On her Hiring Technical People blog, Johanna Rothman writes about firing people who don’t work.This matches my experience. Holding on to employees who aren’t pulling their weight drags down morale for the entire team. Firing someone isn’t easy, and...
I often work with groups who know where they want to go, have some good ideas on how to get there, but they are blocked. When I ask why they can’t achieve the results they envision, they tell me things like: –We lack resources.–We lack...
fa-cil-i-tate. verb. (1) to make easier or less difficult; to help forward (an action, a process, etc.). (2) to assist the progress of (a person).–Random House College Dictionary Revised EditionI spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday in Ottawa at the annual IAF...
Laurent Bossavit posts a discussion of the reasons to deep six the status meeting. The problem ? A status meeting’s traditional format has the person who convened the meeting, a manager usually, work through a list of items. They are items of importance to the...
All retrospectives, all the time. At least in this post.Keith Ray posts this snippet about self-directed improvement paths on his blog. (See previous post on Keith’s Project Management tip on Reforming Project Management.)Retrospectives are an excellent vehicle...
My pal Keith Ray sent this Project Management tip into Hal Macomber: 007: Create A Habit of Self-Directed Improvement Keith Ray reminds us that an intention and routine of improvement matters more than any specific improvement methods. Too often a bureaucratic intent...
From an article by Tom Krattenmaker in HBS Working Knowledge: Career Effectiveness: In Search of the Perfect Meeting: “The biggest complaints I hear about meetings are that they’re unproductive, that they last too long, that they’re...
One-on-one meetings are a vastly underrated management technique… well done one-on-one meetings, that is. I find them useful particularly when the group I’m managing is a group, not a tight-knit team, but I’ve used them when I was managing project...
This from Keith Ray, after reading Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith: “Management” is mostly invisible – the worse management is, the more visible it is. The best managers (I’m told) often seem like they are neither busy nor doing...
Laurent Bossavit tells a story about following “the process” to fix a customer problem. The only problem is, at the end of it all, the customer still has a problem.Laurent writes:My version of the Zeroth Law of Quality: if you’re not solving the...
Brian Marick has a pointer to this piece on Martin Fowler’s bliki: MF Bliki: WhatIsFailure The Standish Group’s CHAOS report has been talking of billions of wasted dollars on IT projects for many years. The 34% success rate is actually a improvement over...
Johanna Rothman has this to say in the latest issue of her ezine “Pragmatic Manager:” Meetings are a fact of our lives. Most of the time we don’t need a facilitator to help move our meeting along; we can manage to accomplish the goals of the meeting...
This weekend, I was talking to a friend about her relatively new job. She’s pleased that she’s gotten some training in new practices, and is able to use them on the job. And she wishes she could go back to the training session. She’s an OT, but I...
I’m at STAR East in Orlando this week. (Tough duty, but someone has to do it!) This year, STAR if offering something new: Testing Dialogues are facilitated sessions where professionals in the testing arena explore some of the challenges they face. There are two...
Not too long ago, I found myself struggling I was writing the Tech Speak column for the current issue of STQE. (More accurately, I was slogging through a string of first drafts that left me unexcited, uninvolved, and frustrated.) Eventually, I asked for help, and my...
Oh, dear. Oh, dear.Sunday afternoon, as I was getting ready to fly out to visit a client, I cast about for some airplane reading. I found a thin little book called Managing Your Boss, by Sandi Mann.In the section titled “Emotional Management,” the author...
Johanna Rothman asks, in a comment on my last post on Collaboration and Teamwork, “How do we build these skills? These are the “soft” skills that many of us struggle to build.”I talk about what’s worked for me and what I’ve seen...
Laurent Bossavit quotes these instructions from a college exam for testers: Incipient.oO{}: Certifications, degrees, teamwork “It is essential that you work on this exam ALONE with no input or assistance from other people. You MAY NOT discuss your progress or...
How could I have forgotten that classic: They’re all number one priority! Usually uttered in response to a question like: What’s the top priority? In this case, the speaker may not know what the top priorities are. Or he may believe that ranking the tasks...
The overheard conversation between a harried developer and her manager (“You’ll just have to multitask!”) reminded me of other management exhortations I have heard. Failure is not an option! This is usually repeated with great vigor and conviction by...
