management
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📈 Do schedule estimates get more or less confident over time?
There are two trajectories for schedule confidence. A schedule feels safest when it is nailed down up front, often built around what management wants to hear. Detailed Gantt charts add to that feeling. The modeling has value, but it rarely …
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🚧 Gatekeepers are ineffective
In the context of complex systems, gatekeepers are ineffective. In product development, a gatekeeper is often a middle manager who relays information from one person to another. As an example, we have been struggling for the past year to ge…
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🏞️ Communicating Status Without Demanding Attention
One precept of “managing up” is that over-communicating tends to work better than under-communicating. This is where releasing “often” comes in. Releases offer a natural way to communicate status because they don’t feel like something requi…
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🤝 How to manage up
The concept of “managing up” can be a valuable practice for developers and middle managers. It seems counter-intuitive that we need to manage the people over us. But, simply put, managing up is intentionally improving the relationship with …
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🧊 The hardest thing to manage
The things we know and understand are easy to manage. We can hire managers who are good at this. Tools can effectively track this. Life is good. The difficulty arises in the unknown. The iceberg analogy illustrates this well. The things we …
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🪞 The illusion of project meta-data
Many tools exist for managing and tracking projects: Jira, Trello, GitHub projects/issues, Notion, Airtable, Asana, MS Project, etc. These all can be very useful. Why then does effective project tracking remain so elusive? As mentioned in t…
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🍄 Mushroom Management
I recall a quote from the book The Soul of a New Machine that describes “Mushroom Management” and goes something like this: “Keep them in the dark, feed them sh**, and watch them grow.” (This book chronicles the experiences of a computer …
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😊 Other ways to align the happy path
Yesterday, we discussed aligning the happy path in code. Are there other ways to align the “happy path”? (The happy path is the desired path where things are functioning as expected.) Some thoughts: Focus on your productive people - as a ma…
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📁 Git* solves the problem of managing files
The thing you get with Git* is a sane way to manage files: organization (team/repo/directories) documentation (excellent support for Markdown) efficient navigation (links in READMEs and other markdown files) history (who changed what when)…
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👥 Everybody Works and the impact on meetings
In a recent podcast titled Everybody Works, the owners of a 60-person company discuss the impact of full-time managers and one of them is more meetings: And the primary problem with management is when it’s full time and it’s only that it c…
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🔝 Support from the top
In a recent discussion with Matthew Rassi about Lean, I asked Matthew if he has ever witnessed Lean being successful in organizations where there is not support at the top. He answered with a resounding no. Likewise, I’ve never observed “Pl…