Managing Product Development

If you don’t read developer.*, consider it. Dan has kindly placed an excerpt from Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. Enjoy!

I received my copies of Behind Closed Doors, and here at the Better Software conference, the bookstore has books. I’m still very excited.

Behind Closed Doors is available for preorder. The book is at the printer, and we expect hardcopies to start shipping late September. In the meantime, if you can’t wait (and I hope you can’t :-), you can buy the combo-pack of the PDF (now) and the book (later in September).

If you’d like to hear some of what’s in Behind Closed Doors, Andy has recorded an mp3 of one of our sidebars, “The Fable of the Rising Young Manager.”

BTW, I thought it was thrilling the first time I saw my name in print as an author. Now that I hear our words, it’s just as thrilling.

We’re in the last stretch of finishing Behind Closed Doors, and now we’re fixing/regenerating pictures.

When Esther and I made the pictures originally, we wrote them on flip charts and took pictures of them. (We were talking about information on flip charts — made sense to us.) Well, it turns out the pictures are not sufficiently high contrast to use in the book.

Esther has much nicer handwriting than I do, so she redrew all the flip chart pictures. To save time, Andy delegated the eps file creation to me.

Here’s my context: I flunked cutting with scissors in Kindergarten. I successfully flunked every other art course I ever took. (In school, I received “A” for effort and whatever the not-quite-failing grade for content.) As soon as possible, I stopped doing anything with pictures.

Fast forward to today. It’s now my job to do a good job with creating eps files. Now to most of you, this does not reek of art — but to me it does. I have to look at contrast, size, rotation, cropping, all things that say “finish a piece of artwork.” Eek.

So how did Andy delegate this to me? He said, “Here, do this and that. Send ‘em to me.” He gave me feedback, explaining I needed to lower the resolution (!). This time, he didn’t say how, but what he wanted as a result. I was successful.

Ok, so this is a small task and I’m not sure I’m over my fear of creating art, but I’m a lot closer. Here’s what Andy did:

• Checked to see I was willing to do the job. (I was.)
• Bounded the work.
• Explained which tools I needed and verified I had them.
• We jointly set a time at which I would check in and verify I had done the right thing.
• Provided feedback so I would know how to modify what I thought success was.

This is almost exactly the same as our checklist for delegation in the book. (In the book, we have a few extra items: knowing when the work is too risky to delegate, and setting boundaries on schedule, cost, quality.)

One of the nicest side effects of delegating is to help other people be aware they have more capabilities than they originally considered. I’m a lot more likely to consider pictures now that I know how to create them and how to electronify them for a book. This was successful delegation–for both of us.

I remember when I became a manager, I wished that I could be injected with everything I needed to know. For the first few years, when I thought I should be omnipotent, I’d come home and whine (sorry, but that’s what I was doing) to Mark.

I finally realized that I needed training — even more than the technical staff did. And the reason I needed training was because I was making decisions (daily) that affected thousands of dollars of company investment. (Assume a technical-person day is roughly $500. It doesn’t take too many people and too many days before you’re dealing with many thousands of dollars of company investment.)

Managers need training. Sometimes, they need training in how to help projects. Some managers also act as PMs and they need project management training (which is different from being a sponsor or helping a project). Most managers need communications training, but not in how to be nice or assertive They need training like the coaching Ken gave a manager in Taking Your Group to Dinner. They need training in how to provide and ask for feedback. And in how to make the most of evaluations, even though most processes for evaluations stink. They need training in how to define and manage the portfolio of work. They need to learn how to ask for status and what to do with the information once they have it.

In my experience, once I coach people on how to ask for what they want, and how to use that information, they don’t need so much coaching on how to be nice or assertive, but some of us still have rough edges. I’m still working on my rough edges (and probably will be forever). But because I understand what I need and how to ask for it, I’m much better than I was.

I recently met someone who said that when he was a manager at a very large company, the company arranged for 2 weeks of management training each year. All the managers got together, had some training, and more importantly, talked with each other about their concerns and how to deal with them.

Management training doesn’t have to be formal. It can take the form of coaching. It can take the form of networking with other managers. (Esther and I are discussing how to facilitate some of those more casual conversations.) Maybe even reading a management book once a month and discussing it with an in-house book club might work. But if you’re not planning and implementing some form of management training each year, your managers aren’t growing enough to continue to be great managers.

According to Capers Jones, Barry Boehm, and Watts Humphrey, poor management is a leading cause of failed projects. I would go farther than that, and say that poor management is the leading cause of failed companies. And as we’ve seen recently in the press, that’s criminal.

So think about what you want for management training this year. Ok, a not-subtle-at-all plug: Esther and I think you should buy our book :-). But even if you don’t do that, make a plan for management training and implement it. You and your staff will be happier and more productive.

My Stickyminds column, What’s on Your Not-to-do List? is posted. Please do leave comments there (or here if you like).

This column is based on one of the ideas in Behind Closed Doors.

Esther and I are editing (the next-to-final pass, we think) the book this week, integrating comments from our reviewers. We are very fortunate; our reviewers provided wonderful feedback. And some of the feedback we’re not going to use — at least, not in this book.

One of the hardest things to do, whether it’s in a book or in a project (or many other undertakings), is to decide what you’re not going to do. As we’re walking through the comments, we’ve been asking ourselves, “Is that comment for this book?” We’ve been drawing the boundaries around what we decided to accomplish with this book, and we’re not adding more.

This is frustrating, relieving, and freeing for me all at the same time. It’s frustrating, because I would like to address many of these topics. But it’s relieving , because our reviewers want us to address these topics, and many of them will be going into my project management book (which has been put aside for the moment), to finish this book. Our boundaries are freeing for me, because I don’t have to consider things outside of the boundary for this book; I can consider them for future writing.

Esther and I decided on our boundaries for this book with something that looks like a project charter (but was our purpose for writing the book). If you haven’t developed a project charter yet for your project, do so. It will help you draw — and keep — the boundaries on your project.

I’m thrilled to announce that you can see the announcement of Esther’s and my book, currently entitled Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management Revealed. Yes, this is the book we pair-wrote. We’re in the final stretch. First is working with Andy and Dave and whomever from Pragmatic Bookshelf to make sure we didn’t miss anything, add too much, and, of course, more editing. Then comes the “final” copyediting. We are on the road to a Sept 1, 2005 release date.

In case you’re not sure, this is a show-and-tell book. First we show you what a great manager does. Then we tell you how to do it. Just a quick anecdote to wet your appetite: one of our reviewers didn’t want to return his marked-up copy. He wanted to keep it, so he could follow the advice. We sent him a clean version, so we could use his edits

As we know more, we’ll pass along the information.

Managers have an obligation to coach employees to help employees obtain better performance. However, managers choose when and whom to coach. Managers also have an obligation to provide feedback — which is not a choice. Every employee deserves feedback about his/her work on a frequent (weekly) basis. I’ve never met a manager who didn’t have some employee who needed coaching about something. Coaching is a “management” skill you can learn. (I believe that on Agile teams, everyone needs to learn to coach.) In fact, I’ll be talking about how to coach at the NZ/Aus Software Development conference. (Esther and I show how to do it in the management book.)

Here’s the essence of coaching:

1. Verify the other person wants help.
2. Generate options with the other person.
3. Walk through consequences of those options. Wait for the coachee to choose an option (unless other people’s safety is at stake).
4. Create an action plan to implement those chosen options.

In the previous blog entry, I suggested that Rich may have to coach people who aren’t sure of their skills as technical leads. Coaching isn’t easy and it takes time. But without coaching, it’s harder to learn new skills. Coaching can jump-start people into working in a new and different way. In my experience, coaching all levels of managers (and a teenager who’s learning to drive is that coaching on new and specific technical skills (”Try turning the wheel that way”) is fast and easy. Coaching to change long-term behaviors or more generic skills is much harder.

I tried to coach a project manager into not growling when she received bad news. I suggested, “Look interested. Look concerned. Try to keep that look of concern, not sounds of dismay.” She was unable to do so. I suggested we generate other alternatives, and she decided a sign that said, “The lion is in,” might work. She explained her growling was a reaction and she was trying to change it but hadn’t been able to yet. After the explosion of laughter, the project staff understood what the growling meant, and were able to give her bad news.

The longer you hold a particular position in the organization, the more you need to consider coaching other people. If you become indispensable, you need to fire yourself from your current position and obtain a new one (in the same company is fine). This is true whether you’re a manager or not. Without coaching other people, you’re not planning for succession, nor are you working to increase capacity of your group, certainly parts of what managers do.