Chaos to Clarity: Managing the Unmanageable

Ron Lichty, Ron Lichty Consultingwww.ronlichty.com

Ron Lichty, Managing Software People & Teams

SOFTWEST

Why we wrote:

* Addison Wesley published October 1, 2012

*

Rules of Thumb / Nuggets of Wisdom*

• Measure twice, cut once.• Life is simpler when you plow around the

stump.

• Brooks’s Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.– Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

* 300 in the book

Agenda

• Managing Delivery• Challenges new programming managers have• Motivating• Recruiting• Handling Problem Employees• Shielding Their Team• Managing Out and Up• Establishing Culture• Communicating• Q&A

Managing Delivery

• Best programming manager you ever worked with?

• Skills• Behaviors• Finesse• Gifts of greatness

. . . that made them stand out?

Great Programming Manager

• Always recruiting• Seeks to collaborate• Listener• Almost psychologist understanding of coders• Motivates• Deals with problem employees• Clear alignment of team and purpose• Infectious enthusiasm that brings it all together• Delivers

Challenges for New Programming Managers

Rule of Thumb: The very thing that has made you successful will get in your way in your next role.

•Manage

•Delegate

•Be a Motivator

•Don’t Be a De-Motivator

Motivators vs De-Motivators

Motivating:Be Careful What You Reward

• “Behavior revolves around what you measure.”– Jim Highsmith

• “Firefighters who get rewarded carry matches.”– Kimberly Wiefling

• Do you define “done” as “coding complete”?– Or as features that delight customers?

Recruiting

• A team manager’s most important job

• Challenge: give it the priority it deserves

• Always be recruiting

• There’s no perfect hiring record

Handling Problem Employees

• Intervention beats performance plans & firing– Requires preparation, commitment, time– But gets the job done earlier:

• One of two results:– Turns them around– Manages them out

—Marty Brounstein: Handling the Difficult Employee

Shielding Your Team• Threat to your team

– Torrent of politics, “opportunities”, issues

– Sap your team’s focus

• Challenge to managers– Be a conduit for Mission and Passion and Strategy

– While shielding your team from distraction

Be a damper to the noise. --Joe Kleinschmidt, CTO

Managing Out and Up

• “The single most important leader in an organization is your immediate supervisor.”– Jim Kouzes

• “You can safely assume all perceptions are real, at least to those who own them.”– Joe Folkman

Managing Out & Up

• Because – your peers increasingly are not technical– and your boss may not be either

• …they’ll pressure you– to micromanage your team (or let them)– to report on / prove your team’s productivity– to fill your team’s plates to capacity

Productivity

• The Apple Lisa team’s managers had asked engineers to report, each week, how many lines of code they’d written. The first week, Bill Atkinson turned his attention to making QuickDraw faster and more efficient, reducing the previous week’s code by 2,000 lines. He duly reported that he’d written minus-2,000 lines of code for the week.

Capacity• Slack is critical to throughput

– 100% capacity results in bottlenecks

--photo (c) Bud Adams, SXC, www.aimpgh.com

What Be-Devils Managers?

• Micromanagement• Requirements that are too detailed• Requirements that are missing• Requirements that are not prioritized• Increasing requirements without adding time• Fixed scope with arbitrary deadlines• Interruptions• Arbitrary, counter-productive rules

How do we focus on collaboration?

How do we focus on collaboration?

• Roadmaps

• Prioritization

• Listening to customers

• Avoiding wasted time

• Reducing complexity

• Making software customers love

Establishing Culture

• Does your company live its values?

• Programming culture ≠ corporate culture– Wall parts off– Substitute and bolster more appropriate values

• Wherever you can, leverage culture & values

Establishing Culture

• “Publicly reward or acknowledge engineers who act in a way that supports the culture that you want to create.”—Juanita Mah, engineering manager

Communicating

• Managers have to communicate more• Encourage the team to communicate• Create a culture of communication

– at every level– with everyone

• up, down, within and across

• “We have two ears and one mouth. Use them in this ratio.”— Kimberly Wiefling

Form a Mutual Admiration Pact?

• Lots more collaboration and communication

• Surprise the rest of management– Relief– Or scare them (!)

• Help each other manage up and out

A Few Closing Rules of Thumb

• If you’re a people manager, your people are far more important than anything else you’re working on.—Tim Swihart, Engineering Director

• Projects should be run like marathons. You have to set a healthy pace that can win the race and expect to sprint for the finish line.—Ed Catmull, CTO, Pixar Animation Studios

• In applications with high technical debt, estimating is nearly impossible.—Jim Highsmith, Agile Coach and Leader

• The quality of code you demand during the first week of a project is the quality of code you’ll get every week thereafter.—Joseph Kleinschmidt, CTO, Leverage Software

Ron Lichty Consulting

• Mentoring and Coaching and Consulting:– http://ronlichty.com/

• The book: Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools & Insights for Managing Software People & Teams– http://ManagingTheUnmanageable.net

• Training: forthcoming:– “The Agile Manager”– “Managing Software People and Teams: the class”(Email me through the site above and I’ll let you know

when.)