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

I attended an Organizational Change BoF last evening at the AYE conference. Among other things, we talked about why it is that some managers fail to act when there are many signs of big problems.


I see three conditions that are prequisites for change (at any level):

People have to recognize the situation. One person at the group told a compnay that was losing billions, but kept cancelling projects that produced revenue, and funded projects that failed. The problem was obvious to anyone who *could* see. But the senior managers had a mental model of operating as a monopoly, and updated neither their mental models nor their corporate accounting systems. So they didn't see it.

People have to believe it is possible to change the situation in some way. If people don't believe it's possible to change, they are paralyzed. THere are some things can't be changed, that are out of the sphere of influence or control. People often forget that even when they can't change external circumstances, they can change their response.

People need to have some idea of how to shift the situation. WHen people have no earthly idea how to shift the situation, they become paralyzed. So paralyzed that they don't seek help in the form of new ideas or expertise. Or they grasp at the first silver bullet that's offered (which often makes the situation worse). Or they do nothing.

So how do you create the conditions for change in your organization? Stay tuned. I'll be blogging about that in the next weeks.

Labels: change, management

posted by Esther Derby at 7:17:00 AM

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Most of the time I hear people talking about trust, they are talking about trust between team members. It's equally important to have trust between managers and team members. In fact, the relationship between an employee and his/her manager consistently shows up as a key factor in retention.

One of the ways that managers in the middle of agile transitions break trust is by giving a decision to the team and then taking it away, as in Tale of a Yo-Yo Manager.

Labels: agile, management

posted by Esther Derby at 5:51:00 AM

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...in blogging for a while and took a break.


Anders Vesterberg read Behind Closed Doors and has some nice things to say on his blog.

Simple principles

Rothman’s and Derby’s main tenet is that the principles of good management are not that difficult to understand. They discuss for example one-on-ones, portfolio management, feedback, coaching and delegation. The thing is to consistently and reliably perform these practises week after week.

Not that difficult, but not always easy. Systems drive behavior, and it's not always easy to recognize and counter act the affects when you're in the thick of it.


I'll meet Anders in person in January at PSL in Sweden. His review was an awfully nice electronic introduction :-).

Labels: management, workshops

posted by Esther Derby at 10:26:00 AM

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Last week I wrote about a middle manager who didn't consider renegotiating a low value project because he'd given his word to his boss.

The response to the post was consistent:

Ken Flowers said,

I have to assume that if the project doesn't make sense to the middle manager, it also wouldn't make sense to the VP. If I were the VP and found out that my manager was doing a project that he knew was ineffective, I would be really angry. I would expect him to talk to me about it first. I pay him for his judgment.

Dwayne Phillips posted:

Beware of promising things that are out of your personal control.

"I promise to look at this and get back to you"

"I promise to do what I CAN"

"I promise to investigate what this project means to you, me, my group, and our company."

On Ken's site, James Todhunter left this comment:

Concealing material information demonstrates a fundamental lack of integrity. I wouldn't want such a person on my team. I could never trust their input or judgement.

It's clear that a middle manager who continues down the wrong path because he "gave his word" is undermining how other people view his integrity.

What happens if we replace "middle manager" with "senior manager" and "boss" with "client" ?

I talked to an executive recently who promised a big client that his company would deliver a special project for them.

Unfortunately, he made a promise on the basis of incomplete information. Once he talked to his development group and ran the numbers, it turned out the work he promised will have a negative return on investment. And it's a double whammy: doing the low value work will delay doing higher value work, and cause the group to miss other targets.

But the executive refuses to consider going back to his client to explain the situation and renegotiate. He gave his word, and he feels his integrity is at stake.

How does the change in position and authority effect your response about the integrity question?

Labels: management

posted by Esther Derby at 9:40:00 AM

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An interesting interview with Jerry Weinberg here, at the Citerus site.

Some excerpts:

Q: You must have seen a whole bunch of ideas, about how to best do software development, grow and die over all those years. Do you see the agile movement as a pendulum swing or is it a move in a new direction?

A: How about a pendulum swing in a new direction? It's a pendulum swing because approximately every decade, there's a fresh movement to "solve the programming problem." High-level languages, structured programming, object-oriented programming, ...

But it's a new direction because it's the first movement to focus largely on social processes rather than purely intellectual ones. For that reason, I believe, it has more hope for success than the earlier movements, each of which made a little progress, then largely ran out of steam before achieving its grand promises.

Of course, agile won't achieve all its grandest promises either, given the conservative nature of human beings, but that's all right. After another dozen decades or so of incremental improvement, we'll begin to see some really fine software development. Well, I shouldn't say "we," because none of us will see them, but at least our great-great-grandchildren will be able to look back at us and laugh at our crude methods.

Q: If you're the J.K Rowling of software development, who's Harry P then?A: Well, first of all, I'm not a billionaire, so it's probably not correct to say I'm the J.K. Rowling of software development. But if I were, I suspect my Harry Potter would be a test manager, expected to do magic but discounted by software developers because "he's only a tester." As for Voldemort, I think he's any project manager who can't say "no" or hear with Harry is telling him.

Labels: agile, management

posted by Esther Derby at 12:04:00 PM

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I've been watching a discussion on the Agile Project Management yahoo group, which poses the question, "Does everyone in agile need to be above average?"

The question behind the question is, "Does agile need extremely competent people in order for it to work?"

When I read stuff like this, I wonder "What method of building software works without competent people?" It's a puzzle.

Which brings me to this snipped from Bob Sutton (via Jason Yip):

Great systems are more important than great people. The notion that you are doomed to mediocrity if you can’t hire the very best people has little empirical support. Yes, there are big differences between the most talented people and the next level down in most occupations. But systems are more important. Toyota beats the competition as a result of a superior system; Men’s Wearhouse and McDonald’s don’t hire people that are much different from their competitors, but their systems explain their long-term dominance more than their people. As Jeff Pfeffer says, many organizations seem to have “brain vacuums” to turn people who seem to be smart into bumbling fools. Even the most brilliant person is doomed to fail in a bad system, and seemingly mediocre people can become stars in a great system.

Agile methods are a system that can help people perform better.

One agile coach I know tells a story about the first agile pilot in her organization. Someone in senior management didn't want the pilot to succeed. So he sent her all the "poor performers" for the pilot team. But they ended up outshining expectations and did a fine job of delivering valuable working software.

Further, focus on individual talent (and focus on individual performance management) takes focus off improving the system.

(I'll say this now, because someone always asks at this point "So you're saying we should hire incompetent dodos?" No, I'm not saying, "hire dodos." Hire competent individuals who are a good fit for the organization's culture. Focus on improving the system to improve results. Focus on individual performance for career development. Give feedback to help individuals become more effective.)

Labels: agile, management

posted by Esther Derby at 2:12:00 PM

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Every so often, I share my views on pay-for-performance and annual performance appraisals on this blog. My experience is that pay-for-performance and annual performance appraisals--contrary to popular belief--actually hurt performance and results, rather than driving higher performance.

So I was interested to learn, via Bob Sutton's blog, that Jeffrey Pfeffer (co-author of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management and author of several other books on management)was called to testify before Congress on the matter of pay-for-performance.

Pfeffer's testimony walks through the assumptions underlying pay-for-performance,

Money is an important motivator.

Motivation is the issue for enhancing performance.

Individual performance can be reliably and unambiguously assessed.

Individual, rather than collective, rewards are important because of the need to overcome free-riding problems.

Differentiation in individual rewards, a necessary and frequently explicit consequence of individual pay-for-performance systems, leads to higher unit performance.

....and lays out the evidence related to those assumptions. (They don't hold true when you actually look at the evidence.)

He also points out that when the explicit and implicit message is that people (and their contributions) aren't valued, tweaking the compensation system won't overcome the depressive effects on performance.

If the senior managers at a company really want to improve performance, tinkering with the pay system isn't the way to go about it. Addressing the underlying culture and quality of management is.

Although the list of high commitment or high performance work practices differs slightly among authors and studies, most such lists include: a) sustained investment in training and development, including job rotation, both formal and on-the-job training, and a tendency to promote from within as a consequence of the successful internal development of skill and people; b) an egalitarian culture in which formal status distinctions are downplayed, salary differences across levels are less than in the general economy, and in which people feel as if their contributions are important and valued; c) delegation of decision making responsibility so that skilled and developed people can actually use their gifts and skills to make real decisions; d) high pay to reduce turnover and attract the best people, coupled with rewards that share organizational success with its members; and e) employment security and a policy of mutual commitment, so that the workforce does not fear for the outcomes of events over which it has no control and instead, feels reciprocally committed to the employer.

He ends his testimony with this statement:

We should implement what we know, rather than what we hope, or wish, might be true.

Read the full testimony here.

Labels: management

posted by Esther Derby at 7:50:00 AM

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I came across a spate of articles lately proposing different reasons why some managers fail. The reasons ranged from rising to their level of incompetence, becoming corrupted by power, promotion by favoritism, and not being a "born leader."

I suspect the reasons are less nefarious.

I suspect managers fail because they haven't developed the skills to be a good manager.

I don't buy that successful managers are "born leaders." I believe that successful managers have skills and abilities related to both management and leadership behaviors. And, my experience is that except for those rare birds who just don't like working with other people--people can learn the skills and develop the abilities to be successful managers. (Assuming reasonable emotional adjustment, self-awareness, and the ability to inspect and adapt their own behavior.)

Of course, it's harder to learn those skills and develop those abilities when there aren't good role models, and when a new manager doesn't have coaching and support to improve.

So if you or someone you know would like to work on their management skills and abilities, consider coming to the Managing One-on-One workshop Johanna and I are offering April 23-25, right here in lovely Minnesota (the show should be gone by then).

Labels: management

posted by Esther Derby at 8:13:00 AM

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Ken Flowers suggests answering these three questions to clarifiy your leadership philosophy (which he came across on George Ambler's blog):

What you believe about people ...
What you believe about life ...
What you believe makes groups and organizations effective ...

I'd add these questions:

How closely do my actions match what I say I believe?

If my actions don't match my beliefs, how is that working for me?

If I really believed what I wrote, how would I act?

(You can read Ken's answers to the first three questions on his blog.)

Labels: management

posted by Esther Derby at 5:48:00 PM

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Bob Sutton points to more research about prima donnas, prima dons, and jerks-at-work:

Boris [Groysberg ] wrote me a pair of detailed notes about a series of case studies that he has done that track Lehman Brothers’ research department over a 20 year period. Boris reports that “the rule” [the no asshole rule] helped fuel the rise of the research department there, and then when it was abandoned, was linked to performance problems, and when it was reinstated, performance again improved.

It seems that while we love the myth of the brilliant-but-difficult star, the data doesn't support our belief. Of course, there are exceptions. There are cases where one brilliant person is the pivot point for corporate success. But mostly it's just bad behavior that supresses overall results.

Labels: management

posted by Esther Derby at 8:18:00 AM

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