Posts Tagged: leadership

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27
Aug 10

Great Design

Fred Brooks in an interview with Wired:

“Great design does not come from great processes; it comes from great designers.”

This seems so natural and correct when talking about design. Applied to other professions, you might see:

  • Great software does not come from great processes; it comes from great developers.
  • Great engineering does not come from great processes; it comes from great engineers.
  • Great testing does not come from great processes; it comes from great testers.
  • Great management does not come from great processes; it comes from great managers.

Yet time and time again, we lean back on the processes that in the best of situations are mediocre and brittle.

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17
Aug 10

Can we fix it? Yes we … no, wait … Maybe!

Daniel Pink writing for the Telegraph:

“Most of us believe in positive self-talk. “I can achieve anything,” we mouth to the mirror in the morning. “Nobody can stop me,” we tell ourselves before walking into a big meeting. We believe we’ll do better if we banish doubts about our ability or our strategy and instead muster an inner voice that affirms our awesomeness.

But not Bob [the Builder]. Instead of puffing up himself and his team, he first wonders whether they can actually achieve their goal.”

Pink then dives into some research on whether positive self-talk actually improves performance or not.

Spoiler: Having doubts improves performance.

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4
Jul 10

Least qualified for

I love this question: “what would happen if everyone on the team did the job they were least qualified for & spent half their time helping others?” @KentBeck

Here’s what I think would happen:

  • The completion of work would slow down for a couple weeks. Maybe a month.
  • New talents would form.
  • Inter-team communication, understanding, and empathy would get amazingly good.
  • Cross training would actually happen, and single-points-of-failure would disappear.
  • The business would see fewer things down because ___ was on vacation.
  • Then the completion of work would start happening faster than it ever had before.
  • And new ideas for old problems would start cropping up all over the place.
  • And a whole bunch of “broken” things would get fixed (poor processes, kludgy systems, etc).
  • And the team would re- self organize, and perform like never has before.

It would be brilliant.

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26
Jun 10

Motivate with Real Projects

Cliff Kuang:

“if you want to foster innovation, [let] people slip from under line management and strike out on their own, on projects they care about”

He’s talking about Dan Pink’s video, the surprising truth about what motivates us:

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14
Jun 10

Estimates

I’ve said it before and Jonathan Rasmusson said it again:

“Let’s face it. Our industry has had some challenges when it comes to setting expectations around estimates on software projects. It’s not that our estimates are necessarily wrong (though they almost always are). It’s more that too often people have looked to estimates for something they can never give—an accurate prediction of the future. [...] The simple fact is that accurate upfront estimates aren’t possible and we need to stop pretending that they are.“

[emphasis added]

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