Eventyr

Leadership on Agile Projects

"Leadership that moves the emphasis from doing-things-right to doing-the-right-things is a better complement to agile methods than the detail oriented task management popularized by modern project management. Interestingly, project management (emphasising achieving things through task control) is a relatively new phenomenon based on Fredrick Taylor’s Transformation View of task decomposition (1900). Whereas Leadership (emphasising achieving things through collaboration and shared vision) is as old as human collaboration itself. "When the best leader's work is done, the people say, We did it ourselves." - Lao-Tzu (604 BC)"

The True Role of a PM on Agile Projects.

Swearing at work

"Regular swearing at work can help boost team spirit among staff, allowing them to express better their feelings as well as develop social relationships, according to a study by researchers.  Yehuda Baruch, a professor of management at the University of East Anglia, and graduate Stuart Jenkins studied the use of profanity in the workplace and assessed its implications for managers."
Swearing at work boosts team spirit (Yahoo! News) (Via Tom).

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From the paper 'Swearing at work and permissive leadership culture: When anti-social becomes social and incivility is acceptable' by Yehuda Baruch and Stuart Jenkins (published in Leadership & Organization Development Journal):

"Social swearing provides stress release for individuals, and helps to develop group norms and cohesion. This subsequently improves both individual and group well being. Conversely, annoyance swearing tends to increase stress for individuals, and hinders positive group norms and cohesion, hampering both individuals’ and groups’ well being."

I'm very curious to look through my data for examples of these two.  I suspect I'll find some more lovely examples. 

I'm looking forward to reading this paper thoroughly, and hope I find time to follow up this reference:

"Taking this point to the extreme, Wajnryb (2003) offers advice for executives who have to make staff redundant: “If you’re worried about which laid-off employee is going to show up with a semi-automatic and shoot up the office, be wary of the non-swearers”."

Intrapreneurship

Intrapreneurism is working from within; "internalising the mission of an organization, absorbing your customer's problem, and driving a creative solution that matters."

• Organisations rely on intrapreneurism and always have.
• No one tells you to do it but they appreciate the results.
• Create an energy and feeling that it will happen and it will.
• When you hear people articulate the mission then momentum has caught on.
• Sell, sell, sell.
  

Her advice was to show that you are competent and deliver so that people trust you. Do this above all.  She ran through a further series of lessons:

Lesson 1: Understand the organisational landscape and politics.
Lesson 2: You can make something GREAT happen.
Lesson 3: Don't assume anything... what appears obvious may not be.
Lesson 4: Make your stakeholders look good.
Lesson 5: Don't be intimidated... and don't give up.
Lesson 6: Bigger effects require teams... but with bigger results.
Lesson 7: Be fearless and keep the faith.

Nina gave a really interesting talk about her work at HP developing a way to use mms camera phone pictures to help girls select the right shades of make-up.  I was fascinated to learn about image processing and colour correction and calibration on camera phones for this project, and the work -arounds that they created to get this to work as a fully functioning prototype.

In her case, being a girl helped her to innovate and push for a project that the male engineers just did not understand.

It was a lovely, interesting, relevant and stimulating talk with which to end my time at GHC.

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Johanna Hunt
Official GHC 2007 Blogger
You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum

Lacking Initiative but Inventing the Future

6. Give the female employee a definite daylong schedule of duties so that they will keep busy without bothering the management for instructions every few minutes. Numerous properties say that women make excellent workers when they have their jobs cut out for them, but that they lack initiative in finding work themselves.

11 Tips on How to Handle Women Employees taken from the 1943 issue of Transportation Magazine (Via The Presurfer)

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I'm getting quite excited in the run up to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.  I am so glad I got a full scholarship to attend.  I admit I'm a bit nervous about being one of their official bloggers, but that just means it is tIme to polish my words, develop some opinions and confirm my daylong schedule of duties so I can do some thinking in advance. (Although I may lack the initiative for the latter, or so I understand from the above.)   

Human Resources

While in Washington DC for Agile 2007 a group of us visited the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial.

The line "No Country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources" quoted on one of the inscriptions entertained us.

The use of the phrase 'human resources' had attracted our attention.  The concept of developers often being treated as nothing but resources to be swapped about had been raised many times during the conference.

From Wikipedia:

In the very narrow context of corporate "human resources", there is a contrasting pull to reflect and require workplace diversity that echoes the diversity of a global customer base. Foreign language and culture skills, ingenuity, humor, and careful listening, are examples of traits that such programs typically require. It would appear that these evidence a general shift to the human capital point of view, and an acknowledgment that human beings do contribute much more to a productive enterprise than "work": they bring their character, their ethics, their creativity, their social connections, and in some cases even their pets and children, and alter the character of a workplace. The term corporate culture is used to characterize such processes.
The traditional but extremely narrow context of hiring, firing, and job description is considered a 20th century anachronism. Most corporate organizations that compete in the modern global economy have adopted a view of human capital that mirrors the modern consensus as above. Some of these, in turn, deprecate the term "human resources" as useless.

I have yet to work out why the phrase "No Country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human capital" would be any more preferable.

Situational Management

Try to think of it as an escalator, moving downwards [The only logical direction for things to move, no matter what the other side say]. At the bottom end is the Directed form of management, where individuals are taken by the hand and told how to do each and every task. At the other end is Delegation, where experienced, knowledgeable staff members are told to perform tasks and expected to complete them on their own. In between is Coaching, where the manager sets tasks and priorities but is interested in feedback from employees. And Support, where staff set their own timescales and solutions for tasks set by the manager, with regular evaluation.

Screwpole teaches situational management... | Reg Developer.

Leadership Issues Reading

Leadership issues reading.  (Perhaps something for the coming weekend.)

Leadership Reading List (From the Scrum Alliance)

Project Management and Scrum – A Side by Side Comparison

World of Warcraft and Project Management

Presentation given by Joi Ito at the 23rd Chaos Communications Congress on World of Warcraft here.

Note to self, watch.  Ignore the pretty blood elves, focus on the project management issues raised.

Visualization Methods

Prototype members of this category of elaborate visualization tools are, in our view, methods (from realms as diverse as education, requirements engineering and argumentation theory) such as concept mapping, evocative knowledge diagrams, argumentation diagrams, or rich visual metaphors. In this paper, however, we only focus on methods with potential applicability in the realm of management. In management the key for better execution is to engage employees. To succeed the communicator not only needs to convey the message, but also needs to tailor it to the recipient’s context, so that he can re-construct the knowledge, integrate it and put it to meaningful action.

Towards A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for Management [pdf] and the engaging Periodic Table of Visualization Methods (via Boing Boing)

Mmm, must find the time tomorrow to properly look at this.

Queen Bee

The study found that when presented with applications for promotion, women were more likely than men to assess the female candidate as less qualified than the male one.

They were also prone to mark down women’s prospects for promotion and to assess them as more controlling than men in their management style.

The findings, based on experiments carried out among more than 700 people, suggest that the “queen bee syndrome” of female rivalry in the workplace may sometimes be as important as sexism in holding back women’s careers.

Office queen bees hold back women’s careers

Interesting.  I wonder how, and if, that plays out in the new media industry.