The job of a manager is very different from the job of an individual contributor. As a manager, you are responsible for your entire team’s work, not only your own. You are accountable for the performance of your organization. You have to enable your team to produce more jointly then what they would be capable of producing alone.

According to Peter Drucker, the guru of modern management, the five elements of management are:

1. Set objectives
2. Organize
3. Motivate and communicate
4. Measure
5. Develop people

All of the elements above are important. Unfortunately, many managers get themselves so busy that they forget about developing their team and themselves. As a manager, you get your work done through other people. And this means that you’ll be meeting with people, both formally and informally most of your time. Here are some of the meetings that you’ll need to have to succeed:

1. Weekly one-on-one meetings with each one of your direct reports. An important part of this meeting is developing the people who report to you.
2. Weekly project review meeting for all projects that are your responsibility.
3. Weekly staff meeting with all your direct reports. The purpose of this meeting is to ensure that your entire team is on the same page with the issues that affect your organization.
4. Monthly department staff meeting (if you have multiple managers reporting to you). During this meeting you have a chance to communicate with the entire organization those topics that pertain to all of them.

The following are resources that you can benefit from as you are developing yourself and your team.

Podcasts

The following podcasts are excellent learning resources:

Manager Tools: Mark Horstman and Michael Auzenne have been producing this podcast since 2005. They provide ready-to-use, practical, and detailed advice on topics ranging from “How to do a handshake” to “How to do your one-on-ones.”

Career Tools: Also by Mark & Mike of Manager Tools. Detailed, practical advice on managing your career one day at a time.

HBR Ideacast: published by the Harvard Business School, provides commentary and advice on a variety of business topics.

Management Books

There are many books targeting the new manager, so picking one is not so easy. Here are some to help you get started:

First, Break all the Rules, by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. The authors report the findings of a multi-year Gallup survey. Their book represents the conclusions drawn from interviews with eighty thousand managers representing one million employees. Their teams sifted through the data to find which criteria separate the best from the rest. Their advice helps you focus your first actions, and provides a roadmap of what to concentrate on as a manager.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey. Free Press. 2004. The undisputed front-runner work  with lessons for developing yourself and your team. Covey’s words of wisdom are just as true today as they were over 20 years ago when he wrote them.

The Essential Drucker, by Peter Drucker. Harper Paperbacks. 2008. This is a good summary of Drucker’s work. He is the “guru of gurus” when it comes to management. He is able to clearly articulate topics that others struggle mightily with. You learn from him about just about any management topics that you will come across during your career. Feel free to pick up any other book by him, including one of the thickest ones, called: Management.

For more books look on my reading list.

Magazines

Magazines may be old media, however the following have good web editions as well. The Harvard Business Review keeps you up-to-date with both academic and hands-on practitioner articles. The Strategy-Business magazine adds to the mix consultant written articles with sound advice. The Economist magazine keeps you up-to-date on world business and politics.

Conclusion

There is an abundance of material available to help you become a great manager. Commit yourself to using them. You may have a lot to learn, however it will be a lot of fun. It is only appropriate to end with Drucker’s advice to all of us: you accumulate knowledge with one reason in mind, to use it to help your team get better results:

“The ultimate test of management is performance. Achievement rather than knowledge remains, of necessity, both aim and proof.”

Even if you manage to keep yourself and your team focused on one project at a time, you still have to ensure that you keep your day “defragmented.” Let’s suppose that you intend to do 6 hours of work today on your project. You can achieve the 6 hours total if you work:

1. 40 blocks of time, 9 minutes each, or
2. 4 blocks of time, 90 minutes each.

You will get way more done working the 4 blocks of 90 minutes. The simple reason is that you have minimized your context switches. Therefore you could focus on the task and finish it. Don’t take my word for it: try it out yourself today.

Unfortunately, we seem to have a hard time measuring productivity. Economists have a straightforward measure of productivity: the value of the output divided by the time required to create it, expressed in dollars per hour. We need to figure out how to make this definition operational for software developers. A component of this measure is time.

Let’s start with Effective On-Task Time or EOT. This is the time that you spend creating the deliverable that is the target of your task. You keep this number pure, devoid of anything that didn’t directly contribute to the output. Your objective is to measure the time that the task took. You can find references to the concept of “Task Time” in a number of places. Watts Humphrey writes that “task time is what engineers spend working on scheduled tasks.”

And herein lies the heart of the matter: EOT is about working on something that you planned to work on. It is about your ability to meet a commitment. The plan is your commitment. The time that it took to complete the task is reflective of your ability to understand the work required to meet that commitment.

EOT doesn’t include time for any activities that don’t matter to the work of creating that deliverable. The interruptions from your co-worker, phone calls, and breaks don’t count. Some of the activities may tangentially work toward it, but your objective is not to account for every minute, but rather to count those distinct minutes when you know that you are moving the needle forward.

At the end of the day, EOT matters first and foremost for you. It helps you understand how good you are, how well you understand your work. It builds your confidence. When you repeatedly make aggressive plans and meet them, you know that you are becoming the engineer that you always wanted to be: outstanding.

References:

• Drucker, Peter. Management Challenges for the 21st Century. Harper Business. New York, NY. 1999.
• Humphrey, Watts. Winning with Software. Addison Wesley. Boston, MA. 2002.

Many people have a fear of deadlines. They are as frightened by them, as they are of speaking in public. For developers, the mastery of both can be a critical success factor. For managers, they are a survival skill.

What happens if you have a problem with deadlines? Maybe right now you have difficulty meeting the deadlines thrown at you, and you have given up on being able to meet them. Not meeting deadlines can be detrimental to your business and your career. So, how do you get out of this?

The age old advice is right on the mark: start out by setting small deadlines that you can meet. Get early wins. The only way you can get better at meeting deadlines is… by actually setting and meeting deadlines.

Along the way it helps if you remind yourself as to why are you doing this: you are getting better at meeting deadlines, because deadlines are nothing more than commitments. The world runs on commitments. Both your business and personal life depend on commitments. Your ability to succeed depends on your ability to make and meet commitments. Other people count on your output. You shouldn’t let them down. And you count on commitments from others. Once the chain reaction of missed commitments and deadlines starts, the endeavor can spiral out of control.

What is a good first commitment? Select a deliverable that can be done in 30 minutes or less. Make a commitment to yourself at the beginning of the day that you complete the work by the end of the day. That’s your first deadline. Here is an example: “I provide feedback to John on the white paper by 5 pm today.” Repeat this for a week.

Once you successfully meet your deadline every day for a week, then set yourself a slightly more ambitious goal. Make the next deadline one that involves between 5 to 10 mini deadlines to deliver on a more complex deliverable (requiring about 5 hours of total work). Then work yourself up to 20, 40, 50 hours of commitments involving many intermediate deadlines. Meet each one, and see your confidence grow.

As you set and meet commitments the word will get out that you are a person to trust with projects. You will become every more successful. And you will see your career take off.

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PS: The Deadline is a book of fiction by Tom DeMarco. The author illustrates many issues surrounding software development. The main character of the book, Mr. Webster Tompkins, the project manager, sets up three teams for each product to develop the same system with different methods. Make time to read it.