Below is an excerpt from Tom’s Expectations For Project Management — a private document written for engineers who report to me and who are running projects in a technical lead role, which lists out a set of project management responsibilities and expectations.
This is a short talk I gave a while ago about how complex systems fail, and root cause analysis. Transcript is below.
Recently someone said to me “stakeholders only care about milestones,” and something clicked for me.
Work should be completed in a series of small changes, where each change is a polished, fully-working improvement.
The tl;dr is that management is a set of powers and accountabilities that the role confers upon you, whereas leadership is the ability to motivate followers. Anyone can be a leader, and teams run on leadership not management. Management is not necessarily bad, but management without leadership is pretty dang terrible! Also management is like the nervous system of an octopus.
Feedback is a gift.
Some gifts are little treats for you to consume. Think of a box of chocolates. You enjoy them and then they’re gone, but you remember the thought that was put into them.
Sometimes gifts are utilitarian, like getting socks for Christmas. They are not the most exciting thing to receive, but you kind of need them as part of your normal day-to-day life, and you’ll get use out of them.
In this, the third and final part of this series, I’m going to present 10 recommendations for avoiding the pitfalls of using bucketed prioritisation (e.g. must haves, nice to haves, etc.), covered in the previous two parts.