“two moments of truth”: when the customer encounters the P&G product in a retail setting; and when they actually use the product.
(Link: What Every New Generation of Bosses Has to Learn – Harvard Business Review)
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Three important ideas, which developers already love and embrace:
Autonomy
Mastery
Purpose
(Link: Top Three Motivators For Developers (Hint: not money!) | Lessons of Failure)
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We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly – or not at all – because of a stifling bureaucracy.
(Link: Berkshire Hathaway 2009 Shareholder Letter)
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The first shift required is a change in orientation from prevention to fast response. Many problems are catastrophic only if allowed to fester. Imagine you hear from an engineer that they are worried that a certain payment subsystem is unreliable, and will therefore double-charge some customers. One way to evaluate this fear is to spend time on analysis: how many customers will be affected? What is the maximum amount of overcharging that will happen? How upset will those customers be? How much will it cost to solve this problem now? In this framework, we’ll tend to either invest in the proposed prevention or do nothing.
(Link: The curse of prevention – Lessons Learned)
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Let Interruptions Dictate Your Schedule
Too often we allow ourselves to be distracted from what we need to be focusing on right now. Mostly it’s unnecessary to jump on every new email immediately; issues can usually wait until we’re done with the current task.
(Link: 14 Ways to Be the World’s Worst Project Manager)
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why the unskilled don’t quit:
They tend to be grateful they have a job and make fewer demands on management; even if they find the workplace unpleasant, they are the least likely to be able to find a job elsewhere. They tend to entrench themselves, becoming maintenance experts on critical systems, assuming responsibilities that no one else wants so that the organization can’t afford to let them go.
(Link: Up or Out: Solving the IT Turnover Crisis)
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Lesson: Pick one, two, or three up front
We also discovered that sometimes one week or three week iterations are better than two week iterations. We experimented with a three week iteration for the last iteration of the two month term. It made sense for one of the projects (to be released soon), but it definitely contributed to sloppiness and missing the deadline on another project. With more time it was easy to say “We’ll deal with that tomorrow” or “We can worry about that next week.” Turns out when you start saying that you’re often already in trouble. Without a looming deadline you can feel (you can feel the pressure two weeks a lot more than three weeks), scope creeps and things get pushed off. So we decided that next time around we’ll experiment with one week, two week, and three week iterations — but that call needs to be made up front. You can’t start with one week and turn it into two or three. A team will say “This is a one weeker” or “This is a two weeker” etc.
(Link: A New Way of Working: A Two-Month Recap – (37signals))
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HIPPO #1 – Highest Paid Person in the Organization
* This informal description is basically… the boss. As you might guess, no one actually uses the term “HIPPO” on the job. It represents a concept that is unwritten, though: even if you cannot see the work that the HIPPO does, that’s the person who is ultimately responsible for everything that occurs at the workplace.
(Link: HIPPO Management: Highest Paid Person in the Organization)
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Mr. Catmull amplifies Mr. Sivers’ sentiment:
If you give a good idea to a mediocre group, they’ll screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a good group, they’ll fix it. Or they’ll throw it away and come up with something else.
(Link: Cultivate Teams, Not Ideas)
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Codebase is developed in Ruby, using the Rails framework for the web application. In addition to this we have also developed our own libraries which power two of the most important parts of the system. Tripod is a library which provides SCM-agnositic access to repositories allowing us to easily interface with Git, Mercurial or Subversion repositories using a unified API. SCAM is our “source control access manager” and it interfaces directly with the Codebase database to control access to all repositories – regardless of the SCM, your request for access will pass through SCAM. We’ll post some blog entries with more details about our actual infrastructure in the next few weeks.
(Link: Codebase – Subversion hosting with complete project management – tickets, milestones.)
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Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions. They know that this is, above all, a matter of system – of the right steps in the right sequence. They know that an effective decision is always a judgement based on “dissenting opinions” rather than on “consensus on the facts”. And they know to make many decisions fast means to make the wrong decisions. What is needed are few, but fundamental decisions. What is needed is the right strategy rather than the razzle-dazzle tactics.
(Link: Drucker – on Effective Executives)
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* Element 1. Problem rationalization. The clear rationalization that the problem was generic and could only be solved through a decision that establishes a rule or a principle.
* Element 2. Boundary conditions. The definition of the specifications that the answer to the problem has to satisfy, that is, of the “boundary conditions.”
* Element 3. The right thing to do. This is the thinking through what is “right,” that is, the solution that will fully satisfy the specifications before attention is given to the compromises, adaptations, and concessions needed to make the decision acceptable.
* Element 4. Actions. The building into the decision of the action to carry it out.
* Element 5. Feedback. The “feedback” that tests the validity and effectiveness of the decision against the actual course of events.
(Link: Drucker’s – 5 Elements of an Effective Decision Making Process)
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UCD can be too documentation-heavy, isolated and risky but Agile needs help with defining requirements and concept development. How can Agile and user centric principles work together? First let’s understand what works well with Agile and not so well with user centered design. In this regard, the work that user centered design calls the ‘design’ phase can produce buckets of documentation which isn’t read, describing interfaces specified in isolation which may not be feasibly coded in the time allotted to them. So, doing detailed design is best done in conjunction with the development team and in a way where resulting interfaces can be tweaked as you go.
(Link: Bringing User Centered Design to the Agile Environment – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design)
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His theory breaks job satisfaction into two factors:
* hygiene factors such as working conditions, quality of supervision, salary, safety, and company policies
* motivation factors such as achievement, recognition, responsibility, the work itself, personal growth, and advancement
(Link: Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money)
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1. Be a developer
I can’t stress this one enough. Development isn’t something that can be appreciated, it has to be experienced. HTML and JavaScript don’t cut it, you have to go out and actually do what your programmers do. Write SQL statements, create classes, build an application. When you can follow along and contribute intelligently to all the technology discussions, developers will start to trust you that you understand them and what they have to deal with. And most importantly you can help them find solutions they may not see yet.
(Link: 12 Lessons Learned for Getting Better Results from Developers)
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