- Managing the Human Resource
- Intro
- managers try to treat people as modules
- Somewhere Today, a Project is Failing
- 15% (worse for bigger projects) software projects fail due to people-related issues, not technology
- high tech illusion: we are in high-tech business
- we are mostly in the human communication business
- focus on the technical, because it is easier
- Make a Cheeseburger, Sell a Cheeseburger
- management philosophy shaped from a production environment
- try to eliminate errors
- bozo definition of management: managers provide all the thinking and people carry out their bidding
- nothing more discouraging to any worker than the sense that his own motivation is inadequate and needs to be supplemented by the boss
- too many managers threatened workers asserting individuality
- the natural people manager realizes uniqueness is what makes project chemistry vital and effective
- steady-state production ill-suited to project work
- project’s entire purpose is to put itself out of business
- can’t spend 100% of the time doing the task, need to budget time to think and ask key questions
- the more important the project, the more brainstorming you should do
- Vienna Waits for You
- real-world management seems to be about working harder and longer
- project members understand that there are more important things than the silly job they’re working on
- overtime is almost always followed by compensatory undertime
- undertime is invisible
- the benefit is balanced out in the long-run
- workaholics often leave after realizing they’ve sacrificed a more important value
- e.g. family, love, home, youth
- if you exploit, will eventually lose
- productivity and turnover should be taken into account together
- people under time pressure don’t work better, they work faster
- sacrifices quality of the product and job satisfaction
- Quality–If Time Permits
- people can not remove their emotions from work
- a major arouser of emotions is threatened self-esteem
- we tend to tie our self-esteem strongly to the quality of product
- a market-driven quality standard makes sense only if you ignore the effect on the builder’s attitude and effectiveness
- in the long-run, market-based quality costs more
- quality far beyond that required by the end-user is a means to higher productivity
- the trade-off between price and quality does not exist in Japan
- rather, the idea that high quality brings on cost reduction is widely accepted
- a policy of “quality if time permits” will assure that no quality at all will sneak into the product
- high, builder-set quality standards increase job satisfaction and some of the lower turnover figures
- in some companies, the project team has an effective power of veto over the delivery of not-yet-ready products
- Parkinson’s Law Revisited
- notion that work expands to fill the time allocated
- he didn’t provide any data, caught on because it was funny
- the law almost certainly doesn’t apply to your people
- in a healthy environment, the reasons that some people don’t perform are due to lack of competence, confidence, and/or affiliation with others on the project
- in none of these cases does schedule pressure help
- in rare cases, when leaning on someone is the only option, should come from the team
- studies show bad estimates tend to sap builders of energy
- surprisingly, highest productivity was when no estimates were prepared at all
- variation of parkinson: organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day
- Laetrile
- a lot of managers look for silver bullet to solve their problems
- there is some new trick you’ve missed that can send productivity soaring
- you are not dumb enough to have missed something so fundamental
- other managers are getting gains of 100-200%
- the typical manager tool is focused on coding and testing
- doesn’t include analysis, negotiation, specification, training, acceptance training, conversion, and cutover
- technology is moving so swiftly you are being passed by
- most of what you’re doing is not truly high-tech work
- changing languages will give you huge gains
- can only impact the implementation part of the project
- because of your backlog, need to double productivity immediately
- the typical project that’s stuck in the backlog is there because it has barely enough benefit to justify building it
- automate away your development staff
- their principal work is human communication to organize the user’s expressions of needs into formal procedure
- your people will work better if you put them under a lot of pressure
- they won’t, they’ll just enjoy it less
- manager’s function is not to make people work, but make it possible for people to work
- The Office Environment
- Intro
- the environment can make it impossible to work
- there are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back
- The Furniture Police
- intellect workers need to have their brains in gear, but also need areas where a conversation can take place
- people who control the space, don’t spend time thinking about any of those concerns
- optimize for containment and minimal cost
- “You Never Get Anything Done Around Here Between 9 and 5”
- staying late or arriving early to get work done in peace is a damning indictment of the office environment
- changing environment is not beyond human capacity
- code wars experiment shows language, years of experience, number of defects, and salary were productivity non-factors
- a big factor is pair mate and likely your work environment
- their work environment failing to attract and keep good people or making it impossible for them to work effectively
- if you manage a team, their workplace environment is your business
- Saving Money on Space
- obvious reason for less space is cost, but benefits are not studied
- the cost of the workspace for a developer is a small percentage of the salary paid to developers
- ratio may be 20:1
- IBM conducted study and decided on 100 sq ft per worker, 30 sq ft of work surface, and noise protection in the form of enclosed offices or six-foot high partitions
- cost reduction to provide workspace below minimum would result in loss of effectiveness that would more than offset cost savings
- noise is proportional to the density
- measuring productivity is difficult, anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all
- if you don’t measure, you can’t improve
- Brain Time vs Body Time
- developers working alone 30% of the time and generate noise the remaining
- takes time to get into a productive flow state
- the work environment can guarantee an endless state of no-flow which increases cost of work getting done
- consider tracking uninterrupted hours vs body hours
- best orgs have ratio as high as .4 and other orgs have as low as .1
- need to sanction notion that people ought to have at least some interrupt-free time
- need an environment where you can think on the job as well
- The Telephone
- highly interruptive
- need to learn ok to not always answer phone
- quality of your time is highly important
- Bring back the door
- if you think environment is an issue, need to start staying so
- expect push back e.g. office is about glitz, use music to cover noise, we want people to interact
- Glitz
- one study shows workers don’t care about surroundings as long as it’s not depressing
- work-conducive office space is not a status symbol, but a necessity
- you can pay for it or lose productivity
- Creativity
- while logical side can function well with music
- creative side is hindered by music
- can result in reduced creativity over a long time and without spark of excitement best people leave
- Vital Space
- dont need individual offices, people can share space
- let people reorganize into shared suites
- ok to violate principle of uniformity
- the optimal environment is not infinitely replicable and different by team/person
- management should at least make sure there is enough space, enough quiet, and privacy
- Taking Umbrella Steps
- master plan architecture can only be understood in terms of its symbolic value to the executives who caused it to be built
- Consider a facility that can grow in an evolutionary fashion
- a philosophy of piecemeal growth
- a set of patterns or shared design principles governing growth
- local control of design by those who will occupy the space
- the natural order emerges when there is a perfect balance between the needs of the individual parts of the environment and the needs of the whole
- let workers be allowed to participate in the design of their own work space
- windows e.g. hotels
- indoor and outdoor space
- reliance on non-replicable formulas
- consider moving your people out of the corporate space if you can
- The Right People
- Intro
- final outcome more an effort of who does the work than how
- get right people, make them happy, turn them loose
- The Hornblower Factor
- managers fundamentally changing people unrealistic
- if not right from the start, likely never will be
- do not hire based on appearances
- the need for uniformity is a sign of insecurity on the part of management
- pride should be tied to the staff’s accomplishments
- dress code should be less important than contributions especially if not customer/client facing
- the term “professional” can be used to mean uniformity or unsurprising
- entropy or level of samness is always increasing making it hard to generate energy or do work
- Hiring a Juggler
- would you hire a juggler without seeing him juggle?
- portfolios are a great way to show real work
- aptitude tests that are oriented towards task might predict how well hires do on typical tasks, but not right-brain activities that require holistic, heuristic judgement and intuition-based experience
- ability to communicate is crucial, consider having them give a presentation to a group
- another side benefit is easier to accept into the group if they approve
- Happy to Be Here
- most people don’t know what turnover is
- average person leaves in 2 years
- cost is roughly half the ramp up time for a new hire
- hidden costs of turnover include making people more short-term focused
- companies with low turnover all share a preoccupation with being the best at something
- being the best is a long-term concent and encourages permanence
- people stay because there is a sense you are expected to stay
- the company invests hugely in your personal growth
- widespread retraining is a common feature of companies with low turnover
- The Self-Healing System
- if you completely automate a system, it becomes entirely deterministic and loses self-healing quality
- strict methodologies where all decisions are predetermined loses flexibility
- implies that people aren’t smart enough to do the thinking
- convergence and standards are a good thing, but instead of statues consider training, tools, peer review
- Hawthrone effect: people perform better when trying something new
- accounts for most productivity gains
- Growing Productive Teams
- Intro
- good work experiences have a fair measure of challenge to them
- if you think to a specific moment, usually it will be about interactions with team
- what’s important is coming together
- in the best work groups, team interaction is everything
- people work better and have more fun
- The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts
- in a jelled team, the probability of success goes up dramatically
- teams formed around a common goal
- believing that workers will automatically accept organizational goals is a sign of naive managerial optimism
- corporate objectives do not exactly line up with workers
- the pleasure comes from achieving any goal together
- most work is done by individuals alone
- the purpose of a team is not goal attainment, but goal alignment
- signs of a jelled team
- low turnover during project
- strong sense of identity
- shared catch phrases, humor, jokes
- individuals eager for peer review
- obvious enjoyment in work
- teams vs cliques
- same denotation, different connotation
- fear of cliques is a sign of managerial insecurity
- well-jelled team does more to serve the manager’s real goals than any assemblage of interchangfeable parts
- The Black Team
- team forms unique personality of its own
- succeeds as a social unit even after original members leave
- Teamicide
- hard to list exactly how to make jelled teams, but easier to enumreate ways to do the opposite
- defensive management
- you can’t protect yourself against your own people’s incompetence
- if they aren’t up to the job, they will fail
- once you’ve decided to go with a group, need to trust them
- freedom means allowing them to proceed differently from your way
- people who feel untrusted have little inclination to bond together
- bureaucracy
- mindless paper pushing is a waste
- team needs to believe in whatever goal it forms around
- can’t get excited about pushing paper
- physical separation
- less causal interaction
- when all on the same team, tend to go into quiet mode at same time so less interruption of flow
- fragmentation of time
- hard to a part of multiple jelled teams
- takes time to change gears
- the quality-reduced project
- concessions painful to developers
- co-workers who are developing a shoddy product don’t even want to look at each other in the eye
- phony deadlines
- tight but not impossible deadline can be enjoyable challenge
- “we absolutely must be done by ___” never helps
- effort will slip if success is impossible
- these teams don’t jell
- clique control
- don’t explicitly break teams up
- due to insecurity
- most organizations don’t set out to consciously kill teams, but do act that way
- A Spaghetti Dinner
- imagine manager invites team to dinner and lets people organically take on responsibilities and make dinner
- good manager provide frequent easy opportunities for teams to succeed together
- Open Kimono
- managers of well workers are careful to respect autonomy once granted
- take no steps to defend yourself from the people you’ve put into positions of trust
- all the people under you are in positions of trust
- brings out the best in everyone, your trust will be rewarded
- don’t need physical oversight, will know based on the results of the product
- skunkwork projects
- projects do well when people get to choose who the work with
- best bosses don’t give direction or make judgements on their own, but through natural authority
- each of the workers is known to have some special area of expertise and is trusted by all as a natural authority in that area
- Chemistry for Team Formation
- simplisitc list
- make a cult of quality
- strong catalyst for team formation
- market, consumers, clients, upper management will never ask for high quality
- team can only do this if protected from short-term economics
- I told her I loved her when I married her
- humans need reassurance and closure
- chemistry-building manager takes pains to divide the work into pieces and makes sure each piece has some substantive demonstration to its completion
- deliver internal intermediate versions
- teams get high from success, renews energy, and makes them feel closer
- the elite team
- people require a sense of uniquenss
- whatever the elite characteristic is, it forms the basis of the team’s identity, an essential ingredient of a jelled team
- team needs to be unique in some sense, not all
- on not breaking up the yankees
- if a team does knit, don’t break it up
- give them the option of working on another project together
- will start each new endeavor with enormous momentum
- a network model of team behavior
- managers not part of the team they manage
- made up of peers
- on best teams, different individuals provide occasional leadership
- no one is a permanent leader
- structure of a team is a network, not hierarchy
- selections from a chinese menu
- a bit of heterogeneity can be enormous aid in building a jelled team
- ok to not be a clone
- can’t always make it happen, but when a team does come together, worth the cost
- It’s Supposed to be Fun to Work Here
- Chaos and Order
- managers job is to leave small packets of chaos to others
- progress towards more orderly controllable mtehods is an unstoppable trend
- thoughtful manager adopts a policy of constructive reintroduction of a small amount of disorder
- pilot projects
- try some new an unproved technique
- initial inefficiency is cost
- improvement in productivity is gain
- hawthorne effect boosts energy as well when people are trying something new
- don’t experiement with more than one aspect on any given project
- war games
- can collect useful stats
- help workers evaluate relative strengths and weaknesses
- if you do it right, will be really fun
- can provide good bonding experience
- brainstorming
- strive for quantity
- evaluation phase later
- discourage negative comments
- faciliate by asking about similar problems, the negative, or immersion
- training, trips, conferences, celebrations, and retreats
- everyone relishes chance to get out of office
- there is a place for adventure, silliness, and a small amount of construtive disorder
- Free Electrons
- many experts are becoming consultants
- some organizations offer roles with loosely defined responsibilties
- they do this, because they profit from it
- embrace individualism
- the mark of the best manager is an ability to single out the few key spirits who have the proper mix of perspective and maturiaty and turn them loose
- manager can’t give direction, they have progressed to the point where their own direction is more unerringly in the best interest of the organization
- Holgar Dansk
- you can’t make all of these changes
- even one change is substantial
- not strong enough to change everything on your own
- takes less effort to raise awareness of issues
- can utilize the power of co-workers, suborindates, rational men and women
- if siliness is gross enough, people need no more than a gentle catalyst
- sociology matters more than people or money
- supposed to be productive, satsifying fun to work
- if it isn’t, there’s nothing else worth concentratin on
- choose your terrain carefully, assembly your facts and speak up
- Son of Peopleware
- Teamicide Revisited
- motivational accessories are demeaning
- overtime on a jelled team can usually not be applied evenly which can lead to damaging team cohesion
- overtime is often more about shielding yourself from blame
- Competition
- coaching is important for team since different members will have different competencies
- good for personal growth
- cannot take place if people don’t feel safe
- don’t want to reveal your weaknesses or let someone else pass your
- some managerial actions that tend to produce teamicidal side effects:
- annual salary or merit reviews
- management by objectives
- praise of certain workers for extraordinary accomplishments
- awards, prizes bonuses tied to performance
- performance measurement in almost any form
- Deming’s point is that simplistic intrinsitc motivators are used to excue mangement from harder matters such as investment, direct perosnal motivation, thoughtful team-formation, staff retention, and ongoing analysis and redesign of work procedures
- in a “team” or “ensemble” the success of the individual is tied irrvocably to the success of the whole
- Process Improvement Programs
- standard interfaces are good, but doesn’t necessarily mean there needs to be a standard process of how to build
- process improvement is good, but process improvement programs aren’t
- formal process improvement moves responsibility up from individual to the organization
- process isn’t worth a rip unless it’s applied to projects that are worth doing
- some organizations stick to safe projects to perserve certification levels
- if organization is the best, should raise bar and strive for more potentially risky, but rewarding projects
- Making Change Possible
- people tend to hate change
- categories of people: blindly loyal, believers but questioners, miltantly opposed
- focus on believers
- blindly loyal are fickle
- fundamental response to change is not logical but emotional
- naive model of change: old status quo -> new status quo
- satir change model: old status quo -> chaos -> pratice and integration -> new status quo
- when you first introduce change, can be worse off for now
- need to understand that this isn’t the new staus quo, need to offer hope that things will get better
- without this model, reaction will be to change back during the choas stage
- change won’t get started unless people feel safe
- change only has a chance of succeeding if failure at least a little bit is ok
- Human Capital
- difference between expense and capital expenditure
- some spend goes away, but some don’t e.g. investing in employee’s skill
- need to preserve an organization’s investment into it’s people
- wallstreet focus on short-term earnings can hurt company in the long-term
- companies of knowledge workers have to realize that their investment in human capital matters the most
- Organizational Learning
- some organizations can learn others can not
- experience turns into learning when an organization alters itself to take account of what experience has shown
- learning is limited by an organization’s ability to keep its people
- learning occurs primarily in middle management
- learning will likely be in the white space between middle management if communication channels are good
- The Ultimate Management Sin Is …
- ultimate sin is wasting people’s time
- status report where the boss interacts individually with each member is for his or her own reassurance
- more about status of the boss
- some ceremonial meetings are good for appreciation and group membership
- often don’t need the same number of people at beginning of the project, but politically infeasible to not staff more people
- makes yourself look bad if you didn’t add extra staff and you are late
- human capital invested in your work force also represents a ton of money
- wasting the time of that huge investment is money poured down the drain
- The Making of Community
- strong need for community and workplace is best chance
- community doesn’t just happen
- organization that succeeds in building a satisfying community tends to keep its people
- people will tend to look back on relationiships fondly over work
- no formula requires substantial atlen, courage and creativity and investment in time
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