If You Want Something Done, Practice Your Patience
As a manager you've been taught, either by your peers, or through hard knocks, to avoid micromanaging your teams. You quickly learn that micromanagement only alienate people.
Anyway, I have noticed that delegation appears to be a difficult concept for inexperienced managers that I had the opportunity to mentor. Delegation does not come naturally. Newly appointed supervisors often think “If you want something done, do it yourself.”
Delegation of authority is an investment and you need patience and time to see your investment come to fruition. It may take a few weeks, a few months, or a year but your patience will be rewarded in the end.
This is the theme of Jurgen Appelo's humorous article.
[via NOOP.NL]
Original photo by mrsmas and published under SXC license.
Patterns and Practices for Distributed Teams
If you are working with teams distributed across multiple timezones, you know how difficult it can be to operate efficiently at times. Over the years, you surely have experimented and tried out different patterns or processes that work in your context.
I have been working for ten years with teams that were in timezones seven to thirteen hours away from my own and we have experimented quite a bit. This is fun and frustrating at the same time.
J.D. Meiers exposes some patterns and practices that will work with distributed teams. I have found that those patterns are not appropriate in every circumstances but they are an excellent summary that will prevent you from reinventing the wheel
[via J.D. Meier's Blog]
Original photo by extranoise and published under an Creative Commons Attribution License
Introduction to Lean Manufacturing [Video]
Gemba Academy has a good video introducing Lean Manufacturing
Self Improvement: There Is No End State When Transitioning to Agile
I am a strong believer in Self Improvement, constant learning, and continuous improvement. As such I really enjoyed this article from Mike Cohn where he describes how Agile adoption is process with no end state that needs to be tailored to your organization needs.
[via Mike Cohn's Blog]
Organizational issues that get in the way of effective project delivery
When things go wrong and projects do not get delivered on time, on schedule, and on budget, it is easy to blame the team or the team lead. However, one should not forget that the organization as a whole can play a role in delaying projects. Ron Ronsenhead lists in his article some Organizational Issues preventing effective project delivery.
[via Ron Rosenhead]
