Lean Coffee: Micro-management

This morning we talked about management, project management, and more specifically, micro-management. A few key points from the discussion:

• What's involved in management?
• Timelines, resources, problems/obstacles
• When to micro-manage?
• Highly selective micro-management
• What are the key things you need?
• Visibility
• Accountability
• Communication
• Need to let people fail and fix things themselves when possible
• But maybe not when it's on a client's critical path
• When to step in? When things aren't going as expected or estimated
• Make sure workers know when to flag things and ask for help
• Manager's job: Find out the impediments and remove them
• Need to give frequent feedback, especially positive
• Don't forget about the positive feedback -- it's easy to only give feedback when there's problems
• Hiring: People observe who stays and who is let go
• Contributes to group culture
• Tools: Pivotal Tracker, Basecamp (good for discussions), Trac (didn't like), PMRobot (coming soon :), Intervals, Bugzilla, Fogbugz, JIRA (bloated, enterprise-y), Redmine (customizable)
• Pivotal Tracker: Velocity / points system works really well

I was really interested by the tools discussion, and on a related note, prepared a quick Google Docs survey. Check it out --> How do you manage? -- I'll post the results at a future session.