Only Passionate People Win : Management

How to screw your development team

youngjoo — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 03:09:00 GMT

Kris – COO
Jim – EVP of Division X
YJ – Development Manager in Division X
Mike – Lead Developer in Division X
Paul – Development Manager in Division Y

Conversation #3: 3:00 PM, Kris & Mike

KRIS: You better have a good explanation of why project X is not done yet.

MIKE: I am working as hard as I can but it will take some time to finish.

K: Non-sense. If you have been working as hard as you can, you would have finished this project 6 months ago.

M: We started this project 6 months ago.

K: According to my estimate, this should only have taken 2 weeks.

M: …

K: What time did you get to work this morning?

M: 9 AM.

K: What time did you leave yesterday?

M: 5 PM.

K: This is exactly what I am talking about. You are not motivated at all to finish this project. You have no urgency!!

M: I completely understand how important this project is to you. And as I said, I am working as hard as I possibly can.

K: No, you are not. What percentage of your time was spent on this project past 6 months?

M: I would say 50%.

K: What have you done with the other 50%?

M: I still need to support the team with their current project. I am the only one who knows about modules they are modifying. That project is suffering also since I am not available full-time to support.

K: Why did you let that happen? What happened to sharing knowledge? Let them figure it out. Everyone in your team is wasting company's money!!

M: They are also trying their best to avoid interrupting me. But when we worked on those modules, you put everyone on another project and I was the only one available to work on them.

K: Oh, now you are blaming me?

M: No, sir. Just trying to explain.

K: Your team has never been reliable! The other team working on this project has already finished their part and is doing final testing. It only took them 2 weeks!

M: I would like to understand how that's even possible.

K: Go talk to Paul. I had a status meeting this morning with him. Let's do this. You tell me when you can really finish this thing. Give me the date.

M: …

K: …

M: …

K: …

M: I guess another two weeks maybe.

K: Ok. Here's what I will do to help you. Since all the noise coming from your team is making you less productive, I can put you in a separate office all by yourself. If you need faster computer, I will have IT set it up for you tonight. I can even throw in two 32" monitors. I will buy you lunch and even dinner if you need everyday and will provide car service for your commute. I can also talk to your wife. Let's get this done in two weeks.

M: …

K: I will see you in two weeks.

Conversation #2: 2:00 PM, YJ & Mike

YJ: KRIS will come down to talk to you. He's very unhappy about the project.

MIKE: What else is new?

Y: He's serious this time. I had a meeting this morning with him. He said that Paul's team already finished their part and is about to start testing. According to him, it only took two weeks which is what Paul has been telling everyone since the beginning.

M: You mean for past six months, right?

Y: Yeah. Paul's been saying "two weeks" for past six months. Anyway, I have a feeling that Kris will try to make a deal with you.

M: What do you mean?

Y: He thinks putting you in a locked room with fastest workstation and feeding meals to you will make you finish the project.

M: What the…

Y: I know. Jim was there, too. Jim has been telling Kris that there are other more important commitments to make. This is Jim's division after all and if Jim can't meet financial goal, he's screwed. You know that Jim is betting everything on the project our team is currently working on, right?

M: Yeah. I've been trying to help them. They are lost without me. I should have never worked on those modules alone.

Y: Jim and I have tried to stop Kris but he did not listen. He will come and talk to you at 3:00 PM. Just be honest with him about the progress.

M: We are months away. How can I tell him that?

Y: Jim and I explained where we were. So, he should be expecting it. Remember, just be honest with him.

M: Ok, I guess.

Conversation #1: 10:00 AM, Kris, Jim & YJ

KRIS: So, how's Mike doing?

YJ: He's still working on the project.

K: You know this is 6^th month that he's been on that project. Why is he still not done?

Y: Haven't we told you that it was a big project? From what I see, Mike is making a tremendous progress on the project.

K: Your division has been doing very poorly financially. No contribution to the company's bottom-line at all!

JIM: Kris, that's exactly why I need Mike on another project YJ's team is working on. That project is too critical for my division.

K: Mike would have been on that project if he finished his 6 months ago.

Y: Kris, it's a big project and there's no way we could have finished it in two weeks.

K: Paul's team did it. Met with Paul right before this meeting and he said they were pretty much done with a couple of bugs to address.

Y: Their scope was much smaller than ours.

K: I don't get it. You guys are making same changes to your systems. I can't understand why it takes longer to do it on your side. Paul's team only spent two weeks!

Y: We have two completely different systems.

J: Kris. I seriously need Mike back. The project he's working on adds no value to my business. We've wasted enough time already.

K: You are wrong, Jim. It has long-term strategic value. It's very important for our company.

J: I cannot meet my commitments this year if we keep spending money on Mike's project.

K: Have Mike finish his project so that he can help. By the way, Paul's division has been making great progress with their business. New deals are coming in.

Y: Kris, we should pull Mike out of his project right now. Otherwise, we won't meet our goals this year.

K: Guys. You are making me to do something that I never want to do. I've only done this once in the past and I believe this is the only solution.

J: What is it?

K: I will put Mike in a locked room with fastest computer we can get. I will buy him food everyday. I will let him use our car service to commute. I will make sure that no one bothers him so that he can focus. It always works. I've done this once before and it worked beautifully.

Y: Jim actually told me about that plan you had discussed with him. I disagree. It will not only hurt his pride, it could have significant impact on others. Please don't go there. Those things won't help him a bit.

K: That's the only way you guys can get out of this mess and have a chance to get back on track. Please set up a meeting with Mike this afternoon. I will talk to him.

J: Kris, YJ and I talked about that and YJ really doesn't think it's such a good idea.

K: Then finish the damn project now! You guys are wasting my money!

Conversation #4: a couple of months later, YJ & Mike

YJ: Mike, I was in a meeting with Kris and Paul. We discussed the project you are working on. Paul's team apparently lost the developer who originally worked on it. And no one can figure out where things are right now.

MIKE: I thought they were done?

Y: Apparently, they were nowhere near done. It's not even testable.

M: Huh? Didn't Paul say that it only took them two weeks and they were just fixing a couple of bugs?

Y: Yeah, he did. But when they were asked to do some demo, they couldn't produce anything. Maybe they did some very basic stuff. Or maybe they used crap load of hacks to finish in two weeks and never tested it. Anyway, they are rolling back their changes completely.

M: What the… Are they going to start over?

Y: No. They have something else they need to address and they have no idea when they will be able to get that project started again.

M: Did Kris let them do that?

Y: Yeah. They were losing so many customers because their product was so unstable. They've been losing a lot of money.

M: …

Y: By the way, thanks for going beyond to help with the team to finish and launch their project. Jim has been working with marketing and product teams to talk to our customers. I think customers are really happy about those new fixes.

M: Well, I couldn't let the team suffer because of the mess I created.

Y: It wasn't your fault that you were the only one who knew ins and outs of those modules. You did great.

M: Well, I contributed to the problem.

Y: I think Linda will help you finish your project. Since your project also involves those modules you trained her on, it will definitely help you.

M: Yeah, I've already started talking to her.

- THE END –

Joel's The Econ 101 Management Method inspired me to write this. Yes, this really happened even though above story has some exaggerations. I owe a lot to Mike (not a real name, of course) and his team. I could have stopped the mess very early on had I been brave enough. I will discuss what I've learned in future posts.

Special thanks to Daryl who forwarded Joel's article to me and help bring out ugly side of my career. You have an amazing skill to make me think. :)

This blog was written and published using Microsoft Word 2007 Beta.

Technorati Tags: software+engineering management developer

You and Your Manager

youngjoo — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 20:46:00 GMT

I got a perfect article for you if you've been wondering about what the heck your manager does and how to work with him/her so that you can be successful.

Deconstructing Managers Day 1
Deconstructing Managers Day 2
Deconstructing Managers Day 3
Deconstructing Managers Day 4
Deconstructing Managers Day 5
Deconstructing Managers Day 6

By the way, if you are not reading Rands In Repose, you are missing out a lot. I stopped my daily visit to Joel's blog once I discovered Rands!

Technorati Tags: software+engineering management

When your customer gets mad

youngjoo — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 10:27:00 GMT

No matter how hard you try, you cannot make every single customer happy with the product you ship. There will be bugs and someone will get seriously mad after fighting with your product for several days. I received an email from a very angry customer yesterday. Few sentences in that email that clearly showed me that whoever sent this email was very very mad.

Email started with below sentence.

Hi, this is just driving me nuts!

And the customer explained what he tried to do. Then let out his anger with below sentences.

...after that it can be a crap shoot...
...it can crash VS 2005 clean out .... no error mesage, no dialog, no re-start VS ..... just a sudden drop to the desktop!!...
...in the last 3 days I have had to re-start windows and VS about 50 times (or some crazy number of times)...

So, clearly this person was fighting with Visual Studio and getting more and more frustrated. And, to be honest, I also got frustrated by his email also. It did not have any useful details for me to help resolve the problem. Instead, it was full of complains in angry tone. 'How in the world can I help you if you just vent and not provide useful information?' was literally what I was thinking. But as soon as I was able to calm down, I realized that this person could have spent several nights trying to figure out what's going on. I would have gotten mad if I was in his shoes. So, I sent out below email.

Hello,

It will be very helpful for us to track down the problem if you can file a bug in our Product Feedback Center with as much detail as possible.
You can access our Product Feedback Center from http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/.

Once we receive a bug, we will have someone assigned to the bug to try to resolve it for you.

We would need more information than the detail you provided below.

Thanks!

Simple. Acknowledge that we could have caused this. Provide next step. And make a reasonable promise. Below is what the customer said in reply.

Will do, thanks....
Mostly I like vs 2005 and the tools .... but when things go wrong and your trying to finish some stuff before the day is over.... gets under the skin and makes one ready to scream / shout etc.... :--)

BTW: I go back to sql 6.5 and Access 1.0 and other older stuff....
So when I read some folks blogs and such it's just funny....
Like tuning indexes and sql jobs today with the tools Vs. back with sql
6.5
-- way better today !!

Just got time today to show a co-worker how to do a SQL CLR s-proc and some scalar functions in t-sql and the guy was just loving the power of sql 2005.

Thanks again.

Completely different tone and even praised our work. The last part about sharing SQL CLR with his co-worker is the best part. Notice how a quick response to the customer that showed that I cared about his problem completely turned customer's attitude around. After all, this person was very happy with our products. Just got frustrated after a huge fighting match with Visual Studio.

By listening to the customer and showing how much you care about customer's issues, you can easily make an angry customer your friend who would tell others to buy your stuff. Yes, it's very important to find new customers. But taking care of people who've already investied in your product is at least as equally important if not more. And you do it one customer at a time.

Microsoft Developer Division's Development Processes

youngjoo — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 02:39:00 GMT

Developer Division @ Microsoft is responsible for Visual Studio and it's the division I belong to. Following two Channel 9 videos will give you some peek at the development processes used by the division. These processes are new to the division. Trying to be more agile / scrum, I guess. I will let you decide whether we are on the right track in terms of being truly Agile.

Shoshanna Budzianowski explains how the division is trying to be more agile
Shoshanna (ShoShe) is the Director of Program Management @ Developer Division. This video is not really about the development process but she does talk about it. You can listen to the whole thing if you want but most of development process discussion happens during first 10~12 min. By the way, she was my 7th and last interviewer. I had a great discussion about Agile Development, some challenges people face, things that people mis-understand, etc. It was the toughest one though.

The Quality Milestone
Developer Division just came out of what we call The Quality Milestone. The idea is about taking some time after shipping a major product to get ready for the next one. Some of the big initiatives include getting rid of all bug-debts from the current release (Visual Studio 2005), creating the next generation test automation framework, increasing test automation coverage, setting up continuous integration environment, beefing up the build infrastructure and reviewing the development process and optimizing. It’s all about ensuring that we are delivering the quality software.

Windows Live Local Streetlevel!!

youngjoo — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 02:36:00 GMT

You gotta try this out. Bird's eye images are so old now...

Channel 9 Video

Tech Preview

In the Line of Fire

youngjoo — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 02:36:00 GMT

No, not Clint Eastwood movie. It's a book by Jerry Weissman about answering tough questions in front of a bunch of people. Jerry Weissman wrote a very famous book called Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story. So, I just finished reading this book and I am impressed. Jerry Weissman has a very impressive resume and you have to be thankful that he wrote two books. You are getting coached by world's most famous presentation coach and only paying about $50.

Go buy the book, read it and let's discuss about Top-spin and Point B.

I feel terrible...

youngjoo — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 02:34:00 GMT

Just came out of the meeting where we discussed what we were going to work on. And I feel terrible. I was sooo unprepared. Did not help team members make progress on agenda. Could not help people make decisions. Heck, I HAD NO OPINION. No contribution what so ever (other than writing down some stuff). I was not acting as a Program Manager. I acted like a secretary... I feel really bad. This is not what I came to do here.

"Look for small wins everyday" my friend told me recently and it was the perfect opportunity to do that. I failed... Miserably...

Gotta do something about this...