So you have just been given the burden
opportunity of managing a high profile software development project
with an aggressive set of goals that are critical to your
organization’s future success. A true “do-or-die” project.
The expectations have been set high. The
time frame is short, the feature content is ground-breaking, the
competition is moving quickly to leap-frog over you, and the customers
have critical needs many of which have not yet been uncovered.
Cool! So what do you do now?
Certainly step one is to make an
assessment of the state of the project, where one of the key things you
are looking to learn is: what is within my control and what is outside
my control. You almost never have the luxury of putting everything on
hold while making that assessment, so this will need to be an in-flight
evaluation. (A later post will discuss this process.)
You will discover a dispiritingly large
number of things that are outside your control. But there is one thing
certain to be in your control: how you will behave, what example you will set for others.
Luckily that is the one thing that will
matter the most to your sanity. This is a project that will consume a
meaningful chunk of your life. You will accomplish more and feel better
about the experience if you have a directed conscious agenda for how you get things done.
Sometimes you get things done by
proactively defining what issues need attention and then pushing those
to the front-burner. Other times you will reactively respond to issues
raised by others. The accepted wisdom is: Proactive = Good, Reactive=Bad.
Two interesting points about this truism: first it is not always true;
second when it is true it is almost never fully put into action.
90% of the time falling into a reactive
management mode is the wrong thing to do. Yet there are exceptions, for
example if you have a solid team in place with good candidates banging
on the door to join, and your product is being caught up into a tornado
of user acceptance then it very well may make sense to respond to the
obvious issues that are right in front of your face and scramble up the
user acceptance curve as fast as you can go. Moore’s classic Inside the Tornado does a good job of describing this state.
Remember though riding the tornado is the
exception, even teams that do eventually “bang it out of the park” can
spend long stretches of time pushing to get all the right pieces in
place. The fact that you were just given the burden
opportunity of managing this project suggests there is something that
needs to be fixed before you get to that whirlwind of user acceptance.
If nothing needed changing no one would shake up such a critical
project by putting a new manager in place.
So you know change is required and it
makes sense that a conscious proactive effort is the right way to
approach that change. What then are the seductive forces that so often
pulls managers into a reactive mindset:
- Confusion of the urgent and the important
- Wish based planning
- Misunderstanding what it means to support your team
We will talk about each of the above in coming posts.
Having navigated around the above
landmines and completed your assessment of the state of the project you
are ready to start you informed proactive management of the team. What
now?
You can start by doing following the
time-honored maxim: “when in doubt – create a PowerPoint”. A
presentation covering the key topics has some advantages:
- by writing it down you are forced to think clearly about the issues
- the presentation format means a minimum number of words which means a
minimum amount of time spent on crafting and wordsmithing the document
itself
- having taken the time to create a “presentation” you will feel a moral
imperative to actually show it to somebody. No matter how salient your
insights they really have no value if you don’t test them, evolve them
and put them into practice, To do that you most communicate them early
and often, hording them for a special occasion tends not to work as
well
The topics to hit in this first presentation
depend on the specifics of the project. Generically there are three
things you will want to cover:
- Do you have the right people on the team?
- Have you articulated a set of defining questions/actions/results?
- How will you refine your process, so that with each turn of the wheel you get better and better at what you are doing?
We will talk about each of the above in coming posts.
copyright 2007 Kerry Champion
