transparency
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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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📥 Email is not a workflow
A recent meeting surfaced a problem: BOM changes in the engineering systems were not reliably reaching the production systems. “I told ’em” is how we had been doing things. We told manufacturing about the changes and handed over links to th…
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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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⚡ The essence of shipping faster
In recent conversations about why development schedules slip and what to do about it, several themes continue to come up: Openness - This is key to surfacing issues early. Safety - People must feel safe being transparent and speaking up. C…
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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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🔓 You should not be needed
An effective process, team, or organization should be able to continue on if any individual steps away for a bit, or forever. But, most people are insecure and like to be needed, so subconsciously structure things to require them to be pres…
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🔍 The importance of small Git commits/pull-requests
Why are small Git commits/pull-requests important? small changes are easier to review. Large PRs are painful to review, thus they tend to be rubber-stamped and not reviewed, or rejected in OSS projects. you get to ship more often. other pe…