On good manager - how to spend windowed office wisely

Last post was about insecure software manager vicious circle, so to balance it today I will talk about what I believe are the most desired features in managers’ CVs to scan for.

Task of finding a good manager is one of the important ones as difference on this element of the puzzle can give us results varying from a successful project on time (if you have your project delivered even earlier it's most likely time to wake up and go to work) to projects abandoned out of frustration by the whole crew, completely unmanageable, which you need to burn to the ground to avoid disease spreading. So unless you have magic idea how to capitalize on high turnover (if you have and you are still making software you are apparently missing something) you should look for a manager who would perform well.

So what makes a difference in manager performance? I would probably go for the following mix: integrity, ability to keep an eye on the target, ability to glue the team, ability to facilitate communication and minimize its costs. Let me elaborate a bit on that.

She has to have the integrity as there will be pressures from all directions - we have customers pushing for features, project sponsors pushing for return on investment, team pushing for nice neat innovations, economy pushing for savings - manager has to know the balance and has to level everything to keep it.

Similar story about maintaining the vision on what it is we are producing. Everybody else get their own partial perspective on the project - there is money view and features view and program characteristics view, internal construction view. Project sponsor is funding it to get more money out of it, developer is writing code to get PS3 for his 1-year old son. Project manager is the person who has to see from the project success perspective. Now this is a difficult task, because requirements, resources keep changing as we go (as we didn't put external world on standby). Project manager has to keep this running target under control and in sync.

Now let's look how the team works - from the workflow point of view, we work in iterations: participants are agreeing what they are working on (parts) and how it will connect to the rest of a whole (interfaces). Then they work on their parts and when finished they integrate the parts with the whole. Keep in mind that we are working on the mathematical model of a high complexity - there is a lot of communication required to make it happen and any miscommunication costs a lot. Project manager has to carefully develop environment, which promotes easy flowing communication. All disrupting factors like interpersonal conflicts, prima donnas, special procedures for communication have to be resolved at all costs. Manager should also seek to find ways to provide people with information in a way, which doesn't get them out of their zones or put them on documentation pages for hours. She should also at all costs make sure that nobody feels overlooked there.

Now to the gluing part - I've worked with many teams in my life, and I can see two patterns really - either people are engaged into the project and work as a team, are proud of being a member of the team, help each other, or they are there to earn money, doing what they are asked to but never going an extra inch in project cause. Performances of both teams differ drastically - I've never done proper measurement, but I think factor of ten is not unreasonable. If you want to check which of the two your team is, check whether most of the team is sitting on their chairs 5.03pm - if they are then there is a pretty good chance they are engaged. By the way if they are still there at 6pm you have another kind of problem, but this is for another occasion. If you are a manager and cannot check whether they are there at 5.03pm because you are in the car already you not only can safely bet they aren't but you have also serious suspicion for what is causing it. To be honest I've never figured out what does the gluing - I had teams working on similar projects on two completely different ends of this scale. The only hints I can give here is: treat people seriously, be honest and be friendly.

And remember you are there no to demand. You are there to help.