Micro - good, management - bad
More good stuff from Kathy Sierra here. (OK, we�re a little late, as Kathy posted this during what was the dark ages for our blog, but we think this one deserves some more.)
Micromanagement. No one likes it. Everybody hates it. Except, arguably, micromanagers. And as Kathy suggests, there’s a little micromanager in all of us� Isn’t there?
In doing our research for 6th Sense, we quickly discovered one of the surest ways to hack off the developers in your software team is, surprise, micro management. Checking in once a week for un update on the state of a project is fine, but checking in once a day means you’re one step away from becoming obsessive.
And no one likes an obsessive.
Yet project leaders do have a job to do. They gotta ensure things are not just running smoothly and that team members have what they need, but that all the steps in the development process have been taken. We all know things like QA and testing can get squeezed to hit deadlines. Result: buggy code.
A week, though, is becoming a long time in development now that project turn arounds are becoming shorter and the number of projects themselves have multiplied. Oh, and did we mention the smaller, or outsourced, app dev team? Outsourcing means app dev is now spread out across time zones, making it even harder for project leaders to check in with individual team members.
That’s why we think metrics gathered in the background, not using some hulking reporting suite, are cool. They work unobtrusively, letting the developer get on with what they do best, while keeping the project leader accurately informed on the separate aspects of the application build lifecycle. Result: project updates without the micro management.
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