Ken Whitaker Presents Leading Software Teams Today at ADC/BSC East
Ken Whitaker of Leading Software Maniacs gave the first keynote presentation at Agile Development Conference & Better Software Conference East 2014. The ballroom was packed with delegates from all over the country and more than twenty other nations.
Whitaker’s presentation was titled “From Chaos to Order: Leading Software Teams Today.” He covered what he said are the five tenets of leadership, starting with effectively managing everyone’s time.
Whitaker explained that the best way to manage everyone’s time is to have a plan. That means you need to have a product roadmap in place and make sure the team knows both the mission and the vision. Managing time also relies heavily on having a strong process. The key to a strong process is to simplify whenever possible, identify risks, remove the bureaucracy, and analyze result daily.
Most importantly, the best thing you can do to improve your process and manage time correctly is to communicate, communicate, and then communicate some more. A good exercise is to have employees write down where they spend their time each day, then use that data to map out how the team is flowing through the daily processes. From there, see what you can simplify and if you can better adapt the plan of action in place.
Secondly, are you committed to quality? Are you really committed to quality? Whitaker said you should ask yourself this regularly. He offered a quote to help reiterate this sentiment: “You can always show how customer-centric you are by how fast to market you release and how fast you fix the defects.”
Whitaker then offered five rules for how to improve your quality and better implement it in your organization: always invest in a separate QA organization, always involve QA from the start, involve QA metrics, have a goal to validate requirements compliance, and treat quality as a feature.
The third pillar of leadership Whitaker advocated is communicating better. Simply put, eliminate ineffective meetings, cut down on offering too much information, lead and get participation, and follow up afterward.
Next, he said you must retain your best employees. You do this by hiring the people who are qualified, not just the people you like. When you hire people who are genuinely good people but aren’t qualified, you cause the team to lose morale and confidence in the organization’s directions. You can avoid this situation by making sure both candidates being hired and current employees understand the expectations in place.
Keep your employees happy by giving them the ability to focus and not asking them to balance too many tasks. When an employee is working on three separate projects, he quickly loses productivity, and an eight-hour day will only produce half the productive hours.
Whitaker’s last tenet of project management leadership is to schedule without pain. The first step to achieving this is to agree with your team—and more importantly, your product manager—about what the project scope is. Then have your team estimate how much effort and what resources will be needed.
Whitaker said that if you remember these things, you can remove chaos and bring your product management back to order.
