Managing Product Development

Hal’s been after me for a long time to switch to specific paragraph tags instead of relying on Blogger’s formatting. Ok. I did it here, and will in my Hiring Technical People blog later.

Comments seem to be fixed — at least partially. If you don’t see your comment, make sure you refresh the page, or wait for a few minutes.

I still can’t automagically generate my archives, so I had messed around with the archive locations, but I’m back to the original archives. I still can’t make automagic archive generation happen, so archives may take a few days to show up every month. If any of you blogger folks know how to do this, I’m all ears.

Some of you are probably trying to plan your vacation around the project you’re on. Good luck. Every time I did that, the project was in some crucial place and my bosses asked me to consider changing my vacation.

Don’t give in to their pleading. If the project is in good shape, you being away for a week (or even two) is not going to hurt the project. If the project is hopeless, you being away for a week or two can’t hurt the project any more. It might even help, because the project can’t depend on you rescuing the project. If the project is teetering on the edge of being healthy, you can make it even healthier when you return, refreshed by your time off.

Vacations help you become better at your job. When you spend an entire week (or gasp, two weeks!) away, your subconscious can work on the problems at work. Your conscious mind is working on the issues of your vacation. When I took bicycling vacations, the biggest problems were: when did we stop for lunch and refill our water bottles, and where to go for dinner. Now that I take lie-in-the-sun vacations, our biggest problems are which beach to go to, and where to go for dinner. (Hey, dinner’s important on vacation!)

Inevitably, when I was a developer, I would come back from vacation all fired up, with a new idea for the design or architecture of the area I was developing. When I was a tester, I came back with at least four new ideas for testing and automation. As a project manager, I knew how to replan the project. As a manager, I had new tactics for the strategies we were trying to implement. No matter what my job was, I was relaxed, for at least a day or two

So, if your company wants to get that vacation time off the books, take it. If you haven’t had a week off in six months, take vacation. You don’t have to go away; you can stay home and clean up, read a racy novel, investigate all the Starbucks’ with a 20-mile radius, take the kids to a water park (hey, they don’t have to be your kids, or even under the age of 40), surf the web and read other people’s weblogs, whatever. The key is to not think directly about your day job. Think about something else. Vacate.

When you return to work refreshed, with a bunch of new ideas, you’ll understand why everyone other than USA companies takes more than two weeks of vacation. (There was a story on NBC two nights ago, but I can’t find it. If anyone else knows the link, send it to me, and I’ll insert it.)

I’ve been subjected to a bunch of team building activities that fell flat for me. My Last Word column in this month’s STQE talks about alternatives to team building. Here’s the quick recipe:

1. Choose a topic the team has a vested interest in solving. (If the people can’t come up with one, you don’t have a team, you have a group. Let them go back to work.)
2. Create a situation where the people have to work together to solve the problem.
3. Debrief the solution and the activity.

Every so often I’m asked to speak at a big corporate event that’s supposed to be a rah-rah or team-building activity. When I do that, I ask for enough time so we can perform an activity together, either all of us, (or more likely) in small groups. Then people learn from each other and create sub-groups that can function as teams.I dislike pep rally-like things (nope, didn’t like them in high school either), or other situations where some desired result is based on something I can’t control.If you’re looking for team-building, or you want the whole company behind you, first break down the problem into something teams can solve. Then break into small groups that can function as teams. (Teams can be cross-functional, depending on the problem.) Facilitate the teams to perform at their best. Voila! Now you’ve created a team situation that works, where you’ve helped solve some problem important to the company, and we haven’t rah-rah’d, hugged, or sung a (foolish) song.And, if you’re the kind of person who likes those rah-rah things, or singing company songs, more power to you. (I don’t think many technical people fall into this category.) Let us technical people help you by providing background work to make you successful.I do like team situations; I don’t like artificial closeness to people with whom I work.For more on meeting ideas, see:

• Managing Group Meetings
• Round Robin Pattern
• Measure ROTI
• Esther’s ideas about the weekly status meeting
• Freedom From Meandering Meetings
• Meetings that Work from the Aye Conference wiki.