Hamstaa!

ACS recently started a new course entitled "Growing Team Leaders" that I feel might compliment my management reading and learning. This post is the first in a series associated with the course.

The first session, "What is a Leader", presented by John Ware of Dale Carnegie Training was on this month. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of skills I was already aware of and am doing as part of my role. There were however a few points that I can continue to work on. One I particularly liked was "Micro manager yourself, macro manage your team". What this essentially means is manage your own time and tasks in detail and provide guidance to your people, trusting them to do their job.

With respect to leadership however, the main point that I took away from the session was that good leaders are focussed on people. This was highlighted by the statement "Managers manage process, leaders lead people". Management is all about managing the processes that achieve results. Leadership however is about vision and hearts & minds.

The bulk of the course then focussed around techniques to balance motivation and accountability within your team and building outstanding communication skills.

So if you really want to lead your team well at all levels, focus on people management along with your other management skills. Understand what motivates your people, give them the opportunities to grow and take them where they might not go themselves.

One thing I've strived to maintain as engineering has grown, is the involvement of engineers in support. Why? Andy hit the nail on the head with his recent post on "All of our developers start in support". In it he said, 

You can’t get a good feel for what customers want when you’re sitting behind your IDE listening to product managers.  Only on the front lines can you hope to understand what people want to do with your product and how you can make it better.

Too often in product companies, engineering and support are two separate groups. The biggest problem with this is that the people developing the software have no real feel for what the end-users are experiencing.

Engineering can come up with great solutions that, when released into the wild, are not entirely practical for clients to use. By being part of the support team, even if only for a few months, engineers gain greater understanding of the pain clients may be going through. They can then develop great ideas on how to introduce small enhancements that really help our clients.

As such, it's now policy that when you join the engineering team you spend some time in support and regularly cycle back into support for short periods. It keeps you focussed on solving clients problems.

Before Easter, on a visit from the States, Andrew (the CEO) restructured the engineering team by moving two of the senior engineers into product management roles. The aim of this restructure for the business is to bring a dedicated focus into building successful products to the product development part of the company. Andrew has discussed some of his reasoning behind the change in "Organizing for Innovation (Part 1) - Why?" 

While talking about the proposed change and how it would affect my team as well as myself, my wife Helen reminded me of a book I'd read many years ago. Who Moved My Cheese by Dr Johnson talks about how change affects people. Presented in the form of a parable, it features "Sniff & Scurry" and "Hem & Haw" whose cheese one day disappears. As Haw goes through the process of finding "new cheese", he provides insights into how to handle change in a series of "writings on the wall". The following one

Enjoy Change! - Savor the adventures and enjoy the taste of new cheese!

got me thinking about what opportunities the restructure would bring.

Opportunities for the team

On of the problems we've struggled with in engineering as we adopted XP was the availability of a "client" who was also trying to plan new products. This change has effectively removed this bottleneck and allowed us to focus on ensuring we delivering value to our clients with each release.

In addition, as our acknowledged guru Adrian has now moved out of direct development, like a tree falling in the forest, it has cleared the area to allow the other engineers to shine. One of these, Andy, has already seen the opportunities for him as he discusses in his article "Big Changes at Ephox".

Opportunities for Me

When I started at Ephox, I had basic management skills and so focussed on building up those skills to meet the new challenge of engineering management. In the meantime, I let my technical skills get blunt. In recent months I had reached a state of balance with my management skills so I had been looking to resharpen my technical skills. This change has provided me the focus on what skills I need to work on as I dive into the development vacuum caused by less resources.

In addition, it has provided the additional management challenges of building up the engineering resources again, managing the requests for the limited resources from 6 different people and maintaining the mental well being of my team as they meet the challenge of less senior colleagues.

Change happens, it's how we react to change that determines how it affects us. With the exception of change for change sake, change brings opportunities. The challenge is to recognise this, identify the opportunities, and "savour the adventure" they present.

I've just finished reading part 1 of an article, "Considering Ajax", by Chris Laffra from IBM and it made me consider what the role of engineering in business is outside of just development.

The underlying technology of AJAX has been around for a while, but what's interesting is the amount of buzz surrounding it now. The danger with this sort of buzz is both engineers and business people alike can get caught up in it and make decisions based on the hype, instead of what is the right solution to a clients problem. As Chris puts it

When you make decisions, one strong cognitive bias is the bandwagon effect, a well-known psychological phenomenon.

Don't get me wrong, there are still plenty of good business reasons to do something even if it's a "bandwagon" idea, for example to get press interest or attract VC. But the real challenge is to overcome the "bandwagon" impulse of a new technology and identify what technical benefits are to be gained by using it.

As I see it, part of the role of engineering is to cut through the hype surrounding a technology, understand what the pros and cons are of it, identify how it can best be utilised to solve a problem and provide an unbiased recommendation of it's potential use in the business.

Of course, engineers aren't immune to hype either, so part of the role of the engineering manager is to remind everyone that the technology is just a tool and ask the questions "what are the real problems with using it?" and "how and where could we use it?".

Ephox has a long history of association with graduates (we were founded by a graduate) and so a significant number of our engineers have been graduates. It has only been recently that we have hired experienced engineers (mostly at the senior level) and found it very difficult to get good candidates. As the engineering manager I'm of course interested in how we build up our resources and this is a troubling development as I try to grow the team.

Damien recently posted a comment on the state of IT in his article "Is Australia in an IT Drought?" In it he comments on the potential future lack of IT graduates in Australia and poses the question:

As an industry we should be asking ourselves how we can make this industry more attractive to young people seeking a career.

While I agree with his calling for the industry to do a better job of promoting the opportunities in IT outside of pure engineering, I think the biggest thing we can do is hire graduates.

A recent discussion with a recruiter indicated that there are plenty of positions out there despite the perception by students that there is no work when they graduate. The problem appears to be, as an industry, we want to hire experienced people, and not graduates. So students are right, there are no jobs for them when they graduate.

So consider hiring a graduate. They are the future "experienced" people and without them, we will find it harder and harder to find good people.