The Successful Software Manager电子书

The Successful Software Manager

Why subscribe?

About the author

About the reviewer

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

Get in touch

Reviews

Why Do You Want to Become a Manager?

Start with "why?"

The pros and cons of becoming a manager

Your attitude and tolerance for risk-taking

Where am I and how did I get here?

The cost of the journey

Are you ready to become a manager?

Breaking down your working week

What jobs are there?

Team leader / manager

Development / delivery manager

Project manager

Being an Agile practitioner

Scrum master

Does being a manager mean managing people?

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

You don't have to be a psychologist

The "Accidental Manager"

The Johari Window

Hacking the impostor syndrome

The Rumsfeld Matrix

Summary

What Are the Key Skills I Need?

Skill 1 – Flexibility and adaptability

Skill 2 – Communication, communication, communication

Inbound communication

Internal communication

Outbound communication

Skill 3 – Team leadership

Aspects of team leadership

Don't do everything yourself

Clarity of team responsibilities

Document your team services

Skill 4 – Stakeholder management

Stakeholder mapping

The layers of a stakeholder relationship

Stakeholder management case study – the UK NHS

Skill 5 – Negotiation

Building rapport

Skill 6 – Using a chosen methodology

Agile

Incremental development, over big-bang releases

Dynamic daily huddles, over regular static updates

User stories, over exhaustive requirements

The Waterfall model

PRINCE2

If I'm not ready, then how do I get ready?

Get a mentor

Shadowing

How do I get the job?

Internal or external

Positioning yourself

Will I like it?

The interview and the offer

Summary

What Is My Job Now?

The seven fundamental roles of any software project

1. Project Manager

Planning

Controlling

1. Scope risk

2. Scheduling risk

3. Resource risk

4. Technology risk

Reporting

2. Project Sponsor

3. Business Subject Matter Expert

4. Business Analyst

5. Technical Architect

6. Developer

7. Testers

Your first day

Meet your manager

Induction training

Meet your team

The first team meeting

Your first week

Meet your stakeholders

Set your own schedule

Make a plan

Summary

A Week in the Life of a Manager

The 70/20/10 blended learning model

Experiential learning

Exposure learning

Educational learning

The impact of your methodology choice

Agile, PRINCE2, and ITIL

The ITIL framework

The five stages of the ITIL life cycle

ITIL versus DevOps

Event, incident, and problem management

Event management

Incident management

Problem management

The weekly project template

Monday

09:00 A.M. to 09:15 A.M. – team huddle

10:00 A.M. to 11:00 A.M. – power meeting

11:00 A.M. to 12:00 A.M. – backlog/task list review

12:00 P.M. onward – stakeholder time

Tuesday

09:00 A.M. to 09:15 A.M. – team huddle

10:00 A.M. onward – planning time

Burn charts

Wednesday

09:00 A.M. to 09:15 A.M. – team huddle

12:00 P.M. onward – team meeting/backlog review/sprint planning

Thursday

09:00 A.M. to 09:15 A.M. – team huddle

12:00 P.M. onward – team time

Friday

09:00 A.M. to 09:15 A.M. – team huddle

11:00 A.M. to 12:00 P.M. – communication and reporting - project status update

12:00 P.M. to 13:00 P.M. – team washup

14:00 P.M. onward – try something different

The weekend

The development process template

A quick visual recap – methodologies

Scrum

Sprint planning

What is velocity?

Daily scrum

Sprint review

Sprint retrospective

Summary

Managing Your Team

Building and maintaining a team

Roles, responsibilities, and boundaries

Should a manager be at the coalface?

Team culture and organizational culture

Team culture – a Malawian example

Setting the tone

Diversity

Managing your team

Managing your team – free up your time

Managing your team – be approachable

Managing your team – be radically transparent!

Ray Dalio – honest improvement

Toyota Production System

Balanced feedback

Managing your boss

Managing your boss – communication

Managing your boss – expectations

Managing your boss – vision

Managing your peers

A team of managers

Collaboration and coordination

Managing your customers

End users

The utility of your product

The user experience

Buyers, budget holders, and decision makers

Summary

Asking the Right Questions to Your Users

Information overload

Understanding situational context

The five different types of users and what they need

Casual users

Business users

Power users

Management users

Non-users

The five whys

Asking why, nicely

Summary

Meetings

The off-duty chat

The one-to-one off-duty chat

Be prepared to talk

How to approach your team for an off-duty chat

The pep talk

Assessing the off-duty chat

How friendly should you be?

Wider-group off-duty chats

The meet and greet

The sales meeting

Your role as a manager in a sales meeting

Preparing for a sales meeting

The science of the sales process

Sales planning

How to deliver the sales meeting

Evaluate

The requirements workshop meeting

Your role as a manager in the requirements workshop

The workshop logistics

User stories for the requirements workshop

Personas at the requirements workshop

Workshop epics

Prioritization

The product demo meeting

Demos – less is definitely more

Rehearsing and tailoring the demo

Create a sense of occasion for the demo

Set the scene for the demo

Be specific about a demo

Pause to engage during the demo

Summary

Design Techniques

Design teams and stakeholders

The architects

The test teams

The five design techniques

Design technique 1 – storyboards

The advantages of storyboards

The disadvantages of storyboards

Making storyboards – a growing toolkit

Design technique 2 – use cases

Case study – how a bank's ATM is used

Use case or user story?

Design technique 3 – wireframes

Design technique 4 – mockups

Design technique 5 – prototypes

How to be a "whiteboard rockstar"

Preparation

Use block capitals

Use colors, but write in black

Use straight lines

Purpose

Controlling the room

Handing over control

Visual anchors

Summary

Validating the Solution

No solution is perfect

Technical validation

Business validation

Design thinking

Learning through testing

Empathize

Define

Ideate

Prototype

Test

Case study – The Finnish UBI

Building consensus

What is consensus?

Building consensus

Writing the business case and getting sign-off

Writing the sections of a business case document

Presenting the business case for sign-off

Summary

Agile, Waterfall, and Everything in Between

Methodologies – A summary and comparison

The language of the PMO

The purpose and value of the PMO

Learn to speak in the PMO language

The stage-gate process

Stage 0 – Discovery and ideation

Stage 1 – Scoping

Stage 2 – Building a business case

Stage 3 – Development

Stage 4 – Testing and validation

Stage 5 – Product launch

Death by boring project status update

Using the RAG status approach

Sending out project updates

Using a dashboard

Keeping it simple, stupid

Interpreting between domains

Making complex things less complex

Clarity through simplicity

Past mistakes and changing the status quo

Summary

Always Be Shipping

Creating a delivery-focused team ethos

Protecting the project from scope creep

Maintaining momentum

When times get tough, muck in!

Continuous delivery

Time to market

The User Acceptance Testing (UAT) review

Developer-tester collaboration

When do we call it a bug?

Learning mindset

UAT report and exit

The Test Summary Report

The UAT meeting

Always be selling – why it's my job, and that's OK

Summary

The Training Day

Approaching the training day

Be realistic about the scope and length of training

Concentrate on three key points

Training preparation and setup

Snappy documentation

Hands-on experience training

Use the lunch break to assess training

The support request is still training

Response and resolution time

Care and attention

Quality of communication

The post-mortem

The End Project Report

Your role in the End Project Report

Nobody cares - what to do about it

The marketing angle

The technical angle

The practical angle

Summary

Organizational Management in the 21st Century

Introduction

An old myth – the manager has all the answers

Management in the Industrial Revolution

And then it all changed

Separating leadership and management

Leadership and management across big and small organizations

Navigating a new world of work

The importance of motivation

Not all motivation is born equal

What is structure?

Process tolerance

Quick recap

The five key concepts in self-management

1. Sociocracy

What is Sociocracy?

Organizing in circles

Consent over consensus and authoritarianism

Feedback between higher and lower circles (double links)

Why should I care about Sociocracy?

How do I use Sociocracy?

2. Holacracy

What is Holacracy?

Why should I care about Holacracy?

How do I use Holacracy?

3. Teal

What is Teal?

Why should I care about Teal?

How do I use Teal?

4. Nonviolent Communication

What is NVC?

Why should I care about NVC?

How do I use NVC?

5. Dynamic Change

What is Dynamic Change?

Why should I care about Dynamic Change?

How do I use Dynamic Change?

Management systems – a comparison

Is it safe to try at home?

Running experiments with your team

Getting expert help

Summary

Developing Yourself as a Leader

You can't separate a leader and their team

The mindset of a leader – Awareness

Awareness of our filters

Awareness of our automatic habits

Awareness makes management easier

The subconscious mind of a manager

Developing awareness as a manager

The value of reflection for managers

Reflection and awareness

What's occurring?

Skillful managers don't react!

Be here now

You treat others how you treat yourself

Learning from mistakes

How to discuss mistakes with your team

Rationality and emotion in a manager

How to feel

How to manage better using emotions

Exercise – Assessing your emotional awareness

Leading with intention

Why are you here?

Exercise – Motivator map

Focus your intention as a leader

The habits of successful leaders

Nudges to victory

Habits – Human do-while loops

The pros and cons of reinforcement learning

Exercise – Refactoring your habit inventory

How leaders use alignment

What alignment are you?

Starting the alignment cycle

A lean you – Experimenting and iterating

Resistance is information

Exercise – Listening to your resistance

Summary – Work on yourself to lead your team

Your Next Steps

So, what's next?

Can I still be creative?

The creative work ahead of you

Stop coding!

Delegation

Delegating in a considerate and controlled way

Accountability

Actually keep coding!

You can still think like a developer

Delegation and being busy

A real-life delegator – Anthony Casalena

Developing others

Relating to others

Creativity bursts

Looking towards your future

Getting the manager job

Getting started

A manager's toolkit

Extracting information – information gathering

Defining solutions

Keeping the build focused

Launching your product

What comes next on your journey?

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