Showing posts with label Management. Show all posts

Lean, Agile, Scrum..... its all dejavu

These days there is lot of talk on lean teams and scrum model of execution.

Perhaps these are not new terms after all..

Here is an informative article that provides insight into how these were thought earlier.

Fast Iterations: How Napoleon Managed the French Army

Handling requirements

Quite often we are required to handle new requirements in our projects. These could range from minor tweaks in the existing functionality or introducing a new behaviour. In these situations how well can these requirements be gauged. Here is a useful checklist that helps in analysing a requriement and cross checking major checkpoints.

And just to remember it in a short way:

Good Requirements are SORTA NUTS

URL: http://svprojectmanagement.com/good-requirements-are-sorta-nuts

Types of Project Managers

If you want to measure your personal traits as a PM, here is a link that describes the personality type of a PM
See what's your type of management skill

Requirements- the ever changing world

Requirements or specs are an essential part of the software development. But the real pain is in dealing with changes in the initial requirements and in meeting deadlines to satisfy these deadlines.

Often new requirements or changes to these make it as a scope creep.

The problem with this is it just regenrates the entire product life cycle from square one. So just demotivates the entire team.

It was nice to see another rambling here

And here is some help on how to react to new requirements or changes in requirements.

Agile, extreme programming were brought in to deal with such frequent changes. Pity these are still not being executed in the correct manner. From what I have observed is, still water fall model is being followed in the name of agile and the only difference is the time duration between each delivery is small.

How responsive were you to the last email?

We as part of our daily work receive mails which require some action from us. But how much do we spend time and respond back and how quickly do we do that? perhaps someone out there is *still * waiting for our response. This could be your client or co-worker or someone else who needs your personal help.

Read this article to go further into this topic.

Leadership groups

Leading a team, however small or big requires good understanding of the team's needs. In a normal team model, there is a leader and a bunch of followers/subordinates who need to follow the leader's instructions. This is just one way traffic. How does the team communicate back to the leader? if the team is small, then its pretty one to one with the lead. In case if the team is big we need a concept of leadership group where in there are several people instead of a single one who takes care of leading and getting involved in the communications. An interesting information about this comes from cricinfo's interview with the Indian cricket coach Greg Chapell. The following is a brief extract of the article. Pls read this in the context that Indian team has just won a test match following a string of defeats. Perhaps a point to ponder for leadership skills?

For any team to be a good team, you need a strong leadership group.

It's certainly an Australian thing but it's also a success thing. Whether it's a sporting group or one from another sphere, there's a strong leadership group. You've got to share it around. I defy any team to be strong without a strong leadership group on the field.We've got small groups within the team. We meet from time to time. We also need to build leadership within the middle group and the younger group. In time they're going to be leaders and senior players.Whether we like it or not we (captain and coach) are perceived to be a part of the selection process. And so there's always going to be some diffidence in coming up and opening up to the coach and the captain. And that's why a strong leadership group is absolutely critical. Because they got to have an avenue somewhere. To be able to come to the captain or coach. Forget the names attached to it, you got to have an avenue to get their voice heard or get their message across or find out what's going on.

And that's again where the small groups we have is very important. It gives each player a chance to speak up without the captain there, or without the coach there. They have their own meetings as well and it's important that they do so because if somebody is struggling to be heard or to get a message through, it's going to affect the way they play. And that's why you can't just have one person. There's got to be a group of people. And the leadership within the team group is absolutely critical to the long-term success and the ongoing success of a team. You guys understand Indian culture much better than I do. It's all about the elders and seniors and people in responsibility who have to be listened to, no matter what. I don't claim to own all the wisdom about cricket. I have been wrong, not often, but I have been wrong. But the players need a voice, they need an avenue, they need to be heard, they need to be understood. And one person can't always be guaranteed to do that. There are two or three players who may relate to each other better than they might relate to another two or three players. Within each one of those cells, they are leaders. They are the ones who carry messages to us. And they don't always come directly either. They can come through Mane, they can come through Ramki, they can come through Frazer. They can come through one of the other players. It's not a single-lane highway, this communication thing.

Cricinfo - 'To be a good team, you need a strong leadership group'

New Employee Training - Is It Worth The Investment

When was the last time you were just ready to pounce on the workarea and start working? I think it must sulrey be your first day at the company. Well, there seems to be some facts behind this phenomenon. Read the article below to see some more facts.

New Employee Training - Is It Worth The Investment

So the next time you have a new teammate, be sure to train him first before assigning any tasks. This will surely pay back well during a crisis.

Want help on MsProject

having been into project planning for quite some time now, I was interested in checking if there are *really* helpful tutorials on basics of MSProject. Google did land me on this http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/Pub0009/LPMFrame.asp?CMD=ArticleSearch&PG=2
Agreed, MS too has its set of tutorials but the above link is much better and one can use it as a qucik start.
So what are u waiting for?

Politics in a Programming Environment

here is a nice article that deals with various personalities you might have met or will meet in near future in software environment :)

BTW, where do u fit in ?

Laxminarayanan Sampath's blog