Category: Management & Leadership
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No Modes
Larry Tesler died this week. He was one of my idols at Apple Computer in the 1990s. A brilliant thought leader and champion of the idea that modes are a bad user experience. A mode is a context for getting work (or play) done. In the early days of computers, before graphical user interfaces, applications…
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Meeting Madness
It’s only getting worse. And there is no cure. I’m talking about meetings. Most sapiens are natural social networkers. And that means we need to know what is going on, who is doing what, how it’s going to be done, where we’re doing it, and why we’re doing it this way and not that way.…
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The Voices of Software Development
The other day I was writing up a job description, which I take rather seriously, and I remembered that I needed to include the statement that an engineering manager has the responsibility to function as the “voice of the engineer”. Then I sat back for a moment and thought, Is this true? Why can’t engineers…
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North Star
Successful companies usually have a secret sauce. It could be an algorithm or an insight. But whatever that secret sauce is, it is used to create or disrupt a market. Apple created the PC market when Steve and Steve figured out that affordable pre-built personal computers would be really useful for consumers. IBM disrupted the…
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Telling Time as an Engineer
Time is the most precious resource. It’s in limited supply, once spent we can’t get it back, and you can’t trade it directly. This might sound a little radical but most global, national, business, and personal problems, seem to me, to boil down to problem of time and who’s time is more important than yours.…
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Volunteer Scrum Master Handbook
I have to disclose upfront that I am more of an Agile guy than a Scrum guy. Which is to say I feel more at home discussing Agile in general than Scrum in particular. (I’m not even sure how to capitalize it–SCRUM or scrum?) Over the years I’ve made my peace with Scrum and as…
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Managing the De-Motivated
It still amazes me how a process created by engineers for engineers can make so many engineers so unhappy. I’ve seen all kinds of responses to Agile from engineers. Some are immediately enthusiastic. Others are cautiously optimistic. Many are amused and cynical. And some are down right hostile. Over time the responses polarize and the…
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In Search of the Motivated
I’m doing a lot of hiring right now. So much that I’ve had to form a hiring scrum and treat it like an engineering project. The scrum is doing a great job. We now have a systematic way to write job descriptions, assign interviewers, evaluate resumes, perform phone screens, and conduct interviews. All this to…
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Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!
What can we learn from Dr. Peter Venkman about the Agile development process? It’s true that Venkman was the less technical member of his team. Clearly Dr. Egon Spengler was the blue-sky researcher while Dr. Ray Stantz was the practical engineer. But Venkman brought a lot to the table: Charm, business acumen, and the…
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Improving Your Whuffie with Agile
Virtual currency like Cory Doctorow’s concept of Whuffie will probably replace real money in the next 100 years. Maybe sooner with the way our current economic crisis is going. Once all the hard currency in the world is spent it’s Gresham’s law FTW! You can get a head start by using Agile development principles to…