This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #41 – You make the call :

You’re the project manager. Two technical types have a technical disagreement they can’t resolve. They bring it to you. You don’t know enough about the question to form your own conclusion, and they aren’t the sort of pair where you can easily assume one is right. How do you go about coming to a decision? Who do you consult? How do you go about finding the information you need? When do you escalate? When do you know you have enough information to make a decision?

Middle Manager,
Arlington, VA

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #40 – Loose cannon programmers:

I’m a team lead and have a handful of programmers, testers and documentation people reporting to me. There is one programmer, lets call him Ivan, who is the most experienced programmer on my team. He is very smart, very confident, and listens to me about 60% of the time. The other 40% he either says one thing and does something different, or refuses to compromise and just does whatever he thinks is right.

Besides driving me crazy, the functional problem is his behavior disturbs the team. When he’s frustrated, he leaves meetings (often yelling at me) or shuts down and goes silent. He sometimes does coding work that we’ve agreed not to do, or adds features we’ve never discussed – sometimes this seems done out of spite for me or others. Since he is well respected as a programmer, less experienced members take on some of his habits, using him as an example. When he’s at his worst he’s a major distraction to progress.

So my question is how do you handle a senior person who is a loose cannon? I can’t just fire him: he’s my most productive programmer. But he creates so many other problems for me and the team that I struggle with how to manage the team with him on it.

– Managing Crazy Ivan

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #39 – How to reorganize a team. Here’s the details of what we’re talking about:

Our VP recently redefined the direction of our division. As a result my 23 person development team needs new goals and new sub-teams organized around them.

So my task this week is to (drumroll) reorganize. I’ve done this before but I’ve never read anyone’s advice on doing it well. Specifically I need to break the VP’s directive (e.g. “We are focused on the server market”) direction down into smaller goals and then figure out how best to apply my 23 people to those goals without them throwing me out the window or setting my car on fire .

– What’s the best way to develop new team goals?
– How many feature teams (sub-teams) should I have?
– How should I apply my 23 person team towards those goals?
– How involved in this decision should each programmer/tester/etc. be?
– Do i optimize for the organization or what people want to work on, or want to learn?
– How worried should I be about preparing for the next direction change?
– What’s the best way to approach this in terms of my decision making process?

– Signed, Captain reorg’s dilemma

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #37 – Hiring for talent vs. experience. Here’s the details of what we’re talking about:

“I’m in charge of a new team at work that needs to hire 4-5 people to take the project from the incubation stage to a full product. Am I better off hiring a bunch of college students with raw potential, so I can grow them into exactly the positions we need, or should I look inside our company or to experienced people in the industry to “hit the ground running”?

– Potential vs. Experience (PVE)

The weekly discussion summaries from the first 30 weeks of pm-clinic are now up.

These summaries distill each week’s discussion into a 2 pages of the core ideas, key suggestions and best references. Some are deeper than others since some discussions generated more posts than others.

30: Happy project status meetings
29: The politics of bug fixing
28: My kingdom for quality
27: When to abandon specs
26: Big teams vs. little teams
25: Death by powerpoint (Surving)
24: Changes during development (Evil?)
23: Traits of good PMs / leaders
22: Limited resources (how to deal)
21: The project from hell
20: How many project managers do you need
19: Managing those far away

For the rest, and info on joining the discussion, go here.

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #36 – The role of lead programmers vs. project managers. Here’s the situation we’re working on:

I’m a group manager in a mid-sized software company (150 people). One of the raging debates we have is over the roles of the leaders of the programming team, the group manager, and the marketing team. When it comes to any leadership or high level decision making we have very different ideas for what roles people should play. It has come up a few times that we should have one dedicated PM for each major product that can lead/co-ordinate/drive, but we’ve never settled on exactly what responsibilities that role would have.

Programmers, testers, marketers are all scared they’ll lose power or be annoyed by a dedicated PM. Right now our lead programmers balance doing much of what I’d expect PMs to do (decision making, tracking), with our small
marketing team doing the rest (requirements/market research), group managers such as myself do the high level stuff.. So I have 4 questions:

1. What are the tradeoffs of creating a new role for project management? Won’t this reduce our lead programmer’s leadership role?
2. What’s the best way to introduce the first PM into an organization?
3. How do you settle debates over who owns which decisions? (requirements, feature cuts, etc.)
4. How would you evaluate the performance of a PM, compared to other roles, if there are only a handful per project?

Last week in the pm-clinic discussion forum was topic #34 – Getting started in leading teams.

This week: Leading the unleadable? Topic #35.

I lead a mixed team which includes developers, architects, testers and analysts. The majority of the team have been hand picked and are experienced, diligent and hard working. There is one fairly novice guy who has been given to me in order for him to learn and develop. The issue is that after 10 months he is still producing work of a very low quality and the rest of the team are constantly having to assist, advise, correct and improve his work.

Some members of the team and getting fed up with carrying the guy and I am very concerned that the team will lose focus. I have proactively tried to help the guy. We have had project reviews where the issues have been raised. We produced action lists for how to address the issues and yet things are no better. He is a stubborn kind of guy who comes from the “my way is always the best way” school of working an usually refuses to adapt or change.

Any advice, war stories, or recommendations for this kind of situation?

– Signed, leading the unleadable?

Last week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #33 – Getting started in leading teams.

This week: Transitioning into managing others.

I am a project manager (PM) who is just starting to have direct reports. I’ve had enough bad managers throughout my career that for a long time I told myself I never would want to be a manager myself. Luckily, now I have a good manager, and I am being encouraged to take a broader leadership role on the team, including managing others directly. This is great, but I still feel that I have a lot to learn about delegating effectively and how to be a good manager to others in general. Any guidance or insight, or advice on avoiding traps on this transition would be most helpful!

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #32 – Fear of changing direction.

1. How do you get a team to stay productive when a big direction change is imminent?
2. If a competitor makes a change that forces you to respond, how do you decide what to do?

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #31 – Working with programmer/architects.

We’re talking a situation where there is an senior architect new to a project, and how to figure out the best way to work with/ lead / manage them.