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It's then natural to want to work with people who are just like us, our clones.
So, every once in a while when we come across people who do not value our inputs, crush our ideas, ignore what we have to say, act as a know-it-all, seem to find pleasure in criticism, satisfaction in creating chaos and look for the negative side of things, it upsets us.
A decision that does not go our way is not an attack on our identity, and yet when others disagree with us or disregard our opinion, we take it personally.
The stronger our belief system, the more difficult it is for us to look beyond our own perspective and treat other people's ideas worthy of consideration. Being stuck in right vs wrong can cause us to feel emotionally stressed out, prevent us from expressing our own ideas with the right frame of mind, and ignore what others have to say.
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The first 30 days on the job may seem crazy with too many things that require your attention. As a first time manager, it may seem that your world has turned upside down with a schedule that's packed, stakeholders with unrealistic demands, and your own team members who look up to you with high hopes and expectations.
The excitement of the new job along with the commotion of its demands will cause you to make mistakes as a new manager.
In the agile and lean communities, we talk a lot about transparency. I see the most product and program success when the various teams create transparency between them, the middle of the continuum. That's the full-product transparency. I see many organizations succeed better when the less the manager knows, the better the team works. And, when there's too little manager-to-team transparency, the efforts become much more difficult or fail. That's because the managers don't explain:
The managers don't explain the purpose. So, the managers request transparency about the teams' work. And, the managers don't offer transparency about the purpose. That's not reciprocal transparency.
Management may seem like a natural career progression for a great individual contributor, while it may not be the best way to expand our role. Much like our earlier decisions that landed us in a particular field, the choice to be a manager or not requires careful examination of our options. Management isn't the only way to grow, get a raise, or take on additional responsibilities from our current role.
Think of management as a maze with a simple entry that requires navigating multiple unknown paths along the way. It's easy to get lost, feel stuck, and lose hope unless we have patience, curiosity, and the ability to learn from its unique challenges. It requires reprogramming our brain to accept responsibility not only for ourselves but also for the team and provide the necessary tools and resources to help them succeed.
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Fear is natural, even in leaders. It is not a bad thing as long as you learn to manage it and put it to productive use by not letting it be the basis of how you act or make decisions.
When a team performs poorly, energy in the environment seems low and employees appear to be disengaged and unmotivated, leaders need to take one hard look at how others perceive them in the workplace and the impact their behavior and action has on others.
From my experience and observations, my concern is weak understanding that the Evidence-Based Management (EBM) framework is empirical. It requires transparency, frequent inspection, and adaptation. Some organizations proceed with the initial evaluation and then drop the idea. Measuring once and making some decisions is not enough! No promises that this would work.
Measuring often, regularly, making decisions, adapting frequently towards a meaningful goal. This is the secret ingredient of the powerful framework. Like Scrum, EBM is simple to understand, difficult to master. Once you experience it, implement it in your organization, you should see significant results.
Let me start by stating a simple fact: Information Technology is a key capability that must be mastered if you want your company to be leading within your industry. You do not have to take my word for it, Didier Bonnet and associates said it best in their “Leading Digital”:
We discovered all kinds of companies, both those struggling and those succeeding in the great challenge of becoming digital. [...] the companies that are succeeding — and they range across industries and sectors — we’re calling Digital Masters. And Digital Masters outperform their peers. Our work indicates that the masters are 26 percent more profitable than their average industry competitors. They generate 9 percent more revenue with their existing physical capacity and drive more efficiency in their existing products and processes.
Demotions are uncommon these days. More often than not, poor performers are simply let go or move on of their own accord. Voluntary demotions; however, are downright rare.
Imagine this was your Agile team: Your Product Owner has expert domain knowledge but is more focused on career progression than on developing a great product. The Business Analyst is thorough but is a poor time manager and often misses deadlines. Your lead Developer is a highly talented and creative coder, but is also a real pain to work with; he belittles others, keeps everything to himself, and believes he is too important to attend Daily Stand-ups.
New and ongoing projects are the backbone of a business’s entire operation and a kickoff meeting constitutes a crucial element of such projects. They are the necessary progressions that cement the significance of a company in the market. So, when the stakes are this high, then you have to be vigilant when starting new projects and build a proper foundation.
Agile project management is an iterative approach to delivering requirements throughout the project life cycle. Likewise, we live in a world where the whole organizational approach to remote teams is finally changing. As a result, a great number of companies are encouraging remote workforces to a lenient extent. The distributed team concept is getting so endorsed that 50% of all of the US Workforce will be completely remote by the year 2020.
As Nicole and I prepare to start looking for a new home, we realized our primary area of interest is currently recognized as being in a "seller’s market." This basically means that there are more buyers than there are available homes for sale. As one might imagine, such a situation allows homes to be sold quickly — which also allows the homes to be sold for more than what they are actually worth. My challenge is figuring out how much we are willing to pay for a home in our primary area versus looking in an alternative area.
If we talk in the context of why time management is important, I have to agree that a lot of us waste it as an indispensable resource. Imagine your entire day spent, while you did nothing of value. This could be interpreted as time wasted in the form of doing useless stuff for yourself and for people around you.
Wouldn’t you agree and do something better instead? Sadly, many of us are guilty of this predicament.
While the main benefits of Agile are higher efficiency and reduced waste of time and resources, shorter delivery time, and more flexibility across the board, there is also one other aspect that requires recognition: It's the impact that the ability to shorten and flex the development process has on human interactions within the organization.
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Because Agile makes it possible for teams to rely on visual communication and tracking more than on in-person data presentation and direct engagement in face-to-face communication, all team members can easily stay informed and engaged in the work, no matter each individual's comfort level with in-person interaction.
How do you measure quality in software engineering? I guess this is the question there will always be a debate on. There are so many approaches to this question that finding only one answer is just impossible. In this article, we will be listing the quality-related metrics that the top engineering teams have been keeping track of, and see when and how you should use them.
However, note that when you think about it, one can wonder if the quality is a goal in itself. The confidence in being able to grow and change behaviors without disruption seems to be more what matters. In that case, quality metrics are surely important, but their evolution over time is at least as important.
