Someone on the ask Berkun forum requested an essay for new managers. It’s a huge topic – there are entire books on this! – but I took a good swing and here’s what I came up with.
Advice for new managers, part 1
Part 2 will be more on tactics and specific things to do in the first few weeks.
Essay #50 will be published today – Its been 6 years of writing these things, first for MSDN, then at uiweb and now here. Thanks to everyone that’s been reading and writing in with questions and requests for essays – hope you’ll stick around. The next book is in progress and I’ll have details soon.
For fun I went back through all the traffic logs and looked at what’s been popular. So here is a traffic determined best of Berkun thru 2005:
Last year Joel Spolsky, of www.joelonsoftware.com fame, published a collection of essays titled The best software writing, volume 1. I thought it was a good volume and a great idea. Most of the essays are from blogs or the web, and were nominated by Joel and readers of his website.
He’s accepting nominations now for Volume 2 and there are already some good reads posted up there.
The nominations are in: The art of project management is a finalist for the 2006 Jolt Awards, sponsored by CMP.
Here are the General book nominations:
In Fred Brooks’ Mythical Man Month, he states:
Brooks Law: adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
In the book he notes that it is an “outrageous oversimplification”, but most laws of this kind are. The trouble is that people often use laws like this in a lazy fashion to end debate, assuming it is as universally applicable as an actual law of basic physics. It doesn’t take much effort to see that there are important exceptions. I hinted at them in chapter 2 of Making Things Happen, but here’s a full explanation of the notable caveats I’ve seen.
Disclaimer: I’m sure there are specific cases where these exceptions do not apply. I am not suggesting the abandonment of Brook’s law, only thoughtful consideration for how it is applied. All additional examinations or applications of Brook’s law, or these exceptions, are welcome.
See also:
Fortune magazine has an interview with the legendary Fred Brooks, author of the grand classic The mythical man month. 30 years in print and the book still outsells almost every project management or software development book out there.
They asked him about open source, Microsoft Vista, and how Brooks law applies to other fields.
SlackerManager has a fresh review of art of PM:
This is a really great book and ought to have a permanent place on any manager’s (not just project managers) desk. Highly recommended for managers of all experience levels.
What’s better than finding a great thing, that works great and makes me endlessly happy without me having to do much work? Well if you like finding good music, Pandora is for you.
I’ve seen many other “auto recommend music for you” type things over the years but these guys have done it right. In my first half hour of use I found 5 CDs I wanted to buy (and was happy with when they arrived: including Neutral milk hotel, Wonderful Smith and an Elliot Smith CD I didn’t know about).
I was so happy with the results I paid the subscription fee straight away. Isn’t it worth a few bucks to get great recommendations for things? (Or perhaps I’m lame and need to make more music savvy friends :).
They now have a free version (ads) available and I highly recommend checking it out. It’s a flash based UI, but they should get an award for the smoothest & least annoying flash UI I’ve seen in some time. The station model took a few minutes to understand (you have to seed the recommendations process), but once I got it I haven’t thought about it again.
This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum How to help a randomized team:
“My team is trying to transition from being purely an integration and maintance team into having real customers with problems, feature requests, complaints, etc. There is a customer support organization but they’re often slow and don’t understand enough about the details to be efficient in exchange information between us and the customer.
The primary problem now is we’re drowning – we have figured out how to simultaneously deal with the ongoing maintance work, while also doing planning and customer work for the next major version. The team is frustrated, decisions are slow and everyone is losing patience. In short, we feel randomized and I don’t know what to do to stop it.
Someone in my org suggested having a escalation response team or process to help shield my team from unnecessary interruption, but I don’t know enough about that to know if it’s right or how to put it into place.”
– Signed, Mr. Crispy (Burning at both ends)
This week in the UX-clinic discussion forum: Topic #3 – Finding UX a home:
In my previous job, the territory of UI/UX Design was hotly contested.
Early on design came from moderately talented folks in Engineering (full disclosure, me). After growth, design moved to the Marketing Dept with the rationale “UI equals branding”. The subsequent redesign was torture for engineering — not a square edge to be seen; low-contrast gradients, etc. In the aftermath, Product Management demanded UI/UX prototyping rights for new features and added user-testing, relegating Marketing’s role to “adding style” just before production.
But after agreeing to that role, Marketing still provided mockups of new features to Exec meetings, the board and clients — all before PM assignment/involvement. Execs usually preferred the first designs they saw. Engineering abandoned their front-end developers to fall under Product Management rather than get involved as a third claim on UX.
It is obvious the Execs need to make a decision about where design truly lies. But in lieu of a decision, where is a good balance? Has anyone seen companies work themselves out of this quicksand? What kind of job role or training could help get the depts on the same page? Where does UI or UX intermix with branding?
Thanks,
– Still Irritable About That Job
I used to think of new years, and resolutions, as silly things. “Why do we need a reminder to change our lives?” I’d say. I laughed when waves of people hit the gym in the first weeks of January, and laugh again as their numbers faded by February.
But now, older, perhaps wiser, I respect New Years Day. It’s the only secular holiday that has any ritualistic meaning – No other day comes with as clear an assignment, or as potent a set of possibilities. It’s the only holiday that forces the question “what change can you make that might make you a happier, better person?”
Over the holidays I read Campbell’s Myths To Live By and one of its points is the role of ritual and tradition in our psychology. They have psychological value to us regardless of faith (Odds are high that any well designed activity that involves atonement, acceptance, forgiveness, or confession is healthy regardless of the brand it comes in). But with the shift to a more secular society, few people replace the possibly beneficial, but religiously themed activities, with new ones. A good community might provide a few, but there is still a debt of ritual and traditional that most of us suffer from.
New years parties date back to 4000 years ago in Mesopotamia (Iraq). The Babylonians and the Romans made promises to their gods on the first day of the year, and some cultures exchanged gifts on New Years day much like many Americans do on Christmas. In the Western world that tradition slowly shifted to being promises made to oneself.
New years day stands alone as a secular American holiday with a positive, self directed, ritual. I used to laugh at people who put resolutions up in their office, or on their refrigerators but now, I ask myself, if I won’t make a resolution, how else will I commit to myself to do something important? If I don’t have a better answer, I better start writing those resolutions.
Many years ago, I came up with my own list of holidays: Scolidays. It included days like silly hat day, movie marathon weekend and Do something you’ve never done before day. But 2005, I chickened out, and only did 2 of the 12 days. But how can I complain? Unlike a religion, I’m the one to blame for all the silly traditions 🙂
References:
Here’s a good short essay about lessons learned from the founder of blink, a 1999 social bookmarking effort.
This really shouldn’t sound too different from what del.ico.us was able to do, and we had something like $13 million to play with to make it happen. Not to mention that there were others with the same idea. Remember Backflip? So (besides the money), why did we fail and del.ico.us and the other Web 2.0 companies succeed?
Kudos to Ari for being honest and open about lessons learned on design, business and timing. Wish there was more of this kind of thing.
What does it mean to make a difference these days? How do you measure you’re own value in the things you care most about?
I think I ate too many preechy pills on this one: I hope it goes down ok on your end.
This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum we’re building a think-week reading list. Here’s are details:
One smart thing I picked up at Microsoft was think-week. It started as something that Gates did: he took a week off a year to read all kinds of interesting papers and thoughts that he typically wouldn’t find time to read.
Not being Bill, I’d shoot for a think day. And tried to get my team to do the same: take an afternoon off at the coffee shop with the goal of reading items from a special “think-day” stack. (A good tip for any team).
So: Lets build the first ever pm-clinic think-week list.
Rules:
1. Nominate an essay, paper, or blog post that you think is important, and probably under-read by your peers on the list.
2. Books are allowed, but smaller units of reading preferred. Go for things that strike unusually deep at important problems, come from unexpected domains (film direction? building architecture?) or take an interesting approach.
3. A good think-week pile is highly diverse, challenging and fun to read.
Looking forward to seeing what you think belongs in the pile.
If you’re not on the pm-clinic list, you’re invited to make your nominations as comments – thanks.
On the UX-Clinic discussion list we’re taking nominations for the best UX writing this year. From design, usability, information architecture or topics far afield that have direct value to user experience stuff.
If you’re not on the list, feel free to make your nominations as comments below.
Had about 120 people yesterday – and was thrilled to see some familiar faces. It’s always good to speak at Microsoft: the audience is always smart and likes to laugh. Here’s some of the good Q&A, from memory, from my talk on why smart people defend bad ideas:
What do you do if your boss is an idiot? Sadly, not much. If they really have some kind of cognitive disability nothing you can do can change that. But you can always look for points of leverage. Who are the smart people who work for your boss that have your bosses ear? How do they influence him? What issues is he smarter about that others and how do you play to his strengths but work independently on areas he’s weak on? And lastly, there are worse thngs than being stupid. Traits like trust, clarity, commitment and leadership skill are mostly orthogonal to intellect. A slow person who listens to the right people might make a better manager than bright person who ignores everyone.
How do you handle a manager that has difficultly making priority decisions? . Take on the burden of setting the plate for them. What can you do to make priority decision easier? This is a very generous form of managing up: where you define for your boss what you need from them to succeed. In this case, you’re going further and doing some of their work for them in order to make your work possible. If that burden is too large, look for other people who work for your manager who suffer as much as you do. You can partner up and set the table together. Also, know that prioritization is the single most important things managers of large teams do. If your manager isn’t doing it well, be worried.
What do you do in a group that doesn’t like to debate ideas? Some people have stigmas about debate: they don’t allow criticism or critique in fear of people feeling hurt. This usually sucks and represents fear of ideas an inability to seperate someone’s ideas from their identity: a death knell for creative thinking. However, in all groups, ideas are debated, just not out in the open. If debates are verbotten in meetings, look to the offices and cubicles. Bring your ideas to people one on one and invite people to come to you.
Why are copouts like ‘We don’t have time’ and ‘This is the way we did it last time? The audience and I discussed many reasons why these statements are problematic: They’re copouts and don’t represent thinking, they put decisions into unquestionable boxes, they imply a we vs. you dynamic which can bully question askers into submission. We agreed that heuristics like these are often right, and are fast to use, but also agreed that there must be a way to over-ride them and force real thinking to take place.
If you were there (or not) and had other questions, glad to answer ’em here.
I’ve been to tons of conferences and often left disapointed. They’re often so similiar and despite the high prices, make it hard to have a good, interesting time. Design or experience related events are often more disapointing: they fail to make the conference itself a well designed experience for attendies.
With that in mind I strongly recommend GEL 2006. It’s a small two day conference focused on good experiences and how to make them. The speakers are diverse and the day is paced well and highly interactive. I attended in 2003, the first year, and have been trying to get back ever since.
You can read all about last year’s conference and see how diverse and interesting the pool of speakers and sessions are.
GEL 2006: Thu & Fri May 4-5th 2006. 2006 Speaker list.
The conference rates are heavily discounted until Dec: 12th. For both days it’s $900 now, $1200 after Dec. 13, and $1500 on April 1st 2006.
In related news: I’ve been lobbying Mark Hurst, the conference organizer, to let me speak there for years – and have failed every time 🙂 But this year I finally got somewhere – Day one of the event is a set of tours of user experiences in NYC. I’ll be running one called The experience of sacred places. We’ll be roaming around Manhattan breaking down how churches, temples, parks and other special places are designed to have the effects they do.
MSNBC posted Google: Ten golden rules by Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, on how Google manages their knowledge worker staff.
I know many people that work at both Google and Microsoft, and I’m sure this will be upsetting to all of them: the spirit of nearly all these rules are shared by both companies.
Having spent time at Google, I know it’s a special place. There are many things about their environment that are very different from Microsoft.
However Schmidt’s MSNBC piece has little to do with what those things are. Here’s a critique on how similiar this list of Google’s CEO’s rules are to my recollections of Microsoft’s approach.
In Summary: there’s little motivation for the CEO of a leading company to reveal what he thinks the true secrets or powerful rules are. There’s more to lose than to gain. But this piece, as fluffy as it is, doesn’t say much about management than anyone paying attention didn’t already know.
This week in the UX-clinic discussion forum: Topic #2 – Who to hire, design or usability?:
I’m a web development manager for a new, but very popular web service. I’ve lobbied successfully for a headcount to help with UX/design/interface issues. Until now everything (prototypes, heuristic evaluations, etc.) has been done by me or one of the 5 programmers.
The challenge is this: what should I hire? I think I have 4 choices: a designer type, an IA, a usability engineer, or someone that does some of everything.
What questions should I be asking myself and my team to determine the best way to use the one UX headcount that I have?
– Shopping in the UX candy store
This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #56 – Where to put the business folks.
Welcome to the last month of the year – here’s a situation for you:
I manage a team of five PMs. Another manager runs the (large) production team of designers, programmers, QA. Folks on my PM team draw resources from his team to assemble project teams. Sometimes my PM team brings in Business Analysts (BA) to help with planning.
So, the other manager recently quit. His right-hand guy is acting manager. Day 3 on the job he invites me for coffee, and proposes to take over the BA positions. having them report through the production area to him, and not to the PM team. Just sign here, OK? No way, I said.
Where is the right home for business analysts or product planner types? What is a sound way to make arguments for where they should live? Does placing a role in a specific part of the organization necessarily stack the deck in a negative way? Or is this simply a political play by the acting manager for more power?
(Extra credit: same question, but with marketing or design).
Signed, The Prince