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.
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:
Recommended: The Soul of a New Machine
I had the recent good fortune to pass a colleague a copy of Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine.
Kidder’s chronicle of the struggle to design and build a 32-bit minicomputer beneath the radar of politicized executive management came out nearly thirty years ago, and while there remains a faint whiff of naugahyde and Old Milwaukee, many of the roadblocks encountered by project leader Tom West are no different than the pitfalls confronting production managers today.