Software Production Management

There are several things nobody told me before I became PM. Most of these things are deeply related to my background knowledge, but probably, even if you do not work on the same field I work, you will find these tips useful.

1. Project Managers are responsible for all the work they do not execute. WTF? Back in the school you could say: Hey! I didn’t do it! It wasn’t me! – But now you are forced to assume any responsibility of the work that has been done by others -on your team of course! “Solution doesn’t work”, “There are several bugs”, “It doesn’t fulfill the client expectations” -It doesn’t occur often if you do your homework, but, it happens at least once so you have to be prepared. Fail is natural to human condition. Are you prepared to fail? Are you ready to get over it and assume the responsibility for others code? -from a coder perspective it could mean kill someone!
2. Project Managers should say client Yes/No and When. Coders aren’t forced to do that -that’s why PM’s estimate. Does it sounds familiar to you? “I’m doing ok with code, it will take like, uhmmm, uhmmm, uhmmm, -then silence- then a value plus extra time for them”.
3. Project Managers will use email clients, office productivity tools including spreadsheets -a lot of spreadsheets- over the lovely IDE -oh man, that sucks. Even the useful textedit… how I miss you?
4. Project Managers will have to say at least once “No” and get mad with their bosses while they are Gold-Plating the clients. The awful thing is that once bosses do that, PMs will have to assume again the responsibility to deliver the new extremely-simple-to-do addition while also have to listen the complains of the team.
5. Project Managers will solve problems between team members. I do no like democracy (democracy is for small cities and countries where  their ability to decide and vote is supported by a deep and clear perspective of the community and its future). PM is only one guy, he/she listen, process and decide -NICE!!! no voting, no democracy.
6. Hands-on Project Managers will also deliver the projects. It means most of the time, deploy to servers, and do a “lite-end-user qa”.  Not your case? YOU ARE SO LUCKY!
7. Project Managers will receive more money -it is not always the case, but here in Colombia, IT IS the case.

If you have any additional thing your mom didn’t told you about PM, feel free to post it as a comment.

Last week I was participating of the “Jornada de Gerencia de Proyectos de TI” – IT project management conference. It was great. Probably in other countries it’s usual to have great congresses or events related to PM, but here in Colombia, even the PMI Colombian Chapter sucks -even the name is out of date. It is not about find great PMs here in Colombia, you can find PM Gurus as weel, but they fail on their limited sense of community, and it’s inability to set a decent conference or even as a non-profitable group.

ACIS, the Colombian Association of Systems Engineers -and other professionals around informatics- have been leading this conference for the last seven years. It is not the most popular event ever, but it is great. It was my first, hope not the last. I met a lot of PMs who work for big IT companies like IBM, HP and Dell. I listen experienced PMs about PM tactics and techniques, tips and how to deal with people – most of PMs and PM methodologies do not take care about people because it is competence of the PM to handle people to keep the project on its way. But, is it true? Should be the PM who handles all the “human” side of the project? Probably it is, because almost all the times, PMs are the bridge between the senior management (and their necessity of results), and the team (and their personal needs).

The bonus of this event was the unexpected visit and presentation of Tony Johnson, the CEO of Crosswind - He talked about Program Management, its difference with Project Management, but also, he talked about Agile and how PgM works Agile. I was shocked, to hear a guy who works helping people to get its PMI Certifications talking about Agile. Wow! The presentation took no more than 45 minutes, and I was amazed about Tony’s ability to link PMI and Agile -while most Agilist seems to feel offended with the PPM framework of the PMI.

BTW, I did my part too, doing a short presentation about how to choose the right PM software tool for your company/team/project.

Congrats to Martha Ardila, Beatriz Caicedo and the whole team behind the event. It was great.

Few days ago I had a conversation with one of the most active Bloggers I had ever known: Bas de Baar about project management in Colombia.I’m not the most experienced project manager here in Colombia, but probably I had worked for few companies that provide me with a very well understanding of what is going on with project management in Colombia.

Project Management isn’t new in Colombia. At least for IT and software related companies Project Managers have been there forever (due to the nature of the IT and software development processes). But, there is something missing about PM here in Colombia: Team Building.

I do believe that Labor Climate and Team Building aren’t the same. As I said to Bas, almost all Colombians -good, not so good, and bad ones- will try to be your friend. Colombian people is really appreciated because of their willingness and attitude of service and camaraderie (did I write it right?). However those are two different things: try to be your friend, and be a good boss, project manager or director.

And that’s why Labor Climate seems to be amazing on Colombian SW development related companies even when “team building” is not a priority. And it could be good, because of its impact on the organizational behavior, improve the labor climate will probably  boost the team efficiency and collaboration. But, not to perform team building activities will be bad for long-term employee & employers relationship, because “personal” friendship isn’t necessarily based on the idea of personal and professional growth and career development.

Furthermore,  SW developers, designers, and architects, and IT project managers, prefers to have project-based relationships with their employers. And for those who know, contractors, even if they are good doing what they do, increase the probability of certain risks to occur -example: dependency on people because there is no knowledge spread opportunity.

To conclude. there is a big difference between “having a great time with amazing people at the office” and “having a great work experience”. It should be a balance between labor climate and team building to ensure a short-term motivation, but also a long-term relationship between employers and employees.

Self-organization is a process of attraction and repulsion in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases in complexity without being guided or managed by an outside source. Wikipedia

Self-organized teams can be identified by some simple rules -I didn’t think about it until I heard Esther Derby @Project Shrink- that I would try to explain as maturity levels.

• Stage One: Managing and monitoring their own work performance. They assess the complexity of the tasks and the skills required to validate and assign the work in an effective manner. Then they also monitor the progress and performance.
• Stage Two: Cross training. Team is able to identify its weaknesses and bottleneck and plan a training to transfer knowledge and skills across the team members.
• Stage Three: Hiring and Firing. This one is, one of the most difficult levels to achieve due to the ability of the team to manage/control their own cost and budget. Most of the teams do not have even knowledge about the assigned budget, the project expected profitability or even to handle overhead. This is because small teams are most of the cases self-organized and probably do not have other knowledge than its production skills -production means skills required to do the job. At this level, the whole team is able to participate during a new team member hiring process or even to decide -on a performance basis- who should leave the team.

Self-organized doesn’t mean at all “unmanaged” team, it probably means that team is a mature enough to execute few of the manager tasks -but not all of them. Even inside self-organized teams is possible to find a leader or somebody that gives directions to the team -because the team is designated to do something that for sure somebody is requesting somewhere. So, yes, self-organized also have to follow directions (client or top-management). So there is room for Project Managers. However it is complicated to find the balance between what has to be done and what has to be delegated by the PM without negatively affecting the performance. Team is mature enough to be empowered but, I believe, if there is nothing to be managed then it is probably because it is not a self-organized team, it is because it is probably a spin-off.

It depends on the project manager culture and his/her personal strategy of management implementation -could be based on trust, or performance control, or micromanagement, because not all of the PM out there will have the aptitude to handle self-organized teams. And by the way, not all the skilled workers will fit in a team of this nature, some people is great following instructions, other people would be more productive if they are empowered to take some decisions.

I will do my best trying to include few tips on how to build and success with virtual teams. They have become very popular and now have a lot of acceptance as part of product research and development projects. However virtual teams could  be used in several projects in an cost efficient way. There are a couple of things that you have to know or ensure before you try to start your project with a virtual team -based on Jessica Lipnack video chat @Project Shrink.

The team should feel that they are doing something useful. That their work is needed and also appreciated by the team and the project itself. They should feel their value. Also,they should be happier doing their work in that way (as part of a virtual team) than doing it in another way. Remember, you need a team that feels comfortable doing their work, and comfortable about how the perform or execute their work.

On any project, and even more on those that depends on specific people knowledge -like research, product development and software development- communication is the key. When you have a few genius working for you, you must ensure that they can share and transfer their knowledge properly during meetings and reports (that should be a few and not a lot). So the magic key to success in any project is communication, communication and more communication -please, it doesn’t mean a lot of meetings or a lot of reports. It means effective communication.

How to achieve an effective communication? It’s really easy these days and that’s why (probably) virtual teams are working better now -i.e. faster and cheaper. Technology is critical. Technology means cheap communication channels with video or audio, and also cheap shared spaces for files, documents and products. The use of online collaboration tools,  organized reporting structure (i.e. status meetings, daily status reports or weekly checkpoints), well supported audio and video conference infrastructure, and of course a good plan (not a complete plan, but a good plan that could be adapted easily) will increase dramatically the chance to succeed.

By achieving a good communication infrastructure, team will focus on the work they have to do instead of logistics. And now, the only thing you have to do, as manager is to understand and validate that you are part of a virtual team too. Obviously as PM you will feel the necessity of full control, however mature teams -and mature team members of course- will handle it in a better way -remember, they feel part of a team and also they like to be part of one.

Inside big corporations, most of the people work at their desk without ever having met their big boss, however, they receive mails from them all the time. You got emails from people you may not know in real, but you work with them or for them. Got the point?

Virtual teams aren’t new at all. But with technology, now PMs can ping them everywhere, all the time -everything is about perception and how you name the things