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I Quit!

I’ve decided to quit the software development and project management biz to get into the more lucrative, albeit illegal spam biz.  I could spend a billion spams a day!  If you’ve been following my blog, don’t dispair.  You’ll still hear from me, just in the form of men’s health emails.  (That’s a joke, folks!)

CIO Insight did a short piece on eleven reasons to quit your job.  See the full story here.  It’s so funny!

http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Careers/11-Outrageous-Reasons-to-Quit-Your-Job-758179/

Do you have a trust fund?  That’s a good reason to quit.  What about if you are making too much money and don’t feel you deserve it.  Well then just quit!  Those are just a few good ones from the survey CIO Insight did.

Prototype

CIO Insight

Actually, those are great reasons.  In fact, all the items on the list are great – for the employer, that is.  That’s because you don’t want a person like that on your team.  If they’ll quit because they can’t get up in the morning or there’s a must-see sporting event one day, then you can live without that person.  Reasons for quitting tell you a lot about a person.  It’s a window into their true character.

But wait a minute…  You want to know their character before you hire them.  Oh, yeah…

The time to test a person’s character is before you add them to your project team – during the interview and selection process.  That means you must either be a really good judge of character, or use a test to weed out the deadbeats.

During my career, employers have used multiple interviewers.  On “interview day” you go from office to office talking to a half dozen team members.  Those team members report back to the HR department with a score, and anecdotal feelings about your “team player” aptitude.  Of course, prospective employees are on their best behavior during such sessions, so you can’t get any dirt on them.  But if your team members are each good judges of character, you’ll have a good idea what you’re dealing with.

One employer put me in from of an impossible-to-finish test.  They said I had two hours to compete it, and that I should answer as many questions as I could.  Problem is, the test would take any normal person four hours to complete.  So what’s a guy to do?  Rush through it, scribbling down answers as fast ask you can?  Or take it slow and easy, answering only the ones you know you’ll get right?  Clearly this was a trick test to see how a person reacts when given too much work to complete in a given time period.  Will they make a big mess of the job by rushing?  Or are the smooth and level-headed.  A test like this will reveal their true character.

Another idea is to take them out to lunch and gang up on them.  See how they react in different settings.  What comes out of their mouth when they aren’t guarding it so closely?  Ask them to gossip about the worst boss they ever had.  Do they take the bait and spill their guts?  Or do they say all their bosses were saints?  You could ask them to rat out their worse coworker.  Same trick…  Do they partake in vicious gossip about their previous workplace?  If so, it tells you that they’ll do the same at your company.  They may even say similar things about you.  Or they may walk off the job to join a rock band!

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That’s Where Experience Comes In

Recently, I overheard a senior project team member reminding a junior software developer to make sure his code built and could be checked in every day. He reminded the junior coder that we now have more coders on the project, and that leaving files checked out for multiple days put others in a difficult position. They could not get his changes until he checked it in, and long delays held up forward progress of the project.

That conversation got me thinking about all the little things you learn throughout the years. Here are some more to consider.
A few things experience has taught me:
• Check your code in often
• Don’t go dark for long periods of time
• Make yourself accessible
• Research everything you don’t know the meaning of
• Try new things
• Don’t get locked into legacy products
• Upgrade your development environment often
• Get a new development machine every three years
• Network with team members
• Answer every email you get, and in timely manner
• Get on Skype
• Blog often
• Re-read your emails before sending
• Let no bug survive
• Don’t be an obstruction to others
• Clear obstructions for those who work with you
• Take a vocabulary class
• Use good grammar and punctuation, not IM slang
• Decline unproductive meetings
• Produce a lot of code
• Design before you code
• Get peer feedback
• Learn to spell
• Work on communication skills
• Make a lot of friends

Got something to add? Become a contributor and add your comments below. I’d love to hear them!

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Failure, ouch…

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
    — Henry Ford

 

These are not from Henry:

Project failure is a luxury few can afford.  Multiple failures can bankrupt you.  See that they don’t…

It really is true that project failure is an opportunity to redesign and restart.  If you think about it… why do projects fail in the first place?  They fail because of some huge flaw that nobody recognized at the outset (or that the stakeholders ignored).

So starting over with those flaws corrected is what Henry is talking about.

There were 13 years of development leading up to the Model T.  (1896 – 1909)  There was another 18 years of development that lead up to the Model A.  (1909 – 1927)  That’s a lot of failure!

But think about it… it’s also a lot of success!

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Timesheet Administrators: Lock Your Timesheets Quick!

Have you ever locked your company timesheet when the week or pay period is over? If not, you’re probably wondering what for? Why lock an employee timesheet? Or you might be wondering how to do it at all.
Locking employee timesheets is done for two primary reasons: payroll and client billing.

First, payroll: If you use your timesheet hours to pay employees, those hours must be verified and deemed correct before entering them into payroll. Nobody wants to be shorted just because they missed a few daily entries, but it happens. You also don’t want to pay crafty employees twice what they should get, just because they entered 80 hours in for the week. Again, you’ve got to verify and certify before timesheet hours go to payroll.

But what happens if an employee makes a change after the hours have gone to payroll? For instance, they realize later that they actually worked a few hours overtime. Understandably, they want to be paid for those hours. But they may not know you have already cut the check. So they innocently enter the extra overtime hours, and nobody notices! The check was already cut before they entered them. Yikes!

Locking all the employee timesheets before you cut checks is the only safe solution.

In the example above, the employee would not be able to enter his overtime hours for the previous pay period because it was already being processed. Lock it down and they can’t enter any additional hours. Of course, they’ll come back screaming, but at least you won’t miss the hours. Just tell them to enter the hours for next week and they’ll get paid for them in the next check.

Second, client billing: It’s the same issue as payroll above. Employees who enter time for the purposes of billing clients may not know the exact time you cut an invoice. The scenario is the same: The Accounts Receivables department cuts an invoice for the previous month’s work… and then a day later one of the employees working on that project enters some additional hours – AFTER the invoice was already cut!

That’s a bad situation!

The Accounts Receivables department doesn’t realize that more time was added to this invoice date range, and, the employee doesn’t realize that the invoice has already been cut. So the billable hours he entered are effectively lost. Sure, they are in the system, but nobody knows they should be included on an invoice.

Oops!

Again, the safest solution is to lock the invoice date range before cutting an invoice. This prevents any new hours from being entered. Employees will get an error and realize they should put the hours into the next pay period instead.

Try locking your timesheets, if you deal with payroll or client billing!

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Three Reasons to Track Project Time

Time tracking, for the purposes of project management, is an overhead some companies are not willing to undertake.  (Read this as an exploitable mistake!)  We all know that some level of administrative overhead is necessary to maintain a healthy organization.  And some level of process or methodology is also necessary.  In this article, I’m suggesting that time tracking should be part of that process.

There are three primary reasons to track project time that apply to all organizations.  It matters nothing whether your company is a consultancy, manufacturer, government agency, non-profit, or otherwise.  Time tracking is valuable to all.  Here are the top three reasons to track project time.   1) Reduce budget overruns, 2) Prioritize projects, and 3) Learn your own business.

I’ll discuss these three project tracking benefits in detail.  Feel free to skip to the ones that interest you most.

1) Reduce Budget Overruns
Human beings are curiously bad with two things: time and money.  A huge number of cottage industries are built around helping people manage time and money.  Why?  Because almost every one of us does it badly.  Admit it… your bank account scrapes bottom almost every month.  And you’re late for at least one event per month.  That’s so easy to predict, I don’t even have to know you to feel confident in its reach.  Everyone suffers from the same poor time and financial accounting.

Unfortunately, we carry those same poor principles into our work life.  I’ll venture to guess that your boss, and his boss above him, is also a poor manager of his personal time and money.  Just because he’s a boss, doesn’t mean he’s any better at time management, or money management, than you are.  We’re all crap.

But if you’ll just subject yourself to a little time tracking discipline, you can avert the most common budget overruns.  It’s the low-hanging fruit you’ve heard so much about.  Just track the time you spend.  That time translates into salaries.  Now you know the project cost.  Don’t spend more than you take in.  Simple.

I know a great time tracking product for this.  It’s named Standard Time.  Click here for Timesheet and Time Tracking Software.  You can install this on everyone’s workstations, and start tracking project time.
You’ll see why it’s important in the next two reasons to track time.

2) Prioritize Projects
Instinctively, you know which projects are strategically important to your company.  You know which ones represent a strategic investment that will pay off big-time in the future.  Even the lowest employee knows that.  (Although it’s the company executives that should enforce the participation in such projects.)  So, are they doing that?  Are you doing that?  (Hint: if you’re a low or mid-level manager, here’s your chance to advance:  Talk “strategic projects” at every meeting.)

“Secondary projects” are nice to do when you’ve got time and money to burn.  Have you got time and money to burn?  If not, you must focus on the strategic projects.  They’re the only ones that make money and keep people employed.  And how, exactly, do you do that?  You track time to them!

Collect all your hours for every project you work on, and then run a report that shows you which projects are getting the most time.  You might be surprised!  Even better, categorized your projects as “strategic” and “non-strategic” and run the report again.  Which category is getting the most time?  Are you surprised yet?

If you’ve already downloaded Standard Time (see link above), you can get all these reports for free.

3) Learn Your Own Business
Last thing: learn your own business (LYOB).  It takes 2 -3 years to really learn a business.  You may have a good guess within your first six months of employment, but you won’t truly know it for another two years!  Tracking your project time chops a year off that.  Here’s why:

When you track time to company projects, you learn what makes them efficient, and what makes them inefficient.  You learn the gritty details because you see everything that goes into the work you do.  My advice: pour over the descriptions in every time log entered by every employee.  Submit yourself to the excruciating pain of studying these details.  You’ll perfectly hate it!

But even as you hate it, you’ll love it.  You’ll become an expert on your business and will soon have the information you need to make improvements.  Time tracking provides the information you need.

Best Time Tracking Program

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Give it to a busy person

Here’s an old saying, “If you want something done, give it to a busy person.”  There is a particular commonality among busy people: they complete an astonishing number of tasks each day.

Busy people feel they have to complete each and every task given to them.  Plus, they feel they need to do every one of them well.  Nothing is half-baked.  No detail is too small.  But to a busy person, all that work is not a burden, it’s an investment.  But still, they sometimes feel overwhelmed but keep motoring on day after day, doubling the number of tasks that normal people complete.  They rarely wait for someone to tell them to do a task twice, or even once for that matter.

I’ve noticed that busy people even walk faster than normal people.  They seem to be on a mission everywhere they go, even to and from work.  They drive faster and rarely make “quick stops” along the way.  They never say, “I’ll just be two minutes,” which has become a popular saying of the non-busy people of the world, because it’s never really just two minutes is it?

I admire busy people, and enjoy studying them, especially in the project management setting.  You don’t see them in meetings like the non-busy people.  Instead, they’re heads-down or jetting off to the next task.  That’s a discipline few possess, including myself.

Bottom line: if you don’t have a busy person to emulate, try becoming one yourself; someone might being to emulate you.  Prioritize everything, all the time.  Complete every task.  Grind out the details that most people gloss over.  Get a whole day’s work done by 10 AM, and then look for something else to do.  You might just find that the busy life suits you!

 

–newshirt

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Should You Go Cloud?

That is the question…to cloud, or not to cloud?  I recently read an article by Sarah Fister Gale, found here: http://www.pmi.org/~/media/PDF/Publications/PMN0312%20cloud.ashx
It is interesting how many people go to the cloud without knowledge of security, back-up, redundancy, and so forth.  There is little doubt that the cloud has many positive attributes.  That is why cloud usage continues to experience robust growth.  However, too often people just assume the cloud is a magical solution with hardly any issues.  Well, that is normally the case…unless you happen to be my brother-in-law.  His company was utilizing a cloud hosted credit card processing service.  And things were great for nearly two years, until the cloud server went down and there was no back-up plan in place.  It took 3 days of hand wringing and lost sales to get back online.  In addition to immediate lost revenue, he lost long term customers.  The article above will certainly give you an idea on specific questions one should ask and a basic outline to help you make a solid choice for your cloud solutions.

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Don’t be the DIA and BAE Baggage System

Remember the expense delays in opening the brand new Denver International Airport?  Many case studies have been done examining the intricate reasons for such a colossal failure on a grand scale.  DIA was to be the most efficient airport in the world, able to accommodate over 50 million passengers per year.  One of the key components was to have a fully automated baggage system…eliminating the tug and trolley system.  This would cut a planes turnaround time by 30 minutes and would be a key component in creating more efficiency with flights and passenger throughout.  The chief project manager, Walter Slinger had his heart set on this shining new system and romanticized about the notoriety the state of the art airport would bring to the city of Denver.  BAE also liked the idea of designing a system that would garner great attention and further their own reputation for building baggage systems.  Again, you could read many in depth case studies about the key decisions that led to the cascade of delays and failures.  However, I would summarize them in a single manner, tunnel vision.  Both parties fell in love with an idea and ignored many internal obvious warnings about the baggage systems feasibility.  The delays were numerous and cost billions of dollars.  In the end, after many attempts to partially use the automated baggage system, it was virtually scrapped for the more economical tug and trolley method.  We all know the old saying that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs?  If you’re a project manager, make sure your love of an idea isn’t greater than your team’s ability to design and implement the idea.  Don’t be afraid to change directions.  Otherwise, you may be the next DIA, which is still one heck of an airport!

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Project Quality Assurance

Project quality has many facets depending on the type of project and the quality objectives. A few common metrics used are guidelines and standards.  Most people understand the difference between the two.  However, guidelines can be confused with standards.  Guidelines are just that, an idea or parameter to stay within.  Standards are a more exact objective to be met.  It is well worth while to make sure people are clear on the differences and expectations of each.  Otherwise, a small misunderstanding can be costly.  As an example, a sorting team was tasked with looking through thousands of figurines to inspect for defects.  The guideline says the figurines can have up to 3 blemishes on the front portion, no larger than 2 cm each as long as they are not on the face.  The Standard stated if there is only one blemish allowed in the facial area and they must be less than 1 cm.  Well, an entire shift didn’t understand the difference between the guidelines and standards and inadvertently allowed figurines to pass through that had single blemishes on the face up to 2 cm…double the allowed size.  This was caught during a random audit and thousands of figurines had to be re-sorted costing the company hours of productivity, not to mention money.  As cliché as it may sound, never assume anything. Communication is vital.  A simple misunderstanding can cost an entire project.