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.

“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:

“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]

“Don’t call your defects ‘bugs’. Call them ‘time bombs’ instead.”
- Watts S. Humphrey

From Wikipedia: “Watts S. Humphrey (born 1927) is an American software engineer, key thinker in the discipline of software engineering, and is often called the father of software quality.”

He has a recent book out that looks like it could be good, Reflections on Management: How to Manage Your Software Projects, Your Teams, Your Boss, and Yourself.  Has anyone read it?

[via @jurgenappelo]

Instead of looking for the bad stuff, measuring it, and finding ways to do less — look for the good stuff and do more! What an excellent idea.

“Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward.”

The same can be seen with fighting fires: They don’t want to try something and fail, and they don’t want to be at fault if they do fail … so hire consultants!

Seth Godin asks some good questions in his post SFW.

“Are most innovations born in environments of control or inspiration? Easy question.”

“[...] What people really mean when they say “I don’t have time” is this thing is not important enough to earn my time. It’s a polite way to tell people they’re not worth your time.

This means people who are always busy are time poor. They have a time shortage. They have time debt. They are either trying to do too much, or they aren’t doing what they’re doing very well. They are failing to either a) be effective with their time b) don’t know what they’re trying to effect, so they scramble away at trying to optimize for  everything, which leads to optimizing nothing.”

If I had to sum up in a word what makes a good manager, I’d say decisiveness. You can use the fanciest computers to gather the numbers, but in the end you have to set a timetable and act.

—Lido Anthony (Lee) Iacocca

A lot of companies seek to control employees. They have handbooks and policies. They monitor emails. They make rules about what’s allowed and what’s forbidden. [...]

Imagine an employee handbook that just said: “We trust you. Be mischievous.”

This makes a lot of sense to me. If the company trusts you with corporate secrets, company property, and access to production servers … maybe the policies on appropriate use of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are misplaced.

This seems to me to be good advise, and one that I’m going to work on. Apparently he has a whole book written about this type of thing.

“A survey by the Centre for Work-Life Policy, an American consultancy, found that between June 2007 and December 2008 the proportion of employees who professed loyalty to their employers slumped from 95% to 39%; the number voicing trust in them fell from 79% to 22%.”

The article puts the primary blame on the poor economy, but also suggests that micro-measuring employees (how many times did you smile at a customer today?) and mixed messages about company loyalty play a significant role.

Bob Sutton discusses the data further. Particularly, he is interested in how companies will fare when the economy returns.

Rewarding Firefighters not Fire Inspectors.

In other words, the people spotting the problems and fixing them before the “fire” do not get rewards. The “firefighters” who rush and put out fires in progress do get reward.

But which is better for the company?

Once the fire starts, damage is already being done. “Fires” are stressful and distracting – but never seen a company yet that actively makes sure that fires don’t happen. But seen lots of companies that reward the firefighters ( even when they were the “pyromaniacs” )

If your problems are not going away, try upping the quality of thinking. It is a bitter pill for some to swallow, but you gotta try something new. Try hiring a coach, bringing in a consultant, or trying something you never had the guts to try before.

Often the problems are self inflicted, but then they may have been the right decisions at the time. Times change, people grow, and that’s OK. Recognize that while you may have contributed to the problems, you can also be part of the solution.

Go try something different, institute a higher level of thinking, and have the courage to embrace the change.

“The Net Gener arrives at work, eager to use his social networking tools to collaborate and create and contribute to the company. For starters, he’s shocked to find that the company’s technology tools are more primitive than the ones he used in high school. The company he works for still thinks the Net is about web sites presenting information, rather than a Web 2.0 collaboration platform. And they are surprised, perhaps naively, to learn that corporations have antiquated ways of working. Then the company bans Facebook at the office because it suspects Net Geners are wasting time chatting with friends and throwing digital snowballs when they should be working – thus depriving Net Geners of their link to friends, to fun, to coworkers. Pretty soon, the talent heads for the exit.”

There are a lot of things that have changed in the last few decades of corporate life.

While the corporate environment used to be the place for innovation and advanced technology, the fear mongering on security and productivity have all but driven innovation into the consumer market. Take for example, my 2-year-old laptop which is faster and much more feature rich than my work laptop. At home I’ve got a webcam, powerful video editing software, enterprise-class server software, extensive software development tools, and a plethora of other modern applications that keep me productive and able to collaborate with distributed teams. And that’s just what came included with my computer – no extra purchase necessary. When I want to make a good impression at work, I use my personal laptop to create presentations, not my work one.

The tool set on my work computer is very minimal (essentially Microsoft Office, and Internet Explorer), after which they take the restrictions up a notch by blocking free tools like YouTube (allegedly for bandwidth reasons) and Google Image Search (no naughty pictures!) Even when I was expecting all of this, I was still shocked to discover they actively block tabbed browsing – an ancient browser feature for anyone not stuck with IE. Perhaps “tabbed browsing” is an esoteric complaint from a computer geek, but I can not make any sense of the policy. In my mind, I would rather have tabs in my browser than a phone on my desk. Along the same lines, my work laptop could have a webcam, but to keep things secure, it was replaced with a ridiculous-looking pop-out keyboard light.

As for Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites? They certainly have value from a marketing-department perspective, but even beyond that, these are simply the equivalent to a digital smoke break. It’s just a quick way to get away from work to refocus thinking. “Thought breaks” are vital for those of us in the knowledge worker business, and blocking them just makes people bitter and (ironically) unproductive.

The way I see it, the internet is just like the telephone and photocopier. It’s a resource that is provided for employees to be productive. They can be used for good or for bad, and if you can’t trust your employees to make the right choice and be productive at work, then you had no business hiring them in the first place. Mullenweg, the cofounder of wordpress.com says:

“If you have bad people, you need a lot of process and structure. If you have good people, you need way less process and bureaucracy.”

It is no wonder Net Geners don’t stick around for long. The corporate way, which was once innovative and cutting edge, has languished. The real innovation today is happening with small, globally distributed, teams. In exchange for byzantine corporate policies, the Net Geners favor simple employee trust. Which it turns out, is a pretty solid business plan.

“The minute when I start justifying my estimate or explaining why I have to change a lot of things, I’ve lost. [...] So I have found that the way out of this situation IS NOT to go technical and start explaining how code works. They’re NEVER going to say gee, now that you gave me a quick tutorial in web application design, and then you explained how you’ll need to rewrite the permissions decorators to use a new state factory, I guess your estimate makes sense.

Instead, this approach works OK for me:

Me: I think it is a great idea and it won’t require a lot of research and development, but it’s going to take a while. So based on that estimate, should we put into the queue or not?”

[via Matt Wilson's blog, via Ester Derby ]

“Why don’t we just call plans what they really are: guesses. Unless you’re a fortune teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy. There are just too many factors that are out of your hands: market conditions, competitors, customers, the economy, etc. Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t actually control.”

This is a great article. Predicting the future is an eductated guess at best.

“tasks that don’t directly add value to the customer, but enable delivering value to the customer. Sometimes these are the tasks and functions that enable the business to stay in business–like accounting, or payroll, or management.”