Office Worker Essentials
A century ago the majority of people were employed in manual labor: either on a farm or in industry. A small minority worked as professionals. They were the early knowledge workers. Their primary tools were the pen and paper. How times have changed. Today every knowledge worker has a myriad of tools at their disposal and they are expected to master them.
Resources for a New Manager
The life of a new manager is full of challenges. You, like many people before you, might've gotten into this role without any management training. This article aims to assist you in building your own management curriculum to help you on your new journey.
Humans, Multitasking, and Context Switching
The modern age demands from all of us to deliver more in shorter time. The easy solution to this problem is to multitask. However, as an article by Roger Brown points out: 'Multitasking Gets You There Later.' At the bottom of the article he provides a good list of references as well.
Effective On-Task Time
Software development is knowledge work. We use knowledge, take input as knowledge, and the output we produce is knowledge. Our output is executable knowledge. According to Peter Drucker, the 21st century's defining characteristic is knowledge work. We, software engineers, are in the thick of things.
Mastering Deadlines
In Living with Constraints, I touched on a topic that is on the mind of software people: managers and developers alike. The time constraint, also known as The Deadline, is of particular angst for some technical people.
IEMC '07
The 2007 International Engineering Management Conference was held near Austin, at Hyatt Lost Pines Resort from July 30 through August 1. I was a panelist on the Peter Drucker Leadership Panel.
Peter Drucker on Software Management
Well, Peter Drucker didn't write about software management, but he did write about management. In his book _Managing in a Time of Great Change_ he has a chapter called _The Five Deadly Business Sins_. Here is what Drucker has to say...
Elements of Agility: Levels of Initiative
When agility comes up in conversations, the typical topics are methods, techniques, or process, but rarely _initiative_. Even though initiative, more than other factors, determines if a team can perform at maximum performance. These days an organization cannot be competitive if its people are at levels 1 or 2 on the initiative scale.
Managers Need Tools
It seems that all professionals have their tools, but somehow managers were forgotten. No more! There is a great podcast to provide the tools that managers need to do their jobs better called Manager Tools.
How I Got Started With Management
It must be an inner drive that I like to see things done, and that I have taken up interest in getting things done from an early age. As far as I remember, I have always headed a little group and worked on some sort of project that I wanted to see completed, preferebly sooner, then later. I have a natural inclination toward leadership. Several groups have appointed me to become their leader, and I took up leadership positions on my own.
Software Process: Here is why I got interested
You know the feeling: you are assigned to a new project and asked to give an “estimate” of the length of time the new project will take. You think about it for a moment—or for a day—and then give the date. But you have no confidence in the date, so before you give it you double it, or triple it, hoping that the new date will give you just enough time to take care of most of the unexpected things that might come up.
Why Focus On Software Development Performance?
As software permeates every aspect of our daily lives, more software is needed to support our society’s ever increasing needs. For the manager or executive overseeing software-heavy projects: it is easy to feel overwhelmed. Missed commitments, defective software releases, and almost never ending user satisfaction issues seem to be the norm...