Late Autumn Essay: “Why each time we end up in software hell.”

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

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Creating software is easy. It’s like you are building a plane and they forgot to provide you the building materials and you have to install both wings on one side according to the specification but no one knows how to do it and the plane is already flying and they already sold 10x more tickets that you can put in the plane and suddenly the fire starts….

Ok, I worked too long as the project manager, so forgive me for being too optimistic. Let’s imagine you have a new project. That would be a great journey! Because this time EVERYTHING WOULD BE DIFFERENT. You wanted to be different this time, but ended up as usual…in the hell. So what is causing this permanent hell? I tried to point out the most obvious causes.

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Collection Of My Favourite Project Manager’s Fails

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

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This time I would like to share my personal collection of manager’s errors which I have been made (at first I wanted to write “errors which I came across” pretending that other managers made them and I only witnessed these stupid errors)  for the last 7 years.

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Project status reports for juniors

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

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This week our PM intern asked me about the best way to write the project status reports. I like when interns ask me questions. I can spend one more working hour speaking about the question topic, work, clients, projects and the hard life of the project managers. If I am lucky I can get up to 7-8 questions per day, so I can be pretty busy with that hard work.

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Employee engagement: WTF is this?

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

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Reading the twitter feed over the weekend I came across several posts about the employee engagement. What is employee engagement? To me it sounds like the old-fashion term used by HR managers. They talk about it a lot, they even can attempt to perform some annual surveys to measure it. The definition of it can also a bit different for the HR manager, top manager and the developer, who is working in your project team.
Managers usually think of the engagement as the willingness of the employees to live their life at work.

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PMs guide to tricky questions: To rewrite, or not to rewrite?

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

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During the last several months our team came across 3 projects with the same issue – customers had the “almost done” project (usually customers state smth like “85%” or “95% done”) but they could not launch it, because the bug fixing process was endless or the “last crucial” feature was almost impossible to implement. Almost all of them were startups. We performed code review for them to be able to answer if we can handle it. From inside the products looked very similar. I think I even could tell all their development history by looking at these layers of code, covering each other like patches in a crazy quilt. We usually ended up with these clients arguing about one question – “Rewrite or do not rewrite all of that”. So I decided to write this post about the BIG rewriting.

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The fun is dead, long live the fun!

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

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Are you happy on Monday morning? What about Friday evening? We all know how office workers are waiting for the Friday evenings… Because work is hard. Because there is no more joy. Really? How people who are not feeling good about their work can produce something great?

If you ask any of your colleague when they felt joy at work they probably tell you about some challenge they faced and successfully solved or brainstorming, where their team produced a great idea. Also they can point out the time when they worked with a great passionate team of developers. Even if they were creating “one more social network”.

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Do Not Lose Your Face or PMs Guide to Tricky Questions: Why Use Fibonacci?

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

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We are all used to just implement the well-known “best practices”, not even thinking much about the reasons they were created. Especially in Agile. We like all those rituals, as they make us fill as we are going the right direction. Just follow the rituals and you’ll be ok.fibonacci copy 4PMs/Scrum Masters usually hate all these clever questions from the sarcastic developers, as the only thing they can answer is – “It’s obvious, stupid!”.

You can’t even explain, why 🙂 I want to write several posts about the most frequent questions managers can’t answer, so you are prepared and next time your team mentions it – you brains can shine in full managerial glory. Also I will use levels of the answers complexity, so you can always adjust them to your current audience.

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Decision making chaos organizing techniques for Project managers

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

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As the project manager I often found myself in the situation when everyone was looking at me and waiting my decision. As they really thought I am an expert or I know what to do. So every project manager should know some facilitation techniques to help team produce the decision or ideas. Because the smartest thing PM can do – allow the people who are really good at thinking to think the problem over and find the decision (I am talking about the team). PM should be a good facilitator and have a list of hand-on practices to help the team.

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What Is Wrong With Management By Objectives?

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When I was introduced by the management by objectives during my first working day in one of the companies I worked as the project manager I was impressed – I was so keen on measuring and controlling everything. “It was something I read about in management books and now I will see how it works in the real life!” – that is how I was thinking. Guys told me that they successfully used MBO for all the departments, so I expected the great results in the next quarter…But smth went wrong. We tried to adjust and redefine the objectives next quarter, but it seemed impossible to win this game – each time we redefined the objectives  the system and people somehow could hack it and we just could not keep up with that speed of “hacking” – our suggestions were not good enough each time.

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How to understand developers are really working hard: manager’s guide

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

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Have you ever met the manager who is satisfied with the speed of development? I, personally, not. But sometimes it is even worse than just the speed…I had so many  educational talks with the customers about the development work – why you can’t code 8 hours in a row and why sitting and staring at the wall or even playing table tennis can be a work too for the developer, as he is thinking over the issue during that time. Once one of the top managers entered my room shouting “They are not working! They are browsing Internet!!! What we can do with that?”

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