The right people
- Get the right people.
- Make them happy so they don’t want to leave.
- Turn them loose.
Leadership as a service
In order to lead without using positional authority:
- Step up to the task
- Be evidently fit for the task
- Prepare for the task by doing the required homework ahead of time.
- Maximise value to everyone
- Do it all with humour and obvious goodwill.
Holding an audition to test worker’s abilities to communicate with each other. Ask the candidate to prepare a ten or fifteen minute presentation on some aspect of past work. It could be new technology and the experience of first trying it out, or about a management lesson learned the hard way or about a particularly interesting project.
Articulating the contract to new employees is going to be essential to give them a chance to fit in. Continuous partial attention periods have to be defined as personal time off, acceptable time limits during the workday.
Cost of Rehire
For employees who stay from 15-30 months, the cost to rehire is typically one and half month to two months salary (recruiter cost). The total cost for replacement is about 4-5 months of the employee salary.
Things that prevent a Jelled Team
Defensive management
You can’t protect yourself against your own people’s incompetence. Therefore, trust your people, let them make mistakes, and don’t be a technical inference manager.
Physical separation
Putting people together gives them opportunities for casual interaction. When there is no group space, no neighbours, and constant reinforcement, no chance of a group culture learning.
Bureaucracy
Paperwork accounts for more than 30% of the cost of producing a given product. Paper pushers can’t get themselves into SWAT mode. They can’t see themselves hell-bent for success.
Fragmentation of time
People who work more than 1 project at a time significantly increase distraction for the individual.
The quality-reduced product
A cost-reduced product and a quality-reduced product usually mean the same thing. (Less quality for earlier, cheaper delivery). Co-workers who are developing a shoddy product don’t even want to look each other in the eye.
Phoney deadlines
When a date mentioned is impossible to meet and everyone knows it, the effect will certainly slip. Do not be a Parkinsonian robot with no respect or concern for the teams.
Clique control
Do not break up teams when they are working together so well.
Deterministic and Non-deterministic Systems
If the business policy governing the new system has a sufficient degree of natural ad hoc-cracy: it’s a mistake to automate it.
The reason that non-deterministic systems can often heal themselves painlessly and elegantly (sometimes at no cost at all) is that the humans who make up the system have an easy familiarity with the underlying goals. Making a system deterministic will result in the loss of its ability to heal itself.
Methodology and methodology
Big M Methodology is an attempt to centralise thinking! This includes a long list of supposed benefits: standardisation, documentary uniformity, managerial control and state-of-the-art techniques.
Small m methodology is a basic approach one takes to get a job done. It consists of two parts: a tailored plan and a body of skills necessary to affect the plan.
Methodology Madness
A morass of paperwork
Voluminous documentation is part of the problem, not part of the solution. As features grow, documentation itself is getting bigger.
Convergence
Training: People do what they know how to do.
Tools: A few automated aids for modelling, design, implementation, and test will convergence.
Peer review: Active peer-review mechanisms: quality circles, walkthroughs, inspections, technology fairs will create natural tendency toward convergence.
You can’t declare something a standard until it has already become a de facto standard. A standard is a proven method for undertaking a repeated task.
The Hawthorne Effect, loosely stated that people perform better when they’re trying something new. To allow the Hawthorne Effect to work for you, you have to make non-standard approaches to the rule. The standard should be brief and gentle.
Dancing with Risk
Spend time planning and provisioning your own failure. “The work is so important that we must have it done by January first. This also means the work is so unimportant that we don’t want to fund it beyond January first.”
Repeal passive consent
Silent gives consent, under assumptions when someone does some wacky things and you don’t object.
Basic Meeting Hygiene
Some people are so addicted to meetings that work has to take second place. As the number. A meeting that is specifically called to get something done is called a “working meeting”. The others are non-working meetings. A working meeting is called to reach a decision. Invite people who need to agree before the decision can be judged. Make sure it has an agenda. If the group action terminates the meeting; then it’s a working meeting.
Additional Learnings
Hybrid Approach
Implement partial automation that handles routine, predictable tasks while leaving room for human intervention in more complex, variable situations.