22
No, don't even think about taking someone's phone. If they're looking at their Facebook account or personal Twitter account during a meeting, then you have a bigger problem, and the solution most likely would involve possibly trying to recruit and hire the right kind of people; ideally, those who are capable of acting like adults.
However, one thing ...
18
that's a very pertinent question! I'd rephrase it in a slightly different way:
Why people don't pay enough attention to meetings?
The usage of mobiles (or any other gadgets) just for distraction (at least in the meetings I've been to) is mainly because people don't believe the meeting is useful.
So, instead of trying to solve the consequence, I'd suggest ...
12
I don't think there is going to be an easy answer to this question.
From my perspective, the critical factors are:
Team is not meeting the development goals
QA runs late, but does not want help from developers as it is currently offered/supplied
Developers complete the work that they perceive is necessary, and don't perceive any need to do additional ...
11
Command-and-Control vs. Self-Organizing Teams
Should I collect all the phones before a meeting? ...I don't want to punish everyone just because a few people can't pay attention[.]
It depends. Are you facilitating a meeting between adults, or babysitting kids? If you treat adults like kids, then you abandon all hope of creating teams where people step up ...
11
Your asking many questions here:
component teams (platform, front end ... ):
You are correct, that goes against Scrum. If you want to lose time with handover then do this :-)
shared team members
Also goes against Scrum. Multitasking slows people down, makes them lose focus. Good for bad quality :-)
How to deal with a really large and really small team? The ...
10
Ideal
The best thing would be of course to have a separate moderator.
Now, considering that if you could do this, you would have already, here is a proposition, which should be considered in all such cases: cycle.
Abstract
That is: when an important role needs to be regularly taken by some group member, but that assuming this role prevents him/her to ...
10
Interesting question. Before I could take action, I'd need to know two things (at least):
1. What is the impact on the project?
2. What are the duties of the team lead? What is the team lead
accountable for?
90% of the PM's job is assessing the impact of an issue/risk/change/ on the project and communicating that impact to the relevant stakeholders. ...
9
TL;DR
Gamification is inherently competitive, which is contrary to the "succeed or fail as a team" concept that underlies many agile methodologies. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea; it just means it's not well-suited for use with frameworks like Scrum or Extreme Programming. Your mileage may vary with other methodologies.
Competitive Nature of ...
8
David was right on the spot when me wrote that the output matters (delivered values), so I have nothing else to share than a story.
The company I'm working for have several sites, and I'd like to write about two specific sites: one, where the discussions can be as long as they needed and the other where the sponsors behave as you described. Both sides are ...
8
I personally wouldn't feel the relationship is better if I contributed to putting out a crappy product when I know the solution is suspect. So option 2 -- going with a less than ideal solution -- is something I would have a lot of trouble with and might likely make me feel a bit resentful for having to work with someone who is unteachable.
With that said, ...
8
The criteria you will use for assessment depend on what you, as a boss, value, on what's for you, as a boss, important.
You may create a long list of them (communication, honesty, humor, transparency...) , but people will get confused, so I'd limit to few, like 5 or 7, choosing the most important for you.
In my opinion more important than a list itself, ...
8
From your story it sounds like the current teamlead is not very good at being a teamlead and excels as a Senior Developer. I would suggest he is relieved of the task of coordinating work to his fellow developers and have the Project Manager appoint someone with more personal skills who will likely enjoy it more, ensure that the work this powerhouse leaves ...
8
Robert Austin wrote a short, devastating little book, Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, that neatly demonstrates why and how most personal measurement systems are doomed be either at best distortionary or at worse actively dysfunctional.
The problem is that you're introducing personal measurement. Under selected circumstances, that can ...
8
It's great to hear that Code Reviews went smoothly and you are seeing results soon, you have seen it's effective and that means the junior programmer is keen to learn (All good stuff)
Few things I would like to suggest which can be done at your end
Good code samples from existing code base - You probably have some star quality code in your existing code ...
7
Your interactions with team members are the key part of being a PM. You will always have some sort of relationship with them, good or bad. In the common case where a PM has zero real power in a company, having a good relationship with those who do have power becomes overwhelmingly important because if you don't have someone who is willing to back you up you ...
7
Notwithstanding my comment about the proper exchange, you are dealing with a normal problem of 1) prediction of future performance, and 2) how to attract good employees.
The first problem is a huge problem. Predictive indicators that we tend to use are not that predictive. One of them is experience. Experience is one of the most widely used criterion, ...
6
If you want to build consensus, tell the new team members that this how the team currently operates. Over time, as the new team members become more integrated and you each learn more about each other, you may want to revisit the choices.
If consensus doesn't work or it doesn't fit other constraints on the project (e.g. time), tell them that that's the way ...
6
there are a select few that cannot seem to take their eyes off of their phone
imho, it's quite common for creative people to get bored during all those endless meetings
perhaps you could change the way you run meetings? I've seen too many project managers who just loved all kinds of meetings and couldn't understand why developers would find these ...
6
Treat the symptoms or kill the disease. Taking the cell phones away will certainly cure the distraction problems. I'd hate to think what the side effects might be.
A high performing team doing work with which everyone agrees will not be distracted. It is simple as that. Like others have stated, take a long, hard look at your meeting and ask the right ...
6
What are the key Agile points to be considered in a small startup company, with a team of 5-6 people
Getting started with Agile Project Management
What are the key points I have to consider in terms of Project Management and Agility.
Looks like you want to follow agile project management, but others
may not know what that means. Try to get at least a couple of people
trained. Scrum is the most popular agile process.
Assign the key roles of Scrum Master ...
5
Not just in retrospectives, but in most workshops and meetings, it is very wise to have a facilitator that is separate from the team. This role is for meeting control and does not participate in the meeting content. If you commingle roles, you are degrading the effectiveness of the facilator. So I would answer your question with a no. Bring in a separate ...
5
This is an opportunity to educate your sponsor. 100% FTE is really somewhere between 45% to maybe 75% truly productive where the balance is unproductive to include socializing amongst other things. 100% truly productive is not achievable and likely detrimental to performance. There is value in socializing but you need to make sure it does not get out of hand....
5
Project Success is the Metric, All Else is a Proxy
Measuring skills or teamwork (whatever that actually means, assuming you can measure it at all) is really just a proxy for measuring whether someone is supporting the project and making a valuable contribution to the project's process. Even assuming that you're measuring something vaguely relevant (e.g. a ...
5
The most direct result of this is that QA is constantly behind. When we start a sprint there are already several items ready for QA. While they work on these items, things keep piling up and at the end of the sprint we've got a giant set of items in QA and developers saying they have nothing to do. Of course with items not getting finished in a sprint, the ...
5
It can be a copout, but in my experience, most of the time when someone says something like "relationship building is a cop-out", the person saying that really does need to put more effort into building relationships. Let's look at some hypothetical scenarios:
Al's engineers need some mockups from Beth in graphics department. Al says to Beth, "I need these ...
5
T think this actually marks you a s good leader even more than a good manager.
This has always been one of my favorite quotes:
“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worse when they despise him. But of a good leader who talks little when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: We did ...
5
Help the team to move from storming to norming, see stages of group development. You can achieve this by:
Present your observations to the team. Take care that you talk about observations and not interpretation.
Highlight the advantages you could achieve if you change your behaviour, e.g. get better results by taking more ideas into account, speed up ...
5
How to keep the team motivated
Ask the team.
Chances are, the team knows both:
What they want to do
What improvements to their process would help most
...far better than you (or, most certainly, strangers on the internet) ever could.
So ask them, discuss, and then ensure they're empowered to actually carry it out.
4
welcome to PMSE!
It isn't clear how you 'inherited' this maintenance project... The takeover from the development phase to the maintenance phase is a vital part of the process - in ITIL it's the Service Transition phase; Really worth to take a look! - some definitions are important to be highlighted:
Define a Grace Period: There's a Grace Period after the ...
4
Is the goal to remove the bottom 10%, 15% of those on probation or is this simply a process everyone goes through before becoming a full employee?
If the former, then you need measurable, hard criteria, not soft ones you listed. It needs to be tied to what they do, something you can count and measure, and then the bottom 10% gets whacked.
If the latter, ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
