Trust your team

Team members get defensive when they get signals of lack of trust. As managers, one of the crucial things is to trust our people. Every plan we lay out, every control mechanism we identify and every decision we take in a project – there has to be an element of trust.

When we work on project, we do a collective effort to meet an objective. Teams work together for common success and trust becomes all-so-important in these cases. Performances start declining when a manager does not trust people, which is generally the starting point of all project issues. In high attrition environment, one and probably only way for long term success as a manager is to have good people and then trust them.

Whether you manage a local or an offshore team, having trust in your team improves your chances of success.

Do you trust your team? How do you instill a high trust environment? I look forward to some viewpoints.

P.S: On that point, Gautam Ghosh has some thoughts on a manager’s role in development of employees.

Update July 13th, 07: This also relates closely to what I have written in my post. “Outsourcing works better when based on trust“

Agile and Offshore

Agile is everywhere these days – my quest was to find out implications of using agile development methodologies in offshore model.  Agile in offshore model has been a topic of debate primarily since offshore and distributed development does not foster face-to-face human communication during the project lifecycle.

My quest lead me to read some interesting viewpoints on this topic. I admired the lessons Martin Fowler has shared in his article. From what I read, one thing was clear – it is too early to conclude upon the benefits of agile in offshore model. Offshore and agile may or may not go together.

As Martin says:

“We may never really understand the pros and cons offshore development. Software development is an activity who’s output is impossible to measure. As such we’ll never have hard numbers to prove one approach better than another. What we will see is growing qualitative feedback on the benefits of agility and offshore development – these qualitative assessments will determine if either, or both, will survive.”

There is also an interesting debate going on over Vincent Massol’s interview on Agile Offshore. http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=23168#106090

Some good Agile Resources:
• Extreme Programming Intro
• Business Agile
• Agile Advice
• Agile in Action
• Manifesto for Agile Software Development
• Agile Alliance
• Agile Management Blog

P.S: A great article on Agile Software Development on Trizle titled How to Finish Big Projects  where the author emphasizes on creating crucial chunk first and then build outwards. 

No-progress intimations and expectation management

I have written earlier about the importance of managing expectations all around in project management – same applies to our work as well. I recently stumbled upon one such situation. We had to release a version of application for client review in the evening and the developer working on the administration module left for the day without updating me on the status. As it was to happen, I could not release that day and had to write an email to manage client’s expectations.  When quizzed the next day, he informed that the build was ready the previous evening – and he just guessed that I would know about it.

We usually send out progress report as the project progresses – but what do we do when the team has not made any progress? Rajesh Shetty suggests a great way to manage expectations at the other end in such cases – send “No-progress” report.

It is all about managing the expectation of the other party – it could be a simple email intimation, a call across the department or a “no-progress report”.

Great Quotes : Seth Godin

Via Seth Godin’s blog post “That Moment“: 

“When you are sitting right on the edge of something daring and scary and creative and powerful and perhaps wonderful… and you blink and take a step back.

That’s the moment. The moment between you and remarkable. Most people blink. Most people get stuck. “

Do one thing right

Guy Kawasaki’s marketing lesson from Tam’s Art Gallery  is “Do one thing right”.

This is also a professional lesson as I look at it. Just like organizations, people also have to focus on doing one thing right or specializing in one area of work. Sure, we all multi-task between many different functions in an organization – but professionally, it helps to maintain a focus on one single body of work and excel at it.

Thanks Guy, for sharing that simple but profound lesson.

 P.S: I just realized that this is my 100th post on this blog since I started blogging in April 2006. Just over a year, 100 posts and many interactions with fellow bloggers – this has been a real learning experience for me. Thanks to all fellow bloggers for sharing their learnings with me and in turn, reading me. Long live blogging and long live bloggers!

Great Quotes: Writing

My earlier post revolved around the subject of effective writing. Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book ’The Writer and the Reader’ by Neil Ewart. It is a great collection of great thoughts on writing and reading. 

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new. - Samuel Johnson, Lives of Poets, ‘Pope’

Good writing is the one which gives most knowledge in least time. - Anonymous

Of all the arts in which wise excel,
Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well. - John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham and Normanby

Seek what to write, rather than how to write it. – SENECA, Ad Lucilium