Do You Want To Be A (Better) Manager?
Do You Want To Be A (Better) Manager?
About the Book
Contents
Introduction
I. Alternatives to Management
Motivated by Money?
Are You Willing to Sunlight?
How To Get Fired as IT Manager
II. Management Techniques
Acts of Leadership
Smart Manager Tricks
III. Common Difficult Situations
Instant Reviews, Instant Tests
Reasons
Congruent Interviewing by Audition
Dealing with Addicted Employees
IV. Management Traps to Avoid
Technology Can Make You a Bad Manager
Beware of QuickFixes
TheSauerkrautSyndrome
Destroying Communication and Control
Overstructured Management
V. Managing Yourself
Anger Management
Beyond Blaming: Congruence
In Danger of Success
Staying Young
About the Author
Table of Contents
- Introduction
-
I. Alternatives to Management
- Motivated by Money?
-
Are You Willing to Sunlight?
- Best operator
- Rare attitude
- Getting caught
- Sunlighting on the job
- Sunlighting managers
- How To Get Fired as IT Manager
-
II. Management Techniques
-
Acts of Leadership
- Open the discussion
- Change the model they see
- Compromise appropriately
- Observe what is needed
- Restructure the task
- Restructure the group
- Inventory the resources
- Ask questions
- Listen
- Watch for misunderstanding
- Empathize
- Be ready to pitch in
- Remain open to feedback
- Encourage appropriate behavior
- Withhold negative comments
- Offer ideas without inflicting
- Admit mistakes
- Risk taking the lead
- Risk following a lead
- Let others succeed or fail
- Set an example
- Summary
-
Smart Manager Tricks
- Take each encounter at face value.
- Be realistic in your expectations.
- Match people and work.
- Get to know your people as people.
- Avoid the negative.
- Try low-tech and highly interactive.
- Leverage diversity.
- Employ the coaching model.
- Don’t take your own authority too seriously.
- Become a barrier buster.
- Strive for consensus by creating a sense of safety.
- Tell the new people where the bathrooms are.
- Summary
-
What You Need To Know About Programming
- What is programming, anyway?
- Programming is foresight.
- Programming is writing the recipe, not baking the cake.
- The paradigm of programming, as of science, is “if-so-then-so.”
- The programmer’s recipe must be unambiguous.
- The programmer’s recipe must be complete.
- The programmer’s recipe must terminate.
- The program must be widely applicable.
- The programmer’s recipe must be verifiable.
- The programmer’s recipe must be created in a controlled way.
- Large programs are mastered by successive refinement.
- The programmer has many tools, some of them programs.
- The team is the most powerful programming tool.
- Programming is more than communicating with computers.
- Programming is a political act.
- Programming is a mirror of the mind.
-
Acts of Leadership
-
III. Common Difficult Situations
- Resisting the Sales Pitch
-
An Agile Project Start
- Rule 1: Start with the people you have.
- Rule 2: Never allow the problem to become undefined.
- Rule 3: Invest early and keep investing in team building.
- Rule 4—Let your technical leaders do technical leading.
- Rule 5: Allow adequate time and space for learning.
- Conclusion: Organize for self-organization.
-
Instant Reviews, Instant Tests
- When to review quickly
- How to handle blocking attempts
-
Reasons
- Reasons why the tool was or wasn’t used
- Reasons are meant to fool you.
- Convert reasons to logic
- “You’re right”
-
Congruent Interviewing by Audition
- Hiring based on credentials
- Hiring by audition
- Will candidates take offense?
- Audition mistakes
-
Dealing with Addicted Employees
- What Is an Alcoholic?
- Detecting addictions
- Your responsibility
- But the addict’s my friend
-
IV. Management Traps to Avoid
- Technology Can Make You a Bad Manager
-
Beware of Quick Fixes
- Little solutions
- Lessons of history
- The Sauerkraut Syndrome
-
Better Estimating Can Lead to Worse Performance
- Estimates can become standards
- Using estimates well
-
Preventing a Software Quality Crisis
- Abstract
- Symptoms of Overload Due to Poor Quality
- Lack of Self-Awareness
- Typical Behavior Patterns
- Typical Feelings
- The Software Dynamics of Overload
- Time to Locate Problems
- Management Countermeasures
- Time to Fix Errors
- Management Countermeasures
- Creating Errors While Fixing Other Errors
- Management Countermeasures
- Effects of Shortcuts on Quality
- Management Countermeasures
- Staying Out of Trouble
- References
-
Destroying Communication and Control
- The First Law of Bad Management
- Destroying Information
- Requirements
- Destruction of Information Infrastructure
- Configuration Management
- Hiding Information
- Technical Reviews
- Project Management Reviews
- Quality Assurance
- Degrading the Believability of Information
- Testing
- Inserting Misleading Information
- Demonstrations
- Risk Management Process
- Conclusions
-
Overstructured Management
- The Problem
- The Approach
- The DEAL Model
- Sequence
- Choice
- Modularization
- Iteration
- Recursion
- What is To Be Done?
- References
-
V. Managing Yourself
-
Anger Management
- What Is Anger, Anyway?
- Why Anger Is a Poor Tactic for a Manager
- Why Am I Angry?
- Hiding Anger Simply Doesn’t Work
- Identify and Interrupt Your Anger Sequence
- Interrupt The Other Person’s Anger Sequence
- Anger is a Luxury
-
Beyond Blaming: Congruence
- The Blaming Style of Communication
- What Is Congruence?
- What is Blaming?
- How Blaming Hurts a Project
- What Incongruence Looks and Feels Like
- What Congruence Would Look/Feel Like
- Congruence in Large Systems Development Efforts
- Achieving Congruence
- Refusing to Hear the Truth
-
In Danger of Success
- Foolish pride
- Frozen knowledge
- Failing to adapt
-
Staying Young
- Peter Principle simulated
- The Paul Principle
- The Other Paul Principle
- The Good Old Days
- What was true back then
- Buy or Build?
- The real world
- Your time dimension
-
Anger Management
- What Next?
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