Managing Product Development

On the long weekends, Mark and I make a concerted effort to clean up the house. That means I have to address all my little piles: go through them, recycle what I can, throw out what can’t be recycled, file others, figure out what to do with the rest. While Mark was helping me bring some of my paper and books downstairs, he nudged me about finishing the living room. “I know you don’t like clutter,” he said. “Yes, but I know where everything is. Besides, you have clutter, too.” “But I don’t like your clutter,” he responded. I started to say, “Yeah, but my clutter is different” at which point we both cracked up.

My clutter is comfortable for me, otherwise I would have dealt with it already.  You could call my clutter technical debt, and you’d be right. I don’t mind paying it off on long weekends. Otherwise, I would do something about it more often. But the reason my clutter is different is because it fits with my mental model of the world.  I’m sure when Mark reads this, he’ll try to change my mental models. He’s unlikely to be successful.

These same kinds of discussions occur at work, but we tend to laugh at them less. (Maybe we should.) The next time you find yourself perturbed by someone else’s perspective, consider this question: What would have to be true for the other person to be happy (or content or satisfied) with the situation?  Partly, my clutter helps me see all the things I do, which is helpful. More clutter does not make it more helpful — there’s a point at which even I think there’s too much clutter. But seeing clutter doesn’t help Mark, and since we share a house, I need to flex a bit. I’ll continue cleaning up now.

I’ve written before about getting organized, especially when it comes to cleaning up my office. My breakthrough came the last time, when I realized I’m the kind of person who needs to see everything out that I’m working on. Same with my to-do list. (See
Cleaning Up the Office, Round 3.)

I use paper for my to-do list. I need to see the whole thing, so I can make those small priority changes throughout the day or the week. I don’t use software (although, when OmniFocus is available, I might try that). Paper works for me.

I’m coaching a manager who was organized as a technical person–he knew what he had to do, he knew when he had to do it, and he got everything done. He became a manager, and started floundering after about a year. He was still getting things done, but the personal cost was too high–too many hours at work, too much stress. As a manager, the number of tasks he had to track was higher and broader than as a technical contributor.

A manager’s work is different than a technical person. A manager’s span of influence is much broader, so managers tend to have more (smaller) tasks, especially tasks that move across the organization. For me, and for my colleague, that requires a different set of organizing skills.

Once you’re managing several people, you need a low-level project portfolio. See Courage Required. That way you can see what everyone is working on, and resolve any context-switching (so technical people get their work done more quickly). You’ll need one-on-ones to check in with folks on a regular basis, so you know if their work is at risk. These two organizing “tools” allow you to see all the work people are doing, so you know if you need to change what you’re doing.

Don’t think you can manage the management tasks with a project scheduling tool–that’s the wrong tool for disparate tasks of varying sizes with no interdependencies except for you. As with any system, first decide how you need to organize and manage the tasks manually, and then you can see if an electronic tool will help.

If you’re a manager, acknowledge that your list of things to do is different and allow yourself to see how you need to manage it differently than you managed your list when you were not a manager.

There are several questioning comments on my post Testing is Not a Service: What do I mean by testing and how do I reconcile my statement with the context-driven school of testing?

Let me clarify what I mean by service first. The way the participants were discussing testing as a service, they meant a common service to the organization, not the project. In the same way that accounting is a service to the organization, or the HR is a service to the organization, their organizations thought that testing was something that could be applied to projects (frequently long after development “finished”), in the same way that other organizational services could be applied to the organization.

But if you think of testing as a service, it’s applied to a project, not an organization. In a waterfall lifecycle, where the bulk of testing occurs at the end, it’s barely possible to have effective testing after development. It costs more in time, risk, and money. The testers take much more time to find problems because they’re not integrated into the project. It’s likely the testers will not find the problems the customers will. The cost to fix a defect is much higher. But the kinds of testing these people were talking about, “Spend a couple of weeks testing this app,” or my favorite, “Go over it lightly” is not effective for the product or the people. Those aren’t services to the project; they are a service to the organization–an ineffective service to the organization.

To me, testing is a part of development. When I talk about development, I mean code and test and documentation development, because I mean product development. Whatever it takes for the whole product is part of development. In that sense, testing is a service to the project, but definitely not a service to the organization. Product development is the service to the organization. Cost effective, reduced-risk product development requires integrated testing.

So how do I reconcile my view of testing (a component of product development) with the context-driven school of testing? Look at the The Seven Basic Principles of the Context-Driven School. My statements are congruent. Especially see: Testing groups exist to provide testing-related services. They do not run the development project; they serve the project. (They don’t serve the organization; they serve the project.

Product development is the goal, not code development or test development. Effective product development requires an integrated team, who all provide services to the project, not the organization.

Labels: organization, product development, project management

Merlin’s been doing a series of posts about emptying your inbox. I decided he was right.Here’s the philosphical statement in Inbox Zero: Articles of faith that helped me see a new possibility:

Admitting you simply don’t have the time to participate in a 10-times-daily email exchange with someone is difficult to admit. But what’s the alternative?

I decided Merlin was right. Here’s where I am. I started with 402 messages. I easily got down to 183 messages after just 15 minutes. I got stuck then, because I needed a reliable network connection, which my hotel did not have. Then I returned home the next day after a 3-week trip.

When I arrived home, I unpacked my suitcases, did the laundry, and in general caught up with my family and the house. Although I was officially home for 3 days last week, I did little work due to doctor’s appointments and kid-driving tasks.

I kept up with my inbox, not going above messages before I left on last week’s trip. But my next task is to get down below 100 messages and then to 0.

See the entire series here: 43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero.

I’ve been attempting to clean up my office since I moved into it. I had some luck a while ago, using emergent design techniques for cleaning up. But that wasn’t enough. I was ready for an office redesign. So that’s what I did this weekend.

Here is one before picture:

The rest of the office was just as bad.

And here is an after pictures of the same area. The bin is gone, as well as all the stuff in it.:

I don’t have everything cleaned up, but I’m very close. The rest I can do as I get the right storage containers. I recycled over 20 bags of paper. I only threw out about 4 bags of garbage.

I’ve never been clean office kind of person, but my mess was preventing me from getting the work done that I wanted to complete. It’s as if the mess in my environment was preventing me from thinking.

Here’s what I did:

1. Get help. I asked Daughter #2 to help me with my file drawers and general cleaning up. I knew that having another person would help me stay on task. And it turned out that Daughter #2 had several ideas of how to organize things.
2. Attack one area of the room at a time. I cleaned out spaces so I would have a place to put the papers I did want to keep. I first cleaned out a four-drawer file cabinet. I proceeded to the other two small file cabinets and realized I no longer needed them once I had cleaned them out. I proceeded to areas of the room, not attempting to deal with all the surface paper until I dealt with cleaning each area of the room. That allowed me to make room to put things away when I finally dealt with my desk.
3. Organized my materials. I have materials for teaching my classes, materials for simulations, games and puzzles. I had tried to cram everything into one plastic bin, but the bin was too small. I now have several bins, one for each category. And, because I no longer needed the small file cabinets, I have easy access to each bin. I have not fully organized supplies, although I’ve made a good start.
4. Once the rest of my office was organized, I could attack my desk. A couple of months ago, I removed all the paper on my desk into a plastic bin (that first picture), just so I would have a small writing area. I sorted the desk plus the bin into three piles: notebooks, paper, and pens/pencils. That allowed me to sort each pile separately.

The principles that served me well were: work with someone else, stage the work (divide and conquer), inch-pebbles, and appreciations. Working with someone else helped me see what to do, when to do it, and provide ideas when I was stuck. Cleaning my whole office was too intimidating. But cleaning a piece and calling it done was do-able (I’m not sure I would call this cleaning/implementing by feature–but it was close :-). Mark also came down every few hours to give me positive reinforcement, especially as I got closer to being done.

I don’t know how long I can keep my office clean, but I think I have a chance. I have two goals: keep my office clean enough that when I return from a trip, I can unpack my office stuff within an hour, and that small adjustments will be all I need until the next big redesign.

I’m a big fan of emergent schedules (see the rolling wave planning and low tech scheduling entries). I also write that way. I generally have an idea of what I’m going to say, but I’m never quite sure how I’m going to get there until I’m done writing.

Emergent design also works for me as a way of organizing. Many of you have heard me complain about my messy office — for the last ten years I never could understand why my office was so messy and disorganized until yesterday. After all, when I worked inside other people’s companies, I was able to organize my office and know where everything was. I just wasn’t able to do that with my own office.

At first, my office was literally too small. When you’re self-employed, you need room for stuff — printers, paper, supplies — as well as room for the projects you’re working on (including projects for which you need to do research). So, for the first few years, my office was too small to organize well. I was able to expand my office, which helped for about three weeks, but then I couldn’t keep it picked up.

What I realized yesterday (when Esther helped me organize my office) was that I can’t file stuff when I don’t know how to organize it. I’m an “everything out” person — I like to be able to see all the things I’m working on. So, filing behind doors doesn’t work for me. And if I don’t know how to file it, I can’t. But here’s the breakthrough: Esther explained I don’t have to know how I’m going to file it permanently — I only have to know how I’ll file it for now. I can change my filing system when I know more.

Ok, so maybe you folks all figured out that emergent design works for filing systems, as well as for project scheduling , writing, and systems architecture. But it was news to me!

If you’re having trouble cleaning up your office, try what I did. Take a storage box and put a bunch of hanging folders in it. Take a bunch of file folders and put them on one side. Take one of your piles. For each piece of paper, decide if you can throw it out or recycle it. If not, see if it fits in an already-existing folder. If not, take a folder, write something descriptive, and put the piece of paper into it. Place the folder in the storage box. Repeat for all your piles. At the end, look at the stuff in the box. If you want to change the name or file it somewhere else, do so. If not, leave it. I’m leaving my stuff because I still don’t know where it all goes. But it’s no longer in piles on every horizontal surface