Posts Tagged: leadership

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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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29
May 10

Time Bombs

Ran across this quote recently, thought you might enjoy it:

“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]

“Don’t call your defects ‘bugs’. Call them ‘time bombs’ instead.” – Watts S. Humphrey
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1
May 10

Working Well

Recently came across this alternate to continuous improvement. Ask the question: “What’s working well, and how can we do more of it?”

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.

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