Great Quotes: Humanness at work/home

Humanness is somehow evading the high tech and highly formal workplaces where we see people being treated simply as “resources”.

Tom Peters quotes “Philo of Alexandria” in his blog post “A [More or Less] Christmas [and Management] Thought”:

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”

Through this quote, Tom delivers a very strong message that compassion towards your people is as important as getting the job done. Someone has rightly said that with technological advances we have reached moon but it is still difficult for us to reach out to a person sitting next to us.

I believe when an individual is genuinely interested in his people, understands them, listens, helps, trusts, invests (time and efforts), people do appreciate that and walk an extra mile to get things done. People then, don’t need to be pushed to do the work. Understanding the “human” aspect is the hardest part – for managers, for individuals and for businesses to reach excellence.

As Tom says: “Compassion and thoughtfulness are always merited—and Christmas is a particularly good time to think on this subject near the center of humanness at work or at home.”

Thanks Tom, for that worthwhile thought.

Managing Project Quality and Quantity

A lot of software projects are confronted with quality issues sometime in the project lifecycle. Worst is the case when escalation comes from the customer.

My experience so far reveals that when a customer raises a quality escalation, typical approach of a project manager is to initiate rigorous checks and not release the application until each and every bug is identified and resolved. Luc Richard, in his article “The Separation of Church and State” (membership required) at GanttHead.com calls this “Project Mangler” approach. The downside of this approach is that while clients want quality, they would definitely not compromise on the timeline and features required. In the event of a quality related escalation, customer gets extra defensive and seek continuous feedbacks. Features (quantity) have to be delivered, timelines have to be met and quality has to be consistent. How can this be prevented in project planning phase?

Luc Richards suggests that we treat quality and quantity separately by virtue of the types of releases we provide to the clients.

Quantity can be dealt with in major/minor releases – where we provide tested features. That means Release 1.1 would have some more features added in Release 1.0 and so on. Major/Minor releases essentially deal with delivery of tested functionalities in incremental fashion.

Quality can be dealt with in maintenance releases – or “patches” which deal with bug fixes and providing intermediate releases. So, release 1.1 can have multiple maintenance releases in form of 1.1.0, 1.1.1 etc. (This does not mean that Major/Minor releases would not deal with quality – however as we know zero-defect release is a myth and defects coming from client can be dealt with by planning maintenance releases in the project plan)

The challenge is in planning the major/minor releases and the maintenance releases in the project planning phase. While quantity and quality are separated, planning for both happens together. The plan should also be revisited as the project progresses to add more maintenance releases as required during the course of the project. Planning can also specify what elements each of these releases would comprise of.

This strategy clubbed with right expectation management and communication can prove to be very effective. When each release is done, client expectations have to be set. Following parameters can be considered when making a release.

1. Release Details (Major/Minor release, Maintenance Release etc.)
2. Release Coverage (What all functionalities, features, issues, change requests are incorporated in this release – what all is not included)
3. Known Issues in the release (open issues that are being worked upon)
4. Dependencies/Deviations/Constraints
5. Expectations (what client can expect and what is the purpose of release. E.g. an in-development release provided to the client for status update, a major release provided for UAT etc.)

Addressing the above parameters during a release sets the clients expectations and they know what to expect in the release at hand. I have experienced that a lot of post-delivery escalations can be effectively avoided with the strategy above.

Any ideas to take this one step further?

Great Quotes : Humility

Via “Slacker Manager” blog post  ”The Honor of Humility“

The humbleness of a warrior is not the humbleness of the beggar. The warrior lowers his head to no one, but at the same time, he doesn’t permit anyone to lower his head to him. The beggar, on the other hand, falls to his knees at the drop of a hat and scrapes the floor to anyone he deems to be higher; but at the same time, he demands that someone lower than him scrape the floor for him.
—Carlos Castaneda

Creating Team Connections

Success of a project manager largely depends on his ability to make the right connections with his team. A few years back, I had a project manager friend who was handling multiple projects – because of which he was not able to really focus on making connection with his team. Result was a decline in the team performance. My learnings from my friends experience are:

• It is imperative for a project manager to make a conscious effort on team building activities – facilitating effective positive communication, enabling mutual trust, respect, collaboration, fairness, commitment and openness. When these are enabled, team works for itself around a business objective and does what ever it takes to accomplish them. Teams become more accountable as a result of making effective and meaningful connections.
• It is equally crucial for the project manager to plan for time required in doing team building exercises. How can we expect a project manager to juggle with five projects and also do the team building activities? Managing more projects at the cost of people management is almost suicidal.

Lisa Haneberg writes a very impressive post on “Creating Connections” over at her blog “Management Craft“. The post starts with the following lines:

“Business is a contact sport and management is a social act. Until the robots take over, we need to get things done through people. And what that really means is that our relationships are the conduits for results. Think of a complicated telephone switch box with wires running to each home and then to the telephone company. Wires of different colors, some with stripes, some are hot, some ground the current. Wires everywhere making each conversation happen. If a wire gets kinked, cut, or corroded, the conversations stop. Your team is like that box and making sure you have each relationship wired and maintained is critical to ensuring the right conversations are able to occur.”

Read the full article.

Great Quotes: Work and Play

Via Fast Company Blog post “The Future of Work”

“People divide their lives into work and play. But a clever few realize that if you pick the right work it ceases to be work and becomes play. The trick is finding something that you are passionate about and then devoting your life to it. This won’t necessarily make you a fortune but it will make you happy. It may also turn you into a successful innovator, because playfulness is an essential prerequisite for invention.”

I have written about this subject atleast thrice before – in different contexts – Here are the links to the earlier posts related to being passionate about your work. Happy Reading!

• Following our Energies
• Passion Power
• Happiness and Success