I learned what an antibubble is today, so I have something to discuss if I ever encounter a hardcore physics person. Yay me.
posted on December 24, 2003 at 11:57 PMA lot of time, management can just get a bad rap, specifically project & product managers. If you're a developer or designer for tech stuff, your vitriol will often be pointed towards the project/product managers. I think a lot of this has to do with:
- Often the underlings feel like the overlings "get in their way"
- Often the underlings feel as though they are out of the loop, and have arbitrary constraints, deadlines and requirements thrust upon them
- Often the underlings feel as though the flow of information is one-way
- Often the underlings come to view their product as "theirs" instead of part of a cohesive whole... and many project managers inadvertently encourage such thinking
- Good project managers often are not intrusive to the various teams as a whole, and are only noticed through their absence, and therefore often aren't appreciated in the moment. You get a lot of people saying "I could do that", and often times its true, they could, just not nearly as well.
- To the underlings, managers often aren't perceived as adding "direct value" to the project... they aren't contributing code, or graphics, and therefore are a "luxury"
Of course there are a whole lot more, and if you've been doing tech stuff for awhile chances are you've been involved with a project manager who is all of the above and more. Most of us have been exposed to "the poller" PM (my personal favorite), who views their job as constantly polling the various teams or individuals and updating their spreadsheet to give to their boss. As long as everyone says their stuff is fine, or is "on schedule" they're good to go. Or the ones who are insecure about their own knowledge of what they're managing, and either dismiss their underling's advice altogether or (equally as bad) are afraid to take issue with what they're being told by their underlings so as not to appear ignorant.
If you are a designer/developer trading up from smaller, more cohesive groups, to larger development paradigms... having to reorient yourself to the new paradigm can be difficult, and feel very restrictive. Then again, if you're trading up from a small shop, even having something like lead developers could through you a bit off course.
But here's the thing- a good project/product manager is worth their weight in gold to a project/product. Some would take issue with that- the "luxury" crowd, so I won't say they're absolutely required to have a successful project: but I've come to the conclusion that having one makes it that much more likely. To throw around buzzwords, they're a catalyst for success.
- They keep the right & left hand in sync.
A lot of people don't realize just how easy it is for disparate groups to get out of sync, or how much effort you save by catching potential issues early. Often you won't notice this except through its absence, when you go "I wish we would have known..." or "In hindsight..." or my favorite, "Well, if I'd have known, I wouldn't have..." - They run interference
They're often a groups' buffer between other groups (including upper management), letting them get their work done more efficiently and doing what they excel at. When marketing calls a developer and says "Our competitor is doing this, how long till we can have it?" the developer gets thrown wildly off course from their current task. An answer to a question like that isn't something you just throw out to the wild without thought, backgrounding, and knowing the implications to the project as a whole. - They're the grease on the rails.
Some of this goes back to the left and right hand, but not all. Often a good PM is faced with "we might have a problem here" issues, which they take care of instead of the initial findee. A decision is going to have to be made there, and in order to make a good decision one has to educate onself on the possible ramifications, and often a PM is going to be in the best position to grease the rails for the project to get out the door.
People often don't fully appreciate how much interpersonal problems can cause problems within a group: an example would be a prima-donna developer or designer. This can very, very quickly eat away at efficiency and morale at a frightening rate. Beyond the time wasted bitching and illy feelings, these can start to have a real tangible effect on the project: IE, one developer not doing something because they don't want to make the jerk's life easier. Good PM's catch onto these things really quick, and lift the burden of the burgeoning mob (the rest of the group) of dealing with the situation. - They often are an instant spreadsheet
This ties into the one above- but the best ones often have an uncanny birds-eye view of the project that won't be available to others who are focused on their specific tasks. They juggle many disparate variables and have an affinity for finding relationships between them, seeing where they interact.
Sure, its great to have this on paper- but the best PM's know what the paper really means. They end up becoming the project oracle, in a good way. "If I do this, will something bad happen?" You'd be surprised how often in groups where, if that question gets asked, it becomes a huge process to find the answer. A good PM can usually do the math in a small fraction of the time, simply by juggling the project variables in their head. If you live in fear of your PM being hit by a bus, chances are they are doing something really, really right or really, really wrong. But probably the former. - They speak multiple languages
Wildly disparate groups often don't understand each other, even though theoretically their goals should be the same: getting the project out the door. They use a different vocabularies, and often just think in completely different ways. They could be telling each other the exact same thing, but believe the other side just isn't getting it- simply because the information hasn't been presented in a way the other side can grok.
Try it- throw a marketing person and a developer into a room and see what happens. Unless they're exceptional individuals, you'll often deer-in-headlights-stares until they're gratefully let out of the room, or worse yet you'll have to pay a pricey cleaning service to get the blood out of the carpet. - They balance disparate goals
Fiefdoms just suck from the standpoint of actually getting something out the door. They're normal by and large, we're territorial by nature, so there's nothing necessarily wrong with it, its just often a detriment instead of being directed into a positive.
Two teams (lets say the designers and developers) may both have wholly independent goals in regards to a project: a good PM is able to see where those goals align, and where they don't, and where the different responsibilities are going to lie in order to accomplish the goals most efficiently. If left up to each camp, responsibilities are often adopted inappropriately when they could be done more efficiently by the other, or pushed off inappropriately.
A good PM is able to get past what each of the groups are saying, and actually getting down to what people want, and then figuring out how to align those goals. In usability this would be making sure each group's flow has minimal disruption due to the other. - They understand delegation
Often when looking at the org chart, its tempting to say "You know, we really don't need someone who's position is devoted towards simply making everything run", or a designer/developer will say "You know, I could do that"... and they shift some of the PM responsibilities onto the lead developer/designer. This works for awhile, until the lead realizes they're spend more and more of their time doing PM work, and less and less of their time actually being what a lead developer/designer is supposed to be doing... and one of the other designers/developers eventually either has to adopt those roles or they are lost. Inefficient as hell.
A good PM understands delegation- if thought of in a military sense, the PM is the general, with lieutenants in each of the camps. They don't micromanage, and aren't a checklist for every single question: They're a catalyst for success, just as a lead designer or developer is once a group has reached a certain point. They understand that having all the groups working as symbiotically as possible is going to bring the highest chance of success to the project, and culling a system of delegation is part of that. - Good PM's are cautious sponges
They absorb everything told to them from all sides, but filter it for truth & context. It's a scary PM who believes everything told to them by a developer or designer, or everything told to them by marketing. At some point you've probably encountered one: they're regurgitating a whole lot of information, but they don't seem to understand how it all is connecting.
Good PM's seem to understand when they need more information in order to make an informed decision, where to get that information from- and then they make up their own mind with all the information available to them. They don't, for instance, simply ask their lead developer "what do you think we should do?" and go with it. They ask their lead developer what they need to know to get to the heart of the matter, combine it with all other applicable information that the lead developer doesn't/shouldn't have access to, and make their own informed decision. - They're pro-active, not reactionary
This is just one of the aspects I've noticed about a good PM. From a bean-counter POV, its often very easy to say "If the user/customer isn't bitching, there's no problem", which is reactionary. They wait until they have a real problem to try to fix it, rather than trying to head it off before it becomes something that "has to be fixed". They're good at prioritizing problems, which also ties into into dealing with the various groups. - They bring a unified vision
Every project has to have real, concrete goals, and a real, concrete vision of where the project is going. It's often going to be the PM who shapes these aspects through their lieutenants: if it's not them, the fiefdom problem sets in, with each group having a different vision both in how they relate to the other groups and the project at hand, and how their piece fits into the puzzle as a whole. The PM's ideally create and disseminate the big picture.
This goes beyond being a "product GPS", this is about defining the real goals of the project, and communicating those and making sure they're being met- not just making sure bullet-point features are being checked off.
Another area where a lot of people fall down in is that they'll see the above list and go "Oh, I have that". And they might- I can recognize a few of them in myself, but a whole lot of others where I'm lacking.. especially in scale & scope. (Note to brain: this might be one of the core problems... a lot of people have these abilities within their own domain, but they fall down when scaled up)
But its very rare for a person to be very, very good at all of them. Especially in scale and scope- and when you've left the domain of your particular knowledge base & skillset. And perhaps it's why very, very good PM's seem to be so rare.
You also have a problem where being very, very good at one of the things I've mentioned above requires high marks in several different categories due to how they interrelate, or have dependancies upon one another.
If you're good at a few of them, you're probably better suited for a lieutenant role, not a PM. You might qualify in a pinch, as I and others have in a pinch, but you're going to have a real hard time excelling at it, and an even harder time being happy while you do it.
I'm actually writing a lot of this out to try to wrap my head around the problem, due to some issues I'm being faced with. I know the above list isn't all-encompassing, but hopefully it's a start.
There's an article in the Chicago Sun Times recently about the Michigan Ave. Apple store. Some of the highlights are:
- They're selling an iPod every 10 minutes
- The Michigan Avenue store has the highest traffic of all the Apple Stores
The iPod thing isn't what I was interested in, but the Michigan Ave store is really a sight to see even if you're not into macs, just from an architectural standpoint.
This is a big, ritzy area in Chicago- and downtown Chicago takes its architecture seriously. I suppose you'd have to go back through its history to understand what I meant- but as buildings have gone up, they've tried to keep the same "look & feel" of yesteryear below a certain eye level.
The requirements for the Schaumburg Mall Apple Store prolly weren't that big of a deal compared to all the others... it just had to look nice, and look like an Apple Store.
But the downtown store is just beautiful- the outside blends in with its surroundings, without garish signs or features, yet still adds visual value by being there. The splash of green for people who might be viewing it from above is an especially nice touch.
Very much worth a see if you are ever in the Magnificent Mile area doing some shopping... from the redline, get off at Chicago and its about 2 blocks east and a block south.
I haven't been this stressed out in a long, long time. I'm going to be working straight through, and hopefully sleeping on the plane some. Don't be offended if I haven't replied to something- if it's in my inbox, I'll get to it eventually.
Gawd, I feel like I'm working for a .com again.
Starting to wonder if caffeine & nicotine is starting to reach dangerous levels in my blood stream. Noticed while grinding my beans that my hand is picking up that tremor thing again. I normally don't really care about that sort of thing, but had a lil scare awhile back.
The thing that is really messing up is having to constantly switch gears- putting out fires here and there. Interruptions mess me up. I start missing little things, which cost me time, which just piss me off.
Luckily I was able to put a project off for a few days, so I'll be able to finish that up while I'm in Texas hopefully. Just wasn't going to work out- I've got 2 days with which to get ~60 hours worth of work in, and that's not even counting other personal stuff, which, you know, sorta has to get done.
Unamused, but it's pretty much my own fault. Looks like project manager aren't the only ones who need to learn how to say "No".
Approaching burnout much faster than anticipated. My to-do list is piling up, although luckily most of them are non-priority personal things. The lack of wiFi is really putting the crimp on things, so I hope Apple has a firmware update for snow base stations out soon, and ComCast High Speed Internet has become anything but lately. It's really getting quite pathetic- the tech's you talk to on the phone are helpful, and nice, once you get to them through the dizzying phone menu each time.
They've been down for 4 to 8+ hours every other day at the moment due to some issues in this area, for about the last 2 weeks. If I have to listen to their damnable "Please listen to... unplug your modem for... reboot your computer..." one more time I'm going to scream, methinks.
To add insult to injury, PowerPoint has decided it's going to quit much more frequently than I'd like (IE, every hour). Since I'm kind of under the gun on this deadline, I'm unamused. It's going to be interesting to see how this week turns out.
Frustration. My schedule for the next week has me allowing myself time to shower and eat meals, which is a little disconcerting. On that tight of schedule, something is always going to go wrong.
Then again, a friend pointed me to a thing her sister wrote about her experiences with debilitating migraines & methadone, so I feel a lot better about my current situation. Thanks!
The rumors of the next revision to Apple's G5's are starting to get pretty heavy. It's pretty much assured there is going to be a revamp, as they're supposed to get to 3GHz in 7 months or so, so they might want to start bumping a bit. I'm not so sure that there's going to be a big intro in January at the show, as that might be left for other announcements since the iMac, eMac, iBook & others are starting to get really long in the tooth. So perhaps within a month after, or perhaps at the show, who knows.
I'm not really interested in the CPUs per day, although I'll hope they're using a much cooler variant on a smaller process. That's not going to get really interesting until they've hit 2.5 - 2.6GHz or so.
The interesting bit is that the rumors are talking about 4 drive bays, instead of the current two, which would solve one of two of my only beefs with the G5's: only 2 drive bays, and anemic VRAM. They were such obvious omissions to such a powerful box that they raised a lot of eyebrows.
SATA is very cool and all- but there's no way current drives are going to saturate an SATA bus. Where things start to rock is with various RAID levels, especially RAID 5. The G5 is a high end workstation, screaming for RAID 5. I can see where Apple's coming from- they want to push Firewire800, XRAID and the like. But I don't think it's gone over well, not with the size of the current G5. You need at least 3 bays in an enclosure like this. That is somewhat adequate. 4 would be nice. 5 would be cool.
And VRAM? 64megs, and you have to drop $350 for a 128meg card. For the first time in years we have a display system that screams for as much VRAM as it can get, yet they're cutting it back.
And yeah, people always yell back:
"But you only need 32megs for Quartz Extreme!"
Nah. You want as much VRAM as you can possibly get, depending on the resolutions you're pushing and the amount of windows you're using. Especially if other things are using OpenGL, at which point QE is sharing VRAM with them, and slowing down. The more it can keep on the card, the better.
But I'm kind of worried about the drive bays- this could very well turn out to be wishful thinking. Then again, Apple did a turnabout on their digital audio experiment fairly quickly.
Came across this interesting essay. I can imagine lots of people are going to get pretty defensive about it, but whether you disagree or agree with his earlier points they're really a setup for his main points... this "XML, DRM & Open Standards" stuff, like:
There has long been this idea in the industry that using a proprietary format gives you an advantage because you have a captive audience. If they sign up they are stuck with you for ever. But the truth is that a proprietary system goes against the current trends in the industry. If you support open standards your market is everyone, anyone can switch to your product with zero downtime. Buy supporting open standards you also convey a sense that you are able to better connect and interface with multiple organizations, users, and platforms. This is why XML has been such an important technology in recent history.
The most annoying thing about ringtones isn't, well, the ringtones themselves. I can take those, they usually just elicit a "Dumbass" in my mind if Beethoven's 5th starts playing. But I get over it quickly.
What kills me are when people are going through every single one their ringtones, trying to find the uber-ring that completely sums up their personality and life history in under 4 seconds.
Or when they're trying to use their address book or calendar, and have the keypad set to give that incessent beeping noise.
Bleep.
Beep.
Bleep.
Bleep.
Beep.
Bleep.
Bleep.
Beep.
It's one of the few things that makes me want to smack strangers upside the head.
A friend passed on that Darwin 7.0.1 has support for multi-cpu's and hyperthreading for x86 CPU's... Hmmmm. Interesting, that.
I came across this "Deconstruction of Jon Katz" by Wood last night and had a great chuckle. It's really worth a read, as I'd sort of forgotten about that guy, and it made me remember that Katz's articles were the reason I looked at the filtering options for my slashdot account.
Some choice quotes:
Criticising Jon Katz for using the login JonKatz on a site where Anonymous Coward is the lowest of the low is an unnecessarily cheap shot; I cannot fault Katz for identifying himself as himself - it's fair warning, after all - but only for _being_ himself and telling us about it in such detail.
And...
...while columnists are increasingly commonplace. Heck, I seem to be turning into one myself, and even Stallman's thoughts litter usenet like unexploded mortar shells, demanding corralling into a column to provide a counterbalance to whatever Sheriff-Ed material Raymond is churning out in LinuxWorld this week.
It's just beautiful.
I just found out I'll be heading to Canada on January 1st for four days, which is going to make all of this even more interesting. At least I'll have a few days to decompress a bit and gear up for it once I get in from Houston.
Could be worse, I guess. Canada has some things going for it, Toronto especially. Plus, they all have a habit of talking like pirates, which is just precious. And from what I've been told I shouldn't encounter any french-canadians, which will be lovely.
The only real problem I'm having is that my laptop at some point really needs to go back into Apple for service, and finding a point where that is going to be feasible is the hard part. It's always "In 2 weeks I can do without for a week".
But of course you can't trust that, as sometimes it's 3 days, and sometimes it's a month depending on whatever is going on with them, and it's not like the Apple Store's will give you a loaner.
Moral of the story? You can't depend on current laptops as your primary computers anymore. They just aren't trustworthy, and local service centers can't/won't work on them, they always have to be sent out meaning a 3 day turn-around time at the minimum, which is just a drag.
I haven't had a laptop since my Powerbook 1400c that hasn't had to go in for service, and most of them have had to go back more than once. It's not necessarily just an Apple-thing, as I have friends with Dell's with similar issues (Dell keyboards seem to go bad a lot).
I miss being able to chunk down a bunch of cash, and know I was paying for peace of mind. That really isn't the case anymore. Although the tradeoff might be you can buy 2 laptops for the price of what you would have paid in the past...
...started a fire on the kitchen counter this evening. Sunday paper laid upon a lit candle. Hilarity ensues.
And people wonder why I don't do chat rooms. Here's a tidbit from the article:
Mr Meiwes, 42, told the court that after he killed Mr Brandes he explored chat rooms and websites looking for other people who sought the same fate.
I had this forwarded to my inbox a bit ago, and just now got around to it. It's a pretty good laugh, realy. If you ever get asked what a wanker is, this guy is a pretty damn good example. "Wanker Zealot" would prolly be more apt, but I don't think such a classification really exists.
I could say a bunch more, but he does a pretty good job of showing why he's a bit of a joke & embarrassment to the OSX community in general, and virtually no one cares they exist. Thank god his project is completely out of the loop, irrelevant & redundant when it comes to GNU packages thanks to Fink, DarwinPorts/OpenDarwin, Metapkg, & Gentoo.
Ayup, I'm going to Texas again in a week or so to teach a 2 day usability workshop thing to a bunch of developers, and if I'm hearing right, a sprinkling of project managers. Should be interesting to say the least, most of these that I've given are geared towards making a case for adding "usability engineering" into the current workflow, and how to go about doing that in the best/least destructive manner. That's actually a pretty easy sell, once you start whipping out the statistics on gained productivity and the like.
But a bunch of deer-in-headlight-staring developers, who view artsy types as their enemy de jour? I'm thinking I'm going to need to have some usability booth babes to keep their attention. In a lot of these companies I've been exposed to since the .com collapse, the animosity seems to have gone way, way down, since people are actually grateful for having a job... but there are still often undercurrents. IE, developers feel marketing makes their life miserable, and vice versa. If they perceive you as coming to them as a messenger of the other camp, you have a bit of mud to slog through.
These groups just don't even begin to understand each other in most cases, and most of their communication takes place via various liaisons. Since they don't generally understand each other, or understand why each one of them needs certain things, it can raise all sorts of unnecessary problems, morale notwithstanding. But damn, it's generally worth the effort, as they often make the other side's job much harder than it needs to be and once the give & take between them starts it can really make things a lot more efficient for everyone.
The downside is that this is going to make for a very, very tight schedule until the end of December due to everything else I've got going on. I'm back in triage mode, and the lack of sleep starts to take a toll. Having your blood register 2% stimulants by volume isn't really conducive to a long life either, but that's how it goes.
The upside is that I think it's actually going to be a lot of fun, and a bit of a challenge to translate a lot of these concepts not in a way that they'll not only understand it, but to actually feel as those they've started to grok some of the underlying concepts. And sometimes when you're forced to look at concepts through a different point of view you end up gleaning additional insights yourself.
If my inbox is to believed, I may be heading for TX again within 2 weeks for work stuffins, which would be twice in a 30 day period. Might take some doing.
Houston isn't all bad. It has kaloche's, for one. Krispy Kreme's on just about every corner. They've got the guts to build a $1 billion dollar monorail, just, well, to sorta have one but that no one is really expecting to get used. Sort of the biggest belt buckle in history, and if it has rhinestones, I'm sold. Damn tasty steaks, dead animal heads on the walls are included. Plus, some of my best friends in the world live there.
Of course this is what it looked like at 1pm on the way to the airport the last time I tried to fly out of there, and then Continental screwed me over, and I was lost in my own personal purgatory for awhile.
I've come to the conclusion that the most valued quality in any project manager is one who can say no. No to his/her team, no to the client, no to the upper-ups and pretty much everyone they happen to encounter or communicate with on a daily basis.
If you want to be a good project manager, and you can't seem to get the knack of saying "No.", then for the love of all thats holy at least learn how to say "We'll get that in version 2.0".
Alright, maybe it's not the most valued quality but it's the quality that would make my life 1,000 times simpler over this last month, so I'm sticking to it.
I've just finished rereading "The Dogs of Babel" last night, and can't say enough good things about this book. I also can't recommend it to everyone. IE, it goes something like this: Mild-mannered 50's-ish linguistics professor comes home to find his much younger wife dead in an ambiguous, with some odd signs, and the only witness was their family dog. He becomes obsessed with teaching the dog how to speak/communicate, so that it can tell him why his wife died, or what happened to cause the woman he loved to die... whether from suicide, accident, foul play, etc.
Sounds kinda trippy huh? Yeah, well, it is. I had it passed on by a friend, and wasn't really interested, but gave it a shot, and within 3 pages was hooked. The writing is just that good. The plot seems a little absurd, and it is (and gets more absurd) but it's really just an inventive way for the author to explore their relationship.
It's probably the most emotionally "raw" book I've ever read. The circumstances are unreal, but the emotions aren't. Maybe those who have lost significant others are bad control subjects for reading this book, but it actually made me a bit afraid. I'd read a chapter, or half of a chapter, then close it and put it somewhere because it was just too emotionally exhausting. But it'd always be there in the back of your mind, and call you back to it, like a good horror movie. I don't know how this author, as a woman, got into this characters head like she did...
Yeah. Amazing read, but not for everyone. This is something to read after you need to bring yourself down from Dr. Seuss, but if you read this after Ginsberg or something you've pretty much just sealed your fate of jumping off a bridge. I'm actually really looking forward to her 3rd book that's out, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time", which looks to be just as trippy & original.
Otherwise, my reading list has gotten to be fairly long, and stacked up. Next up was supposed to be Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. But you know, I've gone back and reread Cryptonomicon three times, the Diamond Age twice, Snow Crash twice, and you know I'm going to wait until more friends have gotten through it and can honestly tell me that the ending doesn't suck hardcore. If you've ever read one of his books you'll know what I mean. I haven't read Zodiac, but I've heard it's just as bad. How such an amazing writer seems to destroy ever single ending is beyond me.
Which means for now I'm stuck with going back and forth between "Good to Great" and "A New Kind of Science". Everyone of my friends in the industry seems to be having it shoved down their throat. I was afraid it was going to be full-on Tony Robinson territory, but so far it seems to be quite good. Especially like the analogy of "It's not just about having the right people on the bus, it's about having the right people in the right seats on the bus".
And yeah, I've been reading "A New Kind of Science" off and on for a good year, and mentioned it before, but keep having to put it down as he just wigs me out hardcore sometimes. Or I get interested in a point he brings up and spin off into find material on that instead of pushing ahead with it. A lot of what Wolfram is proposing in that is scary shite. I have a feeling I'll need to read this 3-5 times before I feel I have a true handle on a lot of it.
Found this in my inbox yesterday, which I thought was actually pretty darn cool. It looks like it's going to be ROM only, as original optical media was, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be extremely useful for a whole slew of devices. Probably most exciting is that the form factor could be whatever you decided you wanted it to be, similar to the new polymer based batteries that are starting to make it into some of my favorite devices.
It also made me go back and reread this from my bookmark archive, which seems to have made some good progress since I was first looking into it. Yeah it's a ways off, but remember there was a time when a hard drive was a 9 foot prototype of large disks in an IBM research lab.
It just still kind of amazes me sometimes that 99% of our data gets stored on thin metal disks spinning at extremely fast RPM's.
Spent some last night helping one of the boys with their Drivers Education report, which was a little trippy. I was originally none to happy about the whole Drivers Ed thing- yeah it's been 10 years or so since I did it, but still, its expensive to have two boys taking that at once since they aren't taking it in the summer through the school. At least it didn't seem that expensive when I was taking it.
But then I think about how well I know about these boys, and I want to give the rest of the world the best shot they have at staying alive once these two are on the roads, so the expense seems like a small price to pay if I've lowered the probability of something horrific happening.
I'm not digging these reports though, as they have to have 15 different articles involving deaths through car crashes and the like and well, you come across some pretty disturbing stuff when that's what you're googling for. Doesn't exactly put your mind at ease from a pseudo parental/older brother role. It was bad enough with a little sister, but two boys?
*shiver*
