Next time when you forget about something, you screw something up or something just go completely wrong don’t do things you usually do. Don’t make excuses. Don’t look for others to blame. Don’t make like there’s no problem. Just don’t.
Do one thing. Admit you failed. Admit you sucked at that and you know it’s your fault.
You’ll be surprised how different will be a reaction. More positive. More constructive. Just better.
You can’t be an expert in every area. The wider your area of competence is the more superficial is your knowledge. That’s by the way one of biggest issues higher management has to face when they get their promotions – they become generalists, they want it or not. However it really doesn’t matter if you’re an expert in one area or jest knowledgeable enough in many of them. You will face situations when you will play a role which doesn’t suit you very well.
Let it be some office politics played between vendor and client for a developer who’s accidentally in the room. Let it be contract negotiations with customer for a support services manager. Let it be cold calling for a technical guy who supports sales forces. Let it be deciding about code-level issues for a project manager. Let it be whatever.
Sometimes you can’t avoid being involved. Sometimes you can’t even avoid making decisions. Although you can limit negative impact those decisions have on you, your project and your team. The trick is simple. You just have to be aware when you suck. If you know you weaknesses and you consciously avoid entering the ground where you lack experience you won’t harm your side much.
If I suck at negotiations (and I really do) I don’t negotiate. I work hard to avoid situations when I’m a single person responsible for negotiating anything. And when I’m in the bigger team I just try to limit my participation to merits I came for. When someone in my team chooses other line of negotiations than I would, I take a step back. He knows better 9 times out of 10 as I suck at negotiations. Although not always I’m successful at that it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try. The whole thing is being aware of my weakness.
And what is your weak side? Are you aware of it?
One of measures of good management is a number of situations when people, not a manager, decide how to do things. When the manager allows people to make their decisions. Let them become accountable.
I’d like to see technical design document, but you decide what should be in, what out and how the whole thing will look like. Hey, you guys will be working on that later, not me.
We need formalized risk management in the project, but it’s you who decide how to run whole thing. You know a project team better. You know what will and what will not work.
We have some emergency in server room in another city and it has to be dealt with. Find a way to fix the problem and to minimize impact on other tasks. I don’t have all the data to make the best choice.
The more you hear those kinds the better manager you work with.
You have just done a post mortem after a project. How do think, was it good? Or it went rather poorly?
If it was a bad post mortem you can probably feel that. People didn’t share their thoughts about a project or they did it just to have you off their back. You received a bunch of generalities and nothing surprised you on the whole list. Yes, you’d know if it was bad.
How do you know if it was good? The answer is: 5 minutes after finishing post mortem you just can’t know. Most of people could have made their homework adding their thoughts what had been good, what had been bad and should be improved in future. There could have been a discussion during presentation of the list on a team meeting. And you still can’t know.
It will be a good post mortem if you take its results and implement some improvements. When lessons learned are actually learned. Unfortunately sometimes a great beginning – whole work with thinking over whole project – is thrown into the trash, because no one ever looks at the post mortem results and does anything to improve things. That’s why you can judge post mortems after at least few months.
We’ve just started a great post mortem after a big project. First step has been done, as the outcome conclusions point quite lot areas to improve. We’ll see if we can change it to a good post mortem.
How do you act when a crisis comes? Does it motivates you to find unused resources of energy and creativity or rather overwhelms and tires you? Answer yourself honestly. You are not on the interview.
How do your people act when a crisis comes? Who performs well and who don’t deal well with pressure? Think about that before you need to choose those who would help you in a difficult situation.
Ask people how they deal with stressful situations and virtually everyone will tell you that’s not a problem for him. Look at people working under pressure and at least half of them won’t perform very well. A differentiator here is a mixture of several traits including creativity, ambition, general attitude (pessimist/optimist) and engagement.
I don’t say everyone should have the mixture or not being that kind of person is bad. No. But there are roles out there which are much easier to fulfill when you deal well with crisis. Project manager, support engineer, fire fighter, marine... Oops, wrong branches.
Although some of us are more predisposed to deal with stress than others it can be learned to a certain level by anyone. And even when you’re not willing to learn that there are a bunch of positions where it isn’t needed as much. Most of development or quality assurance roles (although not all them) to take the most obvious ones.
When a crisis comes you look for people who will perform well in the situation. When a crisis comes it’s better to know whether you can count on each person in your team. Including yourself. Answering the questions stated at the beginning isn’t a waste of time.
When your boss or managers from other team want to give your people negative feedback, which is a nice way of describing good wigging, they shouldn’t go directly to your people. They should talk with you, right?
When a client is unhappy with performance of a couple of people in a project team they should talk directly with you. Shouldn’t they?
When there’s internal issue between people in a team you should be informed to prevent escalation and help to solve issue rightly. Don’t you think?
When you’re a manager or a leader of a team all attacks, even those which are aimed at your team-members, should hit you first. Then you decide whether it is justified and pass the message to an original addressee or you just dismantle that bomb isolating team from unfair accusations. You work as a lightning rod on steroids. Sometimes you put lightning into the ground and sometimes, whenever needed, you let some energy hit the house.
From my experience usually you protect your team as most of the time you know more about your team and you can just judge better. Sure, that does mean you’ll take some hits on your chest, but hey, that’s something they pay you for. And lightning rod doesn’t moan when another lightning hit.
You work in constant time-trouble. You barely have time to manage urgent things, as you totally focus on super-urgent ones. Your backlog grows day by day. As far as you do something around project management – you should be familiar with those situations.
Sure if we’d worked that way everyday we’d have been fired long time ago. That’s rather emergency than typical situation, although the emergency sometimes lasts for even a couple of weeks (months in extreme situations). After that period we’re left with no energy and huge number of overdue issues to resolve.
When you’re at that point typical reaction is to reject any new things and start to dig through the most important old stuff. You scan through your inbox looking for things your ass should be already kicked for. You try to recall those mega-important tasks your boss told you in a kitchen. Big effort is used to prioritize things.
In those situations I try to make a Do It Now Day. Any request/issue/you call it which comes is resolved instantly. You want that old document to be prepared? You got it. Schedule should be updated? I’m working on it. Now. I promised to check agreements with our contractors? Here it goes. No one wants anything more from me? Let’s go to the inbox. No priorities. Just one thing after another using any reasonable order. Can be from the newest to the oldest to give the first example. Overdue information to be send to a client. Done. A meeting to be organized. In your calendars. Updates in spreadsheet? Check the newest version.
I find a Do It Now Day works great whenever I have no tasks to complete which are highest possible priority. In other case the priority task will always come to you to kick you ass and the whole subtle plan fails. But if it works it really lets my productivity skyrocket. I just don’t waste any minute to unproductive context switching. I just cross out tasks from my virtual todo list. One after another.
Today, which was a Do It Now Day, I cleared my inbox from all urgent stuff for the first time in a month and I still had a time to lose a couple of darts games to fellow PM.
Try the Do It Now Day sometime and tell me how it went.
What did you do when your last project came to the (hopefully successful) end?
Did you write an email to the team saying how crucial had been their effort to complete the project?
Did you thank your team?
Did you bring a bottle of champagne to symbolically celebrate a success?
Did you praise the team to your bosses?
Did you invite the team to a party to reward their effort?
If not, well, you should seriously ask yourself why. Probably something is wrong either with you or with your team.
If you need to recruit a developer or two to a project which is just about to start in 6 weeks, well, you’re late. Way too late. You’ve screwed that one. If you’re finalizing a big contract and have no idea which PM would take it and you consider hiring another one, well, you’re late. Way too late.
Depending on law regulations and level of experience you look for recruitment process will take somewhere between 2 and 5 months. Count another 3 to 6 months for hired person to gather required company-specific knowledge and then finally you can expect them to show full potential.
Recruitment can’t be reactive. It has to be proactive. In other case you not only recruit under pressure of time but also don’t give your hires a chance to prepare them sufficiently. Nine times of ten it just won’t work well.
Whole avoiding hiring mistakes series.
You’re a project manager or you manage a team or you work in sales department or you’re a lead test engineer. For your bosses you have to prepare some reports. Sometimes they suck. Reports, not bosses. You get a bunch of remarks pointing inconsistent data, out-of-date information, wrong numbers or omissions.
On the other hand sometimes your reports are just fine. They’re fine even though you’ve spent much less time preparing them. Why is it so? Why reports sometimes suck?
When you prepare a report for yourself it’ll be good. You don’t need inaccurate data or out-of-date information. You most likely work on the report on-line. Whenever input data has changed report is adjusted.
When you prepare a report for others only, chances are good it’ll suck. You have to make up all the numbers because you don’t have them at hand. You have to reconstruct all changes which have happened since last time you prepared the report. And there are more interesting tasks to do than digging through all that crap anyway.
As far as your report bases on information you work with everyday for yourself it should be good. When you don’t work on the data regularly watch out – your reports may suck.
