Project Management Advice

Project Management Advice for students in CS436S Software Engineering Workshop

1.Dont't mistreat people who work for you.

2.Brainstorming is not polite turn-taking.

3.Motivate your people: make their work fun.

4.Beat the milestones or you will be beaten with them.

5.Delivery schedules are why testing is the way it is.

6.Just having good intentions does not make safe code.

7.It's not wrong to do your best work at proposal time.

8.You can expect the customer to be reasonable, sometimes.

9.Bring a backup if you have to do a live demo. Bring two.

10.But the Java approach looked so good in the specifications.

11.Your job is usually to divine what the customer has in mind.

12.It is always better to have too much work than no work at all.

13.All the best leaders I've seen spend money on people, not hardware.

14.I'd rather have a sketch artist than a programmer at proposal time.

15.One of the very best reasons to develop software by method is to CYA.

16.That's no way to do engineering, to listen to the old guys all the time.

17.Distribute an executable or do a web app? Everyone has a browser, right?

18.They do resource allocation top-down even if we do programming bottom-up.

19.The best way to deal with a rebel is to invite her to the management table.

20.One group had thought about the details. That says a lot about that group.

21.To the customer, how big a problem is depends on how big you make it sound.

22.I honestly believe our work is historic. So it's not hard motivating people.

23.If you have the demo in ppt, half the time you don't even need the live demo!

24.Promoting the wrong person is like sending the message: 'don't do the work.'

25.Your turn in the agenda is actually your rare opportunity to sell your vision.

26.Don't panic -- if your people can solve the snafu, your team looks even better.

27.Turn off your cellphone in a movie theater and your screensaver in a presentation.

28.Looking at a list of software quality measures is like looking into a cruel mirror.

29.Pay close attention to anything and everything that interests the person with the $.

30.Sometimes the noble thing is to step aside and let the others do the work their way.

31.New manager jumping in trying to figure out what's going on? Sounds like status quo.

32.Nothing depresses workers more than more than adding and removing people without an announcement.

33.Our current managers speak government-ese; they are worth every half million they make.

34.Probably all these management gurus are making up software paradigms just to sell books.

35.If your meeting are exhausting, how much energy will your people have for action items?

36.As a reward for letting the specs have more freedom, I expect to see more impressive demos.

37.Shield is a good word -- great managers are great at shielding their people from management.

38.Nothing depresses workers more than asking them to continue work on a dead or stupid project.

39.Management looks a lot more competent when you can see what the management problems really are.

40.The day you have a good manager is the day the jokes about project management stop being funny.

41.I don't think anyone who calls himself a manager is going to know how to manage creative people.

42.I think all policy memos should start with the explanation, 'Because we are afraid of being sued.'

43.The best predictor of whether a team succeeds is whether the people enjoy working with each other.

45.Management often entails making friends and enemies; may you always have more friends than enemies.

46.A strong team absolutely consists of people who have different skills, each contributing differently.

47.If everybody is supposed to be doing the prescribed work, who is supposed to be doing the innovating?

48.Just because you can hire a person at a bargain doesn't mean you can keep that person at that bargain.

49.The customer wants to see that you have details but doesn't want you to waste time talking about them.

50.Use the ppt to sell the demo -- most customers don't actually know what they are seeing during a demo.

51.Abstract box and arrow diagrams are good because everyone imagines you are talking about THEIR problem.

52.Nothing depresses workers more than hiding strategic information because they are not worthy of knowing.

53.During a progress review, the very best thing you can do is say that things are on schedule and shut up.

54.People who make war on tenure and oldtimers always seem to be the ones who are replaced in the long run.

55.I hope you lose someone crucial to your project today so you can learn how bad it is to lose good people.

56.They say that all those countries that beat our kids on international tests still come to us for new ideas.

57.Some managers seem to think they are never wrong. What is the probability that they are right about that?

58.I always want to know what the engineer decided was going to happen as a failsafe when the drive-by-wire fails.

59.Good management has come to mean 'cutting out the fat,' but I don't believe what they are right about that?

60.In Germany, they put us in a small clean white room for 5 days and told us to brainstorm. We had to beg to get out.

61.Not a reason to terminate employees: my management was poor, so you, the employees, have to suffer the consequences.

62.In Japan, you could feel all the young engineers cringe when you were about to voice disagreement with an older person.

63.In France, Italy & Argentina, there is always time to cafe. But the engineers work hard so they can enjoy their cafe.

64.Let your co-workers know that at any time, if they want to take your approach, you would shoulder the bulk of the work.

65.I don't wnat to sound old, but I like it when I can understand a line of code by looking at the page that line is on.

66.Sometimes two people have the floor and both are talking and not even hearing each other -- that's called brainstorming.

67.Occasionally they like your pitch because of a misunderstanding; it is not your responsibility to fix this misunderstanding!

68.There's this famous Dilbert cartoon where one person objects, 'Don't use me to have your ideas.' But that's how it happens.

69.You are lucky to be working in a field where not only are young people listened to, but their ideas are assumed to be better.

70.You might delay your disclosure of a problem if you think you can fix it fast; but what if you are wrong? And then there are ethics.

71.I do find it helpful to think of buffer overruns like the Corvette gas tank. You just don't want to be putting that all over the road.

72.For the first five years of your carrer, your manager will not be as smart as you are, in any of the ways we mean smart, so prepare to be insulted.

73.I don't believe in quality metrics, but I do believe in consensus: if everyone who tries to port your code complains, then your code is not portable.

74.Today I played the role of customer, so I said nothing of value for your learning, and paradoxically, everything I said was priceless to your projects.

75.These four-letter f-words go together: You don't want to fail, so you create a culture of fear by threatening to fire people, and eventually they say fYOU.

76.He does top-down 00 because he keeps writing variations of the same thing. I do bottom-up scripting because I keep trying to do new things. The difference is that simple.

77.Saying bridge building is more advanced than software construction is unfair -- they've only recently had to worry about environmental impact, cracks after small earthquakes, and terrorists.

78.The person who wrote 'sort' did not do it to improve the safety of my programs. But it' one of the main reasons my programs work. Because everyone uses that sort program and it has been properly tested.

79.Some jackasses think they can control people purely with economic incentives. They were never taught this axiom of human nature: it's always worth a few bucks to screw with the person who is trying to screw with you.

80.If you don't want to meet unjustified high salaries, stop promoting people for short-term success. It's easier to find and retain good people who believe in a good institution than it is to cover a payroll corrupted by past speculation.

81.I'm highly suspicious of managers who try to push out people whenever priorities change (which happens every three years); these managers usually have no idea what makes a successful institution and they often owe their own success to the plain dumb luck of being in the right place at the right time.

82.The problem with institutional leverage is this: I have good pitchers, so I build a pitchers' stadium. Their ERA's go down, so other teams lure them away with high salaries. Now I think I have the right to complain that my perfectly good batters have low batting averages? It's better just to have a fair playing field.

83.Take the old guys and figure out what they can do for the institution today. Just because you have a new five year plan doesn't mean have the right to throw people out for you poor fit. What if you are wrong? What if you forgot something? What if they've been right more often than you will ever be? Sometimes just being the old guy is a big contribution to an organization.

From: http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~loui/cs436advice.html