Management Bits and Tips

Downflooring / upflooring could be the mild version of downsizing, promotion or demotion, depends on the office space plans for your next office move. It could also mean nothing if staff streaming is rotational, as mathematicians say, div rot S = 0 or it might say which employee team or a functional unit is important if streaming was done relative to some non-movable office. It might also mean team compression, to minimize staff gradient, like mathematicians say, grad T = 0.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

To my shame I have never read the famous book “AntiPatterns: Refactoring Software, Architectures, and Projects in Crisis”. Being interested in antipatterns which I often figure out myself in the practical domain of software technical support (see Crash Dump Analysis AntiPatterns) I looked for the most recent collection of the management ones and found this book which I’m reading now:

Antipatterns: Identification, Refactoring, and Management (Auerbach Series on Applied Software Engineering)

In addition to their own patterns, the authors of the book provide the description of Brown’s antipatterns (the book mentioned earlier, “AntiPatterns: Refactoring Software, …”), provide two tables for easy antipattern identification in an organization or a team (Management Antipattern Locator and Environmental Antipattern Locator), list and comment on Myers-Briggs personality types, discuss Keirsey temperament groupings and Bramson’s human personality phenotypes. Highly recommended. I especially liked “All You Have Is a Hammer” antipattern of which I was guilty myself during my earlier Team Lead role experience.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

I found this book in a local bookshop a few months ago and now I recommend it to everyone dealing with customers, either internal or external:

Managing Expectations: Working with People Who Want More, Better, Faster, Sooner, NOW!

Foreword was written by Gerald Weinberg.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Yesterday in a local Dun Laoghaire bookstore I stumbled upon this book:

Who Gets Promoted, Who Doesn’t and Why: 10 Things You’d Better Do If You Want to Get Ahead

Initially I hesitated but finally bought it. I wasn’t disappointed when I started reading it that evening. This book finally puts an explanatory system around career promotions and it really fits well with my observations in 15 companies I worked for during past 15 years. This doesn’t mean that I changed the company ever year The longest relationship with a company was 7 years and my current relationship with Citrix approaches 5 years. I just worked for some companies in parallel or just for a few months. This book also teaches some important vocabulary such as:

• - future value
• - a smooth handoff within the window of opportunity
• - optimization of the outcome of the staffing change

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Isn’t it that management is about creating organization from mess (chaos)? In another words, good managers thrive on mess. Isn’t it that management is about preventing mess to appear from organization? In another words, management is about complete annihilation of mess. This is what I thought until today when in a local book store I found this interesting book, was intrigued by its title and bought it:

A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder–How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place (paperback)

Hardcover edition has thirty 4 and 5 star reviews on Amazon and only three reviews are 3 stars so my intuition says the book should be really good:

A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder–How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place (hardcover)

I haven’t yet started reading it but I believe from evolutionary perspective mess provides sources of randomization necessary for survival and fitness of organization. If we are self-organizing ourselves then how do we know that we have chosen the best structure and strategy? If we believe we are right aren’t we ultimately fooled by randomness?    

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Have you ever felt doubt assigning or distributing “meets some”, “meets all” or “exceeds performance” ratings across your team members when delivering feedback during performance appraisals? This is the problem for high performance team leads promoted to management positions. They compare other team members to their past performance and feel that all fall under “meets all” category at best. However they should take the mean of performance indicators and rate team members according to that mean value. For example, your team members had goals to write knowledge base articles (without specifying the predefined number of them). Sure when you were the team lead you wrote 20 of them during one night. That’s why you were promoted Now you see that Adam wrote 1, Sophie wrote 3 and John wrote 5. Hmm, they look all underperforming for you. However, this team without you as an engineer is the new team. So calculate the mean value (1+3+5)/3  = 3. Therefore, it would be fair to say that Adam “meets some”, Sophie “meets all” and John “exceeds performance”.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

I created “Management Bits and Tips” category to write my thoughts on management and then realized how this category title is metaphorically similar to scientific modeling approach:

Analysis (Bits) -> Synthesis (Tips)

There are books and blogs with pure “analytic” titles:

• “Management Bits”
• “Management Bytes”
• “Management Bits and Bytes”

or with pure “synthetic” titles like “Management Tips”.

I was thinking about “Management QWords” category but abandoned that thought because ”QWord” sounds to me as an abbreviation to “Cursing Words”. “Management DWords”? DWORD is an abbreviation to computer memory term “Double Word” but it doesn’t sound good from management perspective. ”Management Words” sounds like a dictionary title. 

Regarding the domain name managementbits I decided to register the shorter name than managementbitsandtips.

Copied with corrections and additions from my Crash Dump Analysis blog

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -