relevant experience and then ask them
I was on the phone this morning with a senior manager. He was describing their current project: “Well, we’ve got 25 people: 12 developers, 6 testers, 2 writers, 4 support people, and 1 project manager.” I asked about the managers of the developers and testers. “Oh, the dev manager is running the project. We
I’m facilitating a roundtable, Test Management 101, on Stickyminds, and someone just posted a question about how to measure testers to show return on investment: measuring the number of defects they find. Ouch. When you measure developers on the number of lines of code, or testers on the number of defects, or carpenters on
Many companies have automated spam filters. This is a Good Thing. However, they look for certain words that have been co-opted by the pornography industry, such as Xtreme Programming (XP) and a cum laude notation on a degree. It’s not a bad thing to look for spam and remove it. It is a bad
by Johanna Rothman. Part 2 from Shaking off the Shoulds. Don’t take on work just because someone else thinks you should. Answer these sanity-saving questions to trim your workload, be tactical and optimize productivity. Part 2 of 2. Remember Sisyphus? That unfortunate who angered Zeus was cursed with a job that may feel all too
The Pragmatic Manager, Volume 1 #2 Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Appreciations, Personalized Thank You’s Telelclass Announcement On the Bookshelf Want to hear more from Johanna? Want to read more of Johanna’s writing? =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Using Appreciations, Personalized Thank You’s The project retrospective was proceeding nicely. We’d had lunch, and we entered the mid-afternoon