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I do believe people is the key. And I think training is VERY important.
What I see around are two different behaviors, both well established! :
- (bed) managers are not sponsoring training because it’s a waste of time;
- employee who could train, would like to train BUT they don’t do because they have no time!
If the first is real evil, the second is perversion. Let me re-phrase the quote I wrote in a previous post:
How do you balance work and training? You don’t balance it, you go and DO it!
PierG
Technorati: management
I wrote a previous post about this topic: quality of service (perceived by our user) is really based on communication.
Let me add something.
You order a car and they tell you are going to wait 3 months to get it. When THAT day arrives, you go to pick it and they tell you: oooopsss sorry, we had this and this problem and there is a delay. What do you think and feel in such a situation??
And what about when you call many times a call center because you continue to have a problem, for example, with your Internet connection and every time they start the call saying: please switch off your modem/router and try again??
And what about when you are talking with a doctor or a lawyer and they treat you as if you have some mental disease and don’t give you details you ask for?
I think that in these examples, what you perceive is that THEY DON’T CARE.
Take the car example: what if they have called you at home some weeks before (because they KNOW IT some weeks before) to tell you all the stuff and offer to give you some extra something for the pain you suffered? OK, the car will be late and you’ll be angry and they probably cannot do more but, at least, they take care of your need and demonstrate it.
PierG
Technorati: communication
I’ve read this article from the ‘Carrer Intensity’ blog. It describes the top 5 irrational fears that are usually limiting people to achieve their goals.
- Fear of the Unknown
- Fear of Failure
- Fear of Commitment
- Fear of Disapproval
- Fear of Success
The last one (Fear of Success) looks interesting:
If you do succeed, how will your life change? Will you always have to work harder? Will your old friends resent you and drift away? What other changes will result?
Have a look!
PierG
I was in a meeting, few days a go, with a Director for Server Development of a BIG hardware (and not only) company.
He told me they are about (would like) to change their test methodology in the product group as they are facing new challenges due to shorter and shorter time to market of their products.
The want to move from a ‘only functional tests’ way of testing to a ’specific customer configuration / application tests’.
Good move.
PierG
Take some managers: not every kind of manager is good for this experiment, you’ll recognize the good one reading this post.
Put them in a meeting room.
Tell you what you are doing: be specific.
After 2 minutes, the first manager will interrupt you and start saying that you are probably wrong and that he knows a better way to do it.
Then another one will disagree and tell you his vision.
Then another one will interrupt and tell everyone his particular experience.
After 60 minutes they will tell you to re-think about it and do another presentation.
I’d really like to start this kind of meetings saying: it is NOT necessary to have a brilliant idea in this meeting, please don’t feel obligated to demonstrate that you are the smartest guy at this table!
PierG
P.S. To tell the truth I know A LOT OF technical guys who suffer of the same disease 
Technorati: communication, management
This morning I was listening to the last episode of the Manager Tools podcast.
Mark and Mike were talking about Training and during the cast they underlined again the power of feedback.
I suggest that you listen to the Feedback episode in the Manager Tools podcast but I want to underline what I define a real truth about feedback: when you see something (positive or negative) and you don’t give feedback, you are DECIDING to give anyway a feedback to your directs.
If they are doing something negative, and you don’t give feedback, you are ENFORCING the fact that this is good, or that you don’t care, or that is wrong but … not so much.
If they are doing something positive, and you don’t give feedback, you are LOOSING A CHANCE to enforce that behavior. May be they are not realizing how good that behavior is or that this is exactly what you want from them.
AND yes, I am a sinner
PierG
Technorati: communication, feedback, management, leadership
Take some managers: not every kind of manager is good for this experiment, you’ll recognize the good one reading this post.
Put them in a meeting room.
Choose a presentation: no matter the topic, just pick a topic they don’t know!
Start the presentation.
After two slides, the first manager will interrupt you and start saying something.
Then another one will disagree and tell him his vision.
Then another one will interrupt and tell everyone his particular experience.
After 30 minutes you’ll be always on the same slide.
I’d really like to start some kind of meetings saying: it is NOT necessary to say something in this meeting, please don’t feel obligated to do so. And I’d really like to finish email writing: it is NOT necessary to reply to this email, please don’t feel obligated to do so.
PierG
P.S. To tell the truth I know a lot of technical guys who suffer of the same disease
Technorati: management, communication
Company A had to buy a custom made product from company B.
They met several times to define a project plan.A project plan that had to lead to an offer. An offer that had to take into account all the specs, the risks, the deliverables with the goal to define time and COSTS of the product.
After all these meetings, there was a kick off in which some managers had to show to an executive of company A this project plan.
At the end of the meeting, this executive raised his hand and asked: ok but … how much is this product gonna cost?
Is this executive too agile or is the project team not seceded in explaining the executive that the goal of the project was to determine the cost? Or was this idea of having this project a bad idea? Or …. ???
PierG
You can find the term holacracy more and more in the blogsphere in these days.
But what is holacracy?
[Holacracy is a ] complete and practical system for achieving agility in all aspects of organizational steering and management.[...]
From the root “holarchy”, taken literally Holacracy means governance by the organizational entity itself – not governance by the people within the organization or by those who own the organization, but by the organization’s own “free will”.
Holacracy aims to facilitate the emergence of a natural consciousness for the organization, allowing it to govern itself, steering towards its own natural telos and shaping around its own natural order.
More info in the Holacracy Web site (where I got this quotes) and in this interesting article .
PierG
You probably know that there is a new Agile SW Dev forum opened by a reference point in the agile community: Ron Jeffries .
One of the first threads is about ‘Measuring Agility’.
Among many interesting posts, I’d like to point out this one from Brad Appleton. Let me just underline what are, in his mind, the key characteristics of agility:
- Adaptive – responsive to change in needs & requirements via continuous feedback and reflective retrospection
- Goal-driven – focus on producing executable-results (working functionality) in order of highest business value.
Iterative – short development cycles, frequent releases, regular feedback- Lean – simple design, streamlined processes, elimination of redundant information, minimal intermediate artifacts
- Emergent behavior – highly collaborative self-organizing teams in close interaction with stakeholders
and:
I do think it could be useful to have some set of key indicators for things like:
- how frequent/infrequent various ‘events’ happen at various levels of scale (e.g., changes-committed, integration builds, stand-up meetings, restrospecting, iterations, releases)
- how collocated people are
- how responsive (versus plan-driven) the planning & prioritizing is
- how much collaboration (as opposed to phase-based ‘handoffs’)
I suggest that you have a look at the entire post to have a clear understanding of his position and the entire thread if you are interested in this topic.
PierG
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