management
Long-live the Triangle!
Aaron Oliver points out that knowing about the “Pick two” triangle is not as much the issue as what people do with that obvious bit of knowledge.
The “triangle,” if you are wondering, is a regular triangle with three named corners: Good, Cheap, Fast. Quite often, when faced with unreasonable demands, project managers/team leaders will draw this triangle on a white board/sheet of paper/paper napkin and ask their management to “pick two” because honestly it’s the best you can realistically get.
Sometimes, freelancers try that as well; often ends up with more unemployed freelancers. People do kill the messenger.
I find only one flaw with Aaron’s post: granted, grade-school students understand this thing. And so do your management/customers. Unfortunately this is irrelevant: their own management applies enough pressure on them that all they can do is look at your drawing and nod in agreement and ask in the very next sentence what can be done do “get all three.”
It’s like when using CMMI: one of the first things you need to do is to decide whether, for your project, schedule is the most important criteria, or whether features scope is.
It’s almost 100% certain that you will find, months in the project, that the most important criteria is the one that’s behind:
- If you selected schedule and now need to kill a couple features to meet your deadlines, marketing will most likely point out that the project is doomed without these features.
- If you had agreed on features being the driving factor and need a couple extra months to deliver them, then…well, why don’t you give it a try and let me know how that went for you?
So, yes, the triangle is a bit obnoxious. And no, if you’re an engineer, it’s very likely that your management does not need to see it once again. But the problem lies mostly with the stakeholders: management’s management, marketing, other groups/units. These are the ones who need to be regularly reminded that “it’s not so simple.”
Because the more stakeholders the project has, the more likely they are to behave irrationally. That’s how we are wired to cope with external pressure.
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Management – is this leadership?
I try to make this blog mostly about open-source and management. And I do not necessarily mean “open-source and management” in the same breath.
These just happen to be two topics that I live and breathe daily and, as they say: “Write about what you know”.
Anyway, today, both worlds collided and you can see the result at http://blog.mootools.net/2007/12/13/an-open-apology-to-the-authors-of-jquery-prototype-and-others
I am not going to comment on the original issue, this isn’t my goal. I simply think that it’s very instructive to read all the comments to that post. They raise some very interesting questions about management.
Was the author’s reaction “leadership?” What constitutes leadership, then? Is it knowing when to apologize? Is it sticking by your own troops?
I leave it to you to form your own opinion.
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Open-Source Management: feeling a bit vindicated…
Funny coincidence: mere days after I decide to re-post my views on open-source, Daniel Robbins, of Gentoo fame, decides to post a late-night rant trying to address the shortcomings of the Gentoo Foundation.
More interesting than his original post, though, I enjoyed reading most comments as well as his own answers to these comments. The phrase “Benevolent Dictator” emerges fairly early on, and obviously this is what it is about. My own experience was very similar, albeit less significant to the community at large since it was with a project that, in the end, was never really jump-started. But I, too, went through the typical phases seen by Daniel: group euphoria, with our extended team posting about 100 messages per day, making all sorts of suggestions, followed by the “Let’s do it” phase, when people started mysteriously disappearing -but still wishing the project well- and finally the disillusion phase, when it became obvious to me that I was left all alone to steer the boat.
Do not get me wrong: Gentoo-the Distro, following Daniel’s impulse, has evolved into a great product and, more importantly, a product with a great community. But Gentoo-the-Foundation is another story. If I remember correctly, Daniel left the Foundation shortly after starting it, thinking that 13 people could do the same work as one single leader. And, in my opinion, this is where he inadvertently – and ironically – created the whole problem that’s plaguing the Foundation today. An Open-Source body, without strong leadership, can only wither and die.
I believe that the current situation could have been avoided by Daniel staying with the Foundation long enough to train its officers to make informed decisions through delegation and coaching.
One of the comments I read stated that management is not what makes Gentoo great. Maybe not, but lack of management is what will make it fail in the end.
Unless..!
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