Author Archives: Chris Sims

SDForum SEM Sig

I spent the evening at the SDForum Software Engineering Management Special Interest Group (SEM Sig) meeting. The room was filled with engineering managers of almost every type and experience level. The presenter tonight was Narinder Sandhu, who worked at HP and Intuit before founding T-Rex Global. He managed to get everyone in the room to do a basic skills-assessment and career action plan, as part of his presentation comparing large companies to small startups.

After the formal presentation, the informal discussions were amazing. I talked with people about things as diverse as: finance, feedback, agile development, a mathematical model for organizational structures, and C vs. Lisp vs. Verilog! Oh yes, I’ll be back.

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Engineering Managers Support Group – Report

Last night, 8 folks gathered in the event room at a Round Table Pizza in San Mateo to learn about giving feedback and discuss the issues they face managing engineers. I was especially gratified that two of my past coworkers dropped by and participated.

The new venue seems to be better located and has the capacity to support the group as it grows. Pizza worked well as workshop food. We will return to this same location next month, on Wednesday August 22nd.

To keep informed about the Bay Area Engineering Managers Support Group, join us on meetup.com.

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Engineering Managers Support Group – Tonight!

Now with free pizza!

Share the adventures and challenges of managing engineers. This month’s session will start with a short workshop on giving feedback. After that comes a facilitated discussion where participants share challenges that they are facing and get feedback, ideas, and support from the group. The event is free and pizza will be provided. Come out, join the discussion, and become a better manager.

We will be in the event room at:
Round Table Pizza
61 43rd Ave
San Mateo, CA

Arrivals and free pizza 7:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Program starts at 7:30 PM

It’s free, RSVP at meetup.com.

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New Classes Available – For Free!

To celebrate America’s two hundred and thirty first birthday, The Technical Management Institute is reducing the price of our one-hour and two-hour classes to zip, zero, or free! For about the cost of a drink of tap water, you can have me come to your company and put on one of these short-format workshops. This will only last a limited time, so act now!

Read the full article…

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Paper Prototyping

LinkedIn has a cool feature that let’s you ask a question of your whole network. This morning, someone in my network asked this question:

Tools for visualising interactive prototypes? What do you prefer?

Powerpoint, ConceptDraw, Omnigraffle, Flash, Ruby on Rails?

We are reviewing the tools we are using to help visualise interactive storyboards and concepts for our clients. What are other people using? How important is it that the tool supports experimenting with real data and conditional branching in order to explore with the development team the consequences of their design decisions?

My reply:

Consider Paper Prototyping.

It is low cost, easy to do, and will quickly teach you how a real user will react to the system. With a paper prototype, a human acts as the computer, so your prototype can support some very sophisticated logic without the need to create code. Modifications are trivial, encouraging experimentation, discovery and improvement. I was skeptical at first, but after using it a few times I have become impressed with the power of this tool.

Photo courtesy of
Nertzy

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Support Group Meeting Tomorrow!


The Bay Area Engineering Managers Support Group will meet tomorrow (Tuesday) night in Palo Alto. The evening will start off with short interactive workshop. Tuesday’s workshop will focus on one of the easiest ways to improve the effectiveness of meetings. Next will come a facilitated discussion in which participants can share issues that they are facing at work and get feedback, tips, and advice from the group. The event is free. We still have room for a couple of more folks to join us. Please RSVP at meetup.com or by leaving a comment on this blog post.

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