"Poor management can increase software costs more rapidly than any other factor." (Barry Boehm)

Last week, I had a bad bout of MDD -- Motivational Deficit Disorder.

MDD is characterized by difficulty focusing, short attention span, and general lassitude.

Okay. I made up MDD. But I had all the symptoms.

I was present and accounted for in my office eight hours a day, but really, I didn't get a whole lot done. I spent a lot of time checking email, reading the paper, wandering around the internet, and playing with my dog.

Once I started a task --my newsletter, insights, will go out in July as planned!-- I was able to finish it, but boy-oh-boy it was hard to get started.

Now that I've recovered, I'm reflecting my week of MDD.

1) Any one who thinks car-in-parking-lot or butt-in-seat is a proxy measurement for productivity is fooling him/herself. It is entirely possible to be in the office and accomplish nothing. It's even possible to look busy much of the time and get nothing worthwhile done.

If you want to know about productivity, measure results.

2) I suspect that one of the reasons I succumbed to MDD last week was lack of down time. I have been working steadily for weeks. I've had some big projects and pressing deadlines. The week before last I attended and presented at the IAF conference, which lasted through the weekend. So I didn't even have the weekend off.

When people don't have formal down time -- weekends and vacations -- they take downtime in situ, while logging butt-in-seat time in the office. It may look like someone is working extra hours but they probably aren't getting as much done as they would working 40 hours a week with evenings and weekends off. (There's also the matter of increased errors due to fatigue, which will reduce productivity further).

If you want productivity, ensure people are working at a sustainable pace and have adequate time off.

3) Most humans, even goal driven humans, occasionally succumb to MDD. That's life. Individual productivity varies.

posted by Esther Derby at 12:49:00 PM  

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fa-cil-i-tate. verb. (1) to make easier or less difficult; to help forward (an action, a process, etc.). (2) to assist the progress of (a person).

--Random House College Dictionary Revised Edition

I spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday in Ottawa at the annual IAF Conference. This conference brings together people from all over the world and from all sectors -- public, non-profit, community, private.

The common thread is helping groups building shared awareness and sustainable agreements.

Facilitators provide process to help groups identify problems, create alternatives, surface assumptions, reach decisions.

Again this year, there was a fairly good contingent of folks who work in the software world. Yes, software.

One of the things I like about this conference is that people share *in detail* what they do that works. And there's almost always a session on spectacular failures, so we can all learn from those experiences, too.

I did a session Project Retrospectives, and it was very fun!

posted by Esther Derby at 9:28:00 PM  

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Laurent Bossavit posts a discussion of the reasons to deep six the status meeting.

The problem ? A status meeting's traditional format has the person who convened the meeting, a manager usually, work through a list of items. They are items of importance to the manager - not to the people attending the meeting as a group. Each item is usually about the work of one or more subordinates, who report their status to the manager for each item which concerns them.

Such a meeting is a waste of time to the persons not concerned by each item. It is humiliating when it is primarily arranged to demonstrate the manager's power over others; when it serves to show wasting other people's time as a manager's prerogative.

I met a manager who was looking for a way to make his two-hour status meetings more interesting... he had noticed that people looked bored. When I asked about using standup meetings in conjunction with one-on-one meetings, he replied that it was more convenient for him to hold one meeting.

I'm not sure he had the conscious intent to show his power by wasting people's time in status meetings, though I can see how it feels that way.I suspect (but do not know) that this manager was not aware, and had not though about how it might appear to others.

I suspect that most managers are repeating what they have seen done before. They are following the time-honored (if mistaken) tradition of the weekly status meeting. Perhaps managers who stick to the old ritual of boring status meetings do not know there is more effective way. Perhaps it's a lack of imagination.

Short project focused standup meetings are for the benefit of the team.

Managers usually get more useful information -- and can do the feedback and coaching part of their job -- in one-on-ones.

(As I've said before.)

posted by Esther Derby at 6:29:00 AM  

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All retrospectives, all the time. At least in this post.

Keith Ray posts this snippet about self-directed improvement paths on his blog. (See previous post on Keith's Project Management tip on Reforming Project Management.)

Retrospectives are an excellent vehicle to help teams start on sefl-directed improvement. In a (well run) retrospective, the team looks at what changes are most important to them and designs interventions that fit where they are and where they want to go.

HBS Working Knowledge posts an article How Your Company Can Learn From Mistakes by Stever Robbins.

I found the questions Stever suggests interesting, and will file them away for future adaptation:

For each “bad” action, ask the team:

What choices could we have made to avoid the bad action?
What choices did we make that should have been avoided?
What misinterpretations of events, motivations, and actions did we make that led to the bad action?
What were the correct interpretations?
What do all these imply about what we should and shouldn’t do going forward?

For each “good” action, ask:

What did we do to cause this?
Is there anything we refrained from doing that allowed this to happen?
Did our interpretation of events, motivations, and actions help this action come to pass?
What do all these imply about what we should do and shouldn’t do going forward?

I have a different take on bringing in emotions and emotional issues. When we leave those out, were missing vital information. I almost always do a "seismograph" in retrospectives for projects longer than a few weeks (OTOH, I sometimes do seismographs for projects that last only a day). The seismograph shows how people responded to events....and provides clues on where the real juice is for a particular project community.

The Industrial XP list has been talking about the "Prime Directive" for the last couple of days.

The Prime Directive (from Norm Kerth's book, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews) says:

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and believe that everyone did the best job he/she could give what he/she knew at the time, his or her skills and abilities, the resources available and the situation at hand.

I try to stand in this space as a matter of personal values. It's not always easy, and it's not always my first reaction. I believe that most people want to do a good job. Sometimes people don't know what to do or how to do it. I find it helps me to a more generous interpretation of others' actions.

And I stand in this space for purely pragmatic reasons: It's very hard for me to influence someone -- or learn from that person's experiences and perspective -- when I've flipped the bozo bit on them.

Within the context of a retrospective, the Prime Directive helps people stay out of the blame-fest -- a necessary condition for learning.

Finally, I'm off to the International Association of Facilitators Conference in Ottawa for the next few days. I'll leading a session on .... Project Retrospectives.

Back on Monday.

posted by Esther Derby at 9:52:00 PM  

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My pal Keith Ray sent this Project Management tip into Hal Macomber:

007: Create A Habit of Self-Directed Improvement

Keith Ray reminds us that an intention and routine of improvement matters more than any specific improvement methods. Too often a bureaucratic intent to adopt a standard approach runs head-on into individuals' and teams' intentions to improve.

This may seem contrary to what we've read about either the Japanese firms' programmatic approaches or western firms' lean/six sigma black belts. While training and methodology can contribute to results, getting in a habit of improving seems to make more of a difference.

There are three aspects to creating the improving habit:

Establish and re-establish clear connections to the purpose of getting on and staying on an improving path.

Provide coherent actions from supervision and company leaders that value and expect the improving habit.

Engage with others who share the same intention for learning and support.

Still, this may not be enough. The leading impediment to adopting this or any other change is a conflicting intention. (More on this later.) For now, set a good example by getting yourself on an improving path and invite others to join you.

Submitted by C. Keith Ray while reading the book Lean Software Development by Mary and Tom Poppendieck.

I agree with the premise that setting a path for improvement can be more effective than "programmatic" or bureaucratic approaches. I've seen the results that come when teams consistently perform retrospectives.

Sometimes the results are visible -- explicitly adding unit testing as a development task or creating a bug report template. Sometimes the results are more subtle: team members gain a better understanding of how their work fits in the big picture -- which leads fewer blind-sides from uncommunicated decisions or changes with in the team, more generosity in interpreting others behavior and more support within the team.

I was struck by the phrase "Provide coherent actions from supervision and company leaders that value and expect the improving habit."

I recently spoke with a manager, Sharon, who was charged (by top management) with supporting learning within a large project driven organization. A lofty goal. Top management is talking the talk.

In Sharon's organization, every sanctioned activity has a project number, and employees are expected to charge nearly 100% of their time. The requirement for an explicit charge number may make the organization look efficient and focused on paper. Charge numbers may prevent rogue projects (possibly), and lollygagging (probably not). (There is no project number -yet- for "organizational learning" or "starting on an improvement path." )

One coherent management actions is providing for time and space for project teams to consider the current state and what they could to do make it better. Near 100% chargeable time may look good on paper, but it robs the organization of the ability to improve.

posted by Esther Derby at 6:55:00 AM  

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From an article by Tom Krattenmaker in HBS Working Knowledge: Career Effectiveness: In Search of the Perfect Meeting:

"The biggest complaints I hear about meetings are that they're unproductive, that they last too long, that they're unnecessary," says Frances A. Micale, an Atlanta-based consultant and trainer, and the author of Not Another Meeting! A Practical Guide for Facilitating Effective Meetings (Oasis, 2002).

"Yet at their best, meetings can mean everything to an organization," she says. "If you can consistently have good, productive meetings, your company is going to perform better. I don't think a lot of people think of it this way, but better meetings mean better communication and better decisions, and that's going to have a direct impact on the bottom line."

I wrote a little riff on meetings a while back, as did Steve Smith. And a few years back, Steve and I did a tutorial on effective meetings at the SM conference. I ran into a guy who was in that tutorial last week... he reported that he'd implemented much of what we taught, and it's made a big difference.

Krattenmaker covers much of the same territory Steve and I did -- but in Harvard Management Communication Letter, so now you'll listen right? :-)

Also see: effectivemeetings.com

posted by Esther Derby at 11:59:00 AM  

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One-on-one meetings are a vastly underrated management technique... well done one-on-one meetings, that is. I find them useful particularly when the group I'm managing is a group, not a tight-knit team, but I've used them when I was managing project teams, too.

In a 1:1 meeting you can uncover progress and obstacles, help people make course corrections, coach and give feedback.

As a manager, I heard about problems and obstacles in 1:1 meetings that I never would have heard about in group status meetings When you know about obstacles, you can work on removing them. And that's part of your job.

1:1 meetings are a place to discuss salary and promotions issues and professional development goals

When you meeting weekly or bi-weekly with the people who report to you, year end evaluations aren't a big overwhelming deal. You've got an on-going record of accomplishments, issues, and coaching discussions. Neither you nor the employee is in for nasty surprises.

If you are working with a small tight-knit team, or an agile team, you may want to use daily standup meetings to cover most project related daily planning, status and obstacles. But you'll still need to meet with folks periodically to find out what's going on with goals, coaching, and so forth.

I would advise, however, that you not follow the example of my old boss; keep the time for the folks who report to you. Going through the inbox, reading email, taking calls -- these all send a signal to the other person that you're not really listening, and that the person who reports to you isn't worth your undivided attention even for 20-30 minutes a week. That's a sorry message for a manager to send.

posted by Esther Derby at 5:16:00 PM  

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This from Keith Ray, after reading Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith:

"Management" is mostly invisible - the worse management is, the more visible it is. The best managers (I'm told) often seem like they are neither busy nor doing "any work," because they've done a lot of work to keep potential problems from turning into actual problems. Managers could do with reading this book, considering their bosses, peers, customers, suppliers, and direct reports as "customers", all of whom to maintain good relationships with.

This matches my experience.

Managers who are busy putting out fires or attending meetings (we're not talking 1:1 meetings with staff here), are visibly busy, but not doing the work that would get them out of crisis mode or develop the capabilities of their staff.

Managers who appear to be not busy have time to observe, reflect, think, and plan appropriate interventions to increase the effectiveness of the group. They know what's going on with the people who report to them, build on strengths, remove obstacles, and work to prevent working in crisis mode.

I had one manager who was so busy she ran between meetings and had to take important phone calls during 1:1 meetings because "it was the only time she had." I planned my dental visits to coincide with those 1:1 meetings. It was a much better use of my time, and more pleasant, too.

posted by Esther Derby at 7:03:00 AM  

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