At this year's SD West conference in Santa Clara (March 9-13), Chris will be leading one of his more popular interactive sessions, Why Do Agile Projects Succeed (or Fail)? The answers are different every time we do this particular workshop, which involves the structured brainstorming method we've come to refer to as "Group Wisdom Without Groupthink." You can check out the results from the same session at Dr. Dobbs' Architecture & Design World conference here.
SD West Discount Code: 9ESPK
Thanks to Cesar Idrovo for passing on the InfoQ link to this juicy paneldiscussion at Qcon 2008 sponsored by BayAPLN and moderated by David Chilcott.
The panelists included Polyanna Pixton, David Hussman, Sue Mckinney and Pat
Reed.
Just before the holiday, we had the pleasure of debuting a brand new course, Management 2.0, in partnership with Wayne Turmel, aka The Cranky Middle Manager. It was also our first course offering in a new market: Chicago. To kick off day one of this action-packed two day course aimed at those who have recently made the move from individual contributor to manager, Chris led the participants through a brief session that examined the question, "What makes a great manager?"
Hamster-powered paper shredder, via Curbly.
Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur yourself or just an entrevoyeur, there’s much to be gleaned from the musings of a distinguished group of business adventurers over at My Way, The Entrepreneur Collective, which aggregates feeds from a dozen individual entrepreneurs’ blogs. Blogging here are some really superb and entertaining folk, including Tom Evslin, whose post Why A Great Programmer is Worth 50 Good Ones is a classic all managers should read, the always brilliant Chris Yeh, and Ben Casnocha, whose Business Rules of Thumb wiki is full of gems like this:
First-rate men hire first-rate men…second-rate men hire third-rate
men…these third-rate men will then employ the bulk of your company’s
employees and they tend to select fourth-rate people. – Richard M. White.
Here be much wisdom.
There are two emergent schools of thought (at least) about technical team hiring: hire fast, fire fast (a play on the "hire slow, fire fast" adage), and no false positives. FeedBurner founder Dick Costolo has this to say:
I buy the hire fast, fire fast line of thinking for Sales Reps or VP
Sales roles but I don’t buy it for Engineering, Marketing, Finance,
etc. The problem with hire fast, fire fast in the engineering
department is quite simple: you don’t end up executing on the fire fast
part of it and the bad hire infects the organization for an extended
period before you figure out how to remove them. Engineering goals are
more generally team goals, there can be lots of reasons code can ship
late, and performance criteria are more subjective than sales
performance criteria. The mediocre hire ends up becoming part of the
team and it just ends up taking longer to fire that person on the team,
by which point they’ve added more subpar work to the mix. So, I am a
subscriber, outside of sales, to the thesis that you have to interview
rigorously and that it’s better to leave an urgently needed role empty
than to bring in a "false positive" who will infect the organization.
to the Technical Management Institute blog.