HIring For Team Fit Posted
I just posted Hiring For Team Fit. Please post comments here.
Lunch with Colleagues
Laurent’s post, The team building lunch prompted a bunch of (hopefully now organized) thoughts about the role of food in high tech projects. One of the things I notice when I perform assessments is whether there is some sort of cafeteria or other food-eating place. Projects that have a physical place large enough for …
Visible Progress
Rick commented on my last post that some engineers think that status checking slows them down. Mark said that engineers push back on demos and pointless measurements and then said in another comment, “progress metrics can always be free.” Here’s how and what I look for, to determine status. If I’m managing a traditionally-planned …
More on Creating Faster Cheaper Projects
Hal posted his take on creating faster cheaper projects. I see that I did not make my assumptions clear in my original post. Hal had three problems (at least!) with my post: Fewer people increase the length of the project. The longer the project, the more the requirements will change (No disagreement from me!) Organizations …
The People Factor in Software
Earlier this week, I was at the Rational User Conference. I was part of a dynamic panel, “The People Factor: Experts Weigh In On The Soft Side of Software.” One question was about how technical managers or project managers have to be. Murray Cantor, one of the other panelists, summed it up this way: …
Pre-Publication Book Announcement: Hiring Technical People
As you can probably tell, I think people are the most important equation in successful product development. Good people can trump inadequate management and/or an inappropriate process. Dorset House has announced the pre-publication price for my book (available in September). I wrote a little more about this on my Hiring Technical People blog.
I'm Not Against Team Things, Really I'm Not
I’ve been subjected to a bunch of team building activities that fell flat for me. My Last Word column in this month’s STQE talks about alternatives to team building. Here’s the quick recipe: Choose a topic the team has a vested interest in solving. (If the people can’t come up with one, you don’t have …
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Creating Silos Helps Managers Avoid Seeing the Data
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, …
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