Project Management

How To Know Your Side Project Is Ready To Be A Startup. Put Your Best People On Your Most Boring Challenges - Michael Schrage. By Michael Schrage | 12:51 PM November 11, 2011 At a recent not-for-attribution dinner with several (exceptionally) successful internet entrepreneurs, the conversation quickly turned to talent. How do you get the best value from your best people over time? The majority insisted that top talent’s time should focus on the highest value-added problems and opportunities. Align the best people against the biggest challenges that only they can surmount. Let them create new game-changing algorithms; let them transform user experience. Above all, your top talent should amplify, extend and consolidate what makes your business model work. But that’s where the contrarian minority view kicked in — and I agree with it. What talent-loving entrepreneurial CEO would assign his best people to such awful tasks?

This seems counterintuitive. Put your most talented people on these most boring and stultifying issues. That’s a big win. Tech Leads will Rule the World. At a Google office the other day, I heard someone say “Tech Leads make all the decisions at Google.” They also make the decisions here at Assembla. If you do distributed software development, they should be making the decisions at your company A Technical Lead or Tech Lead is a software engineer who also leads a team.

The Tech Lead picks the important tasks, answers questions, solves problems, assembles a release, helps new team members – and does development. We think that distributed teams require Tech Leads. These teams communicate with code and other deliverables. Why don’t we use Project Managers or Scrum Masters? It’s a tough job, and some say that engineers can’t do it.

There are many people doing Tech Lead jobs today. However, few people are trained for the Tech Lead role. We think that good developers can become good Tech Leads by practicing a small set of new skills. Tech Leads have always been important for Assembla. Tech Leads are also important for business managers. Tech Lead Checklist to Kick your Team into Gear. Tech Lead Checklist to Kick your Team into Gear Posted by Andy Singleton on Wed, Aug 04, 2010 We recommend that a distributed team have a driver that we call a "Technical Lead". The Tech Lead manages the ticket list, answers questions about engineering, and works with the developers to get stuff done. This person needs to be both a developer, and a manager. It is not an easy job to do, or to recruit for. However, it's not a hard job to learn - if you get the right guidance. Require written standup reports each day.

Review all tickets for the current milestone. Look at new developer applications and say who you are interested in. I realize that some scrum masters will say that this is too much micro-management, that we should set weekly goals and let the the team work out its own schedule. Give your tech leads all the stuff they need in one place for free with Assembla Renzoku. Blog » The Panic Status Board. This is probably the busiest year in Panic’s history. This is good. But a lot of things happening means a high chance that I, the man who lives and breathes Panic and has a giant status board in my head, might not properly explain everything to everyone. Steve and I realized it was high time we made this Cabel Status Board public… using technology! So, with partial inspiration, Neven, Steve and I built the Panic Status Board. Take a secret, sneek peek: What’s on the board? The idea quickly grew beyond “Project Status”, and has become a hub of all sorts of internal Panic information.

E-Mail Queue — number of messages / number of days.Project Status — sorry for the heavy censorship — you know how it is! Instant Pay-Off Les, one of our support guys, said it best after a week: “That board is like magic.” We can’t wait to add more data in the future. Implementation Notes For the truly curious. From start to finish, this was about a three-week project. PrematureRampUp. Bad things · team organization · project planning tags: One of the good things about software is that people seem to want it, and want it quickly. It's usual for organizations to ask teams to speed up production of software and from time to time the organization seeks to help in the way that really shows its commitment - by spending money to add more people to the team. Now there's many an argument that's been had about the true benefit of adding people to a software team. It's clear to me that you don't get a linear benefit, doubling a team won't double its productivity because the communication and coordination costs kick in and blunt the increase.

My utterly unscientific rule of thumb is that any increase in productivity is likely to be proportional to the square root of the increase in people, so doubling a team will get you roughly a 50% increase in productivity. But in practice this will vary a great deal depending on individual factors. So how much ramp up can you safely do? The role of the software architect - part 2 - software architect role. Software architect is not a single role. Each company should have it's own definition. Based on part 1 I try to define the responsibility of the system architect in my organization. In my article I will base on great article about it that you could find here. For me every software architect should start from developer role. Big Picture & Leadership The main role of the Software Architect is to operate on the higher level of abstraction, handle the bigger picture of architecture.

Consult new systems architectureWatch over the architecture during the projectDocumenting the big picture architectureDetecting impact of planned changes Design To achieve proper quality of the architecture the Software Architect should especially take care about design, development and testing. Quality assurance Software Architect should check coding standards, design principles, automated unit testing and code coverage for projects that he is involved. Bemco. Developers Need To Keep Challenging Themselves. I read a very interesting article about a study on why some people learn faster than others. It's a very interesting read which I highly recommend, but in case you're short on time I'll summarize the most important parts because they're relevant to the subject I want to cover with this post. The study claims that there are 2 types of mindset when it comes to learning: The fixed mindset: People who have this, think that we have a certain amount of intelligence and can't do much to change it.

To them, a mistake is a failure, a sign that their capabilities aren't up to the task.The growth mindset: People who have this believe that they can get better at almost everything, as long as they can invest the necessary time and energy. They see mistakes as an essential precursor to knowledge, the engine of education. Needless to say, people with a growth mindset turned out to be significantly better at learning from their mistakes. I find that kinda stuff fascinating.

Reports that say nothing ("It doesn't work! ") There's a reason why technical support is seen as a horrible job to be in, and that reason is bad bug reports. In this essay I'll try to state clearly what makes a good bug report. In a nutshell, the aim of a bug report is to enable the programmer to see the program failing in front of them. In bug reports, try to make very clear what are actual facts ("I was at the computer and this happened") and what are speculations ("I think the problem might be this").

When you report a bug, you are doing so because you want the bug fixed. "It doesn't work. " Many programs, particularly free ones, publish their list of known bugs. "Show me. " Agile Strategy Map - Mapping at ACCUS. At the AgileCoachCamp US in Columbus, OH, I facilitated an open space session on Agile Strategy Mapping Two weeks ago, Olaf and I had the pleasure of participating in the AgileCoachCamp US (#accus). We played our brand new Kanban Pizza Challenge on the Games Day, and hosted multiple open space sessions. One of my sessions got exceptionally good feedback, so I decided to provide a little more information on the agile42 Agile Strategy Map... The opening question was how to effectively manage the work of the leadership or transition teams in large enterprise agile adoptions. The group quickly identified two scenarios: one in which the traditional backlog and task board approach worked extremely well; and one in which the backlog and task board lacked sufficient cohesion to lead an effective adoption, perhaps a result of lack of commitment or discipline.

In the latter case, we discussed the impact of using an Agile Strategy Map.