It’s been about nine months since my last post on Process Refactored — hell, it’s been so long I’m not even getting comment spam here anymore. I haven’t, however, been entirely unproductive; the past nine months have seen the gestation of a handful of new projects, including an open source image management utility and, most recently, a project management tool called Project Slicer.
March 14th, 2011
Recommended: Google’s Rules
For those who might’ve missed it in the business section of the New York Times this weekend, Google has formalized what it believes to be the perceived attributes of a successful manager, and there’s much to admire here:
December 22nd, 2010
Of Studios and Sweatshops
For some reason, many companies treat their production team as a fixed quantity, something to be accommodated or disbanded but rarely improved. It’s the rare C-level executive who understands that a production team exists on a spectrum between good and bad, and that thoughtful management can influence the quality of their team. Perhaps this says something about the quality spectrum of C-level executives: the fewer people at the top of the pyramid, the narrower and more polarized the output.
November 16th, 2010
Re-engineering a Better Performance Review
There’s a dirty little secret about performance reviews, which is this: most of them are useless. Managers dread them because they’re tedious and time-consuming and potentially volatile. Employees hate them because all too often a performance review is the only objective data point informing compensation and bonus. Rarely in my experience does a performance review actually accomplish its primary goal of encouraging superior performance or correcting unproductive behavior.
November 9th, 2010
The Retention Equation
Imagine you’re a hungry young company trying to squeeze into a crowded marketplace. How do you unseat the entrenched competition? You’ll probably start by leveraging the skeleton staff of entrepreneurial generalists that you’re paying with stock options and pizza. You’ll ask them to work late hours and take on the sorts of projects which your competitors wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole: clients they’ve fired, projects they’ve shelved as too ambitious, campaigns that have bounced around between agencies because no one’s willing to tell the client that the idea’s idiotic.
(I’m looking at you, New York-based wireless startup named after a sitcom catchphrase.)
October 17th, 2010
Five Strategies for Negotiating Bad News
Several years ago, as a relatively inexperienced project manager in Toronto, I was sent to a seminar on the art of strategic negotiation held in a hotel conference room out by the airport. The session was led by a real estate guru turned motivational speaker, and while I don’t remember his name, I do remember that he paced the room in a lavalier mic and black swim cap, and that because he’d shaved his eyebrows he resembled a particularly intense mannequin or sunfish.
October 17th, 2010
Bird’s Eye Resource Management
Managing a team of any size on multiple concurrent projects requires some level of process and dashboarding at both the macroscopic and microscopic levels. For microscopic resource management, there’s no beating industry-standard task-based tools like Microsoft Project, Basecamp and Jira (three tools we currently use at Vortex Mobile). Macroscopic resource management remains a challenge. For some reason, there just aren’t a lot of accessible out-of-the-box visualization tools for project managers who need to quickly juggle projects, people and time without committing to a costly ERP infrastructure.
September 28th, 2010
Making Money
I recently interviewed a candidate who, when presented with the opportunity to pose some questions of his own, asked me how the company made money. This initially seemed like an idiotic question (since it immediately followed “why is the bathroom door locked?”), but in hindsight perhaps there’s a subtlety here that I didn’t appreciate in my rush to get the next candidate in the door.
July 10th, 2010
Recommended: Skunk Works
Skunk Works
In 1975, thermodynamicist and propulsion expert Ben R. Rich took over the role of CEO at Lockheed’s famous Skunk Works division, inheriting an unconventional organization-within-an-organization that had become, at the height of the cold war, the envy of defense contractors and private enterprise alike. As chronicled in Rich’s account of the years before and after his promotion to the most coveted role in American aerospace, the Skunk Works became renown for designing cutting edge aircraft under extraordinary pressure and impossible timelines, often coming in under budget.
July 10th, 2010
Process Refactored
I recently held a project management summit at Vortex Mobile where I asked my project managers to question each of our existing processes and come up with new approaches to any of our endemic challenges. Although refactoring code is commonplace among progressive software development companies, few companies talk about refactoring methodology. For many, it’s easier to either cling to outdated processes (remarkably, Staples still offers next day delivery on carbon paper) or invest in the development of cumbersome enterprise-scale methodologies intended to predict and accommodate any conceivable circumstance.
