#management (79 links)
Medium’s recap, financial turnaround, and difficult path back to health.
- Design System Generations medium.com
How to discuss and describe a design system’s biggest changes
- TBM 330: (Un)common Sense Playbook - by John Cutler cutlefish.substack.com
This is a great example of how a mix of common challenges can stymie the common sense playbook. The mix of optics pressure, a "guarded" toxic personality, low trust, and a swamped partner is hard to surmount. Even an experienced manager will struggle in this situation.
- BICEPS palomamedina.com
There are six core needs researchers find are important for humans (both at work and in our personal lives). Each of us have a personal hierarchy for the six however: You might find that equity and belonging are most important to you, but choice and status are most important to your employee, your partner, your child. Getting to know them is a shortcut to better communication, as well as greater inclusivity at work.
- The Middle Management of a Design System Program sparkbox.com
The shape of your design system team and the hierarchy it falls within can greatly impact the way you approach the work. A key role to the success of your program is the middle manager.
- Understanding the Tiger Team Approach | Lucidchart Blog lucidchart.com
A tiger team is a specialized, cross-functional team brought together to solve or investigate a specific problem or critical issue.
- Directly Responsible Individual vs Single Threaded Leader | by Oliver Hu | Keqiu’s Management Notes medium.com
STL is short for Single Threaded Leader. Different from previous approach, this [...] makes the leader exclusively dedicated to a project. The individual ONLY works on this single top level initiative.
- How I ship projects at big tech companies seangoedecke.com
Ship it.
- Words on Founder Mode randsinrepose.com
- Split Your Overwhelmed Teams - ACM Queue queue.acm.org
Two teams of five is not the same as one team of ten.
How should you structure a larger engineering organization, one with dozens (or hundreds) of engineers? There are many tradeoffs to consider, and no single right answer. But, there are some structures that work better than others.
In his 1959 book, “Landmarks of Tomorrow,” he coined the term “knowledge work,” and argued that autonomy would be the central feature of the new corporate world. Drucker predicted that corporate profits would depend on mental effort, and that each individual knowledge worker, possessing skills too specialized to be broken down into “repetitive, simple, mechanical motions” choreographed from above, would need to decide how to “apply his knowledge as a professional” and monitor his own productivity. “The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail,” Drucker wrote, in “The Effective Executive,” from 1967. “He must direct himself.”
U.S. companies such as DuPont and General Motors moved from a functional to a multidivisional structure in the early 20th century. By the latter half of the century the vast majority of large corporations had followed suit. Apple proves that this conventional approach is not necessary and that the functional structure may benefit companies facing tremendous technological change and industry upheaval.
Its fundamental belief is that those with the most expertise and experience in a domain should have decision rights for that domain. This is based on two views: First, Apple competes in markets where the rates of technological change and disruption are high, so it must rely on the judgment and intuition of people with deep knowledge of the technologies responsible for disruption.
- How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class theatlantic.com
Technocratic management, no matter how brilliant, cannot unwind structural inequalities.
- Progression at Monzo progression.monzo.com
<blockquote>Progression frameworks are tools that help us evaluate and pay our staff consistently, and help people understand how to progress in their work. We've put them here for everyone at Monzo (and anyone in the world!) to use.</blockquote>
- DesignOps Handbook - DesignBetter.Co designbetter.co
- Scrum disempowers developers | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
- Why Valve? Or, what do we need corporations for and how does Valve’s management structure fit into today’s corporate world? | Valve blogs.valvesoftware.com
The current system of corporate governance is bunk. Capitalist corporations are on the way to certain extinction. Replete with hierarchies that are exceedingly wasteful of human talent and energies, intertwined with toxic finance, co-dependent with political structures that are losing democratic legitimacy fast, a form of post-capitalist, decentralised corporation will, sooner or later, emerge. The eradication of distribution and marginal costs, the capacity of producers to have direct access to billions of customers instantaneously, the advances of open source communities and mentalities, all these fascinating developments are bound to turn the autocratic Soviet-like megaliths of today into curiosities that students of political economy, business studies et al will marvel at in the future, just like school children marvel at dinosaur skeletons at the Natural History museum.
The “management team” isn’t the “decision making” team. It’s a support function. You may want to call them administration instead of management, which will keep them from getting too big for their britches.
You're so busy, doing everything yourself. You know you need help, but to find and train someone would take more time than you have! So you keep working harder, until you break.
- The Management Myth - Magazine - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
The world of management theorists remains exempt from accountability. In my experience, for what it’s worth, consultants monitored the progress of former clients about as diligently as they checked up on ex-spouses (of which there were many). Unless there was some hope of renewing the relationship (or dating a sister company), it was Hasta la vista, baby. And why should they have cared? Consultants’ recommendations have the same semantic properties as campaign promises: it’s almost freakish if they are remembered in the following year.
- Rands In Repose: How to Run a Meeting randsinrepose.com
There are two useful types of meetings: alignment and creation. Briefly, alignment meetings are tactical communication exchanges that rarely dive into the strategic. These are fine meetings that have a weekly cadence, and while there are lots of ways to screw up these meetings, their tactical repetition often keeps them on the rails. Creation meetings — diving into solving a hard problem — involve, well, more creativity. Each hard problem requires a unique solution, and finding that solution is where creation meetings can go bad.
- Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money | Software by Rob softwarebyrob.com
More money isn't one of them.
- Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule paulgraham.com
When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
- Meeting Ticker tobytripp.github.com
Beautiful. Need an iPhone version.
The way we do this is by having a 1-hour meeting every Tuesday morning where my manager presents a PDF report that outlines these figures and colours the report either Red (we're in trouble and we better do something about it), Yellow (We're in danger, but it's fixable) or Green (we're on track to achieve our goals).
- Home - Chef - Opscode Open Source Wiki wiki.opscode.com
A systems integration framework, built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure.
- Dunning-Kruger effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org
"An example of cognitive bias in which "people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it". They therefore suffer an illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average."
- Best Buy shows the importance of culture in the modern corporation | The Equity Kicker theequitykicker.com
It turns out that Best Buy has embraced the use of social media to empower it’s employees and reaped massive productivity gains as a result.
- scottberkun.com » Looking for project management slang scottberkun.com
- BandCentral -The Online Band Management Tool bandcentralhq.com
Basecamp for bands. Nice idea, but pricing looks a bit skewiff.
- THE FEATURED ARTISTS COALITION featuredartistscoalition.com
The Featured Artists' Coalition campaigns for the protection of performers' and musicians' rights. We want all artists to have more control of their music and a much fairer share of the profits it generates in the digital age.
- Mr. Yuk Says Project Roadmaps Are Poisonous codesqueeze.com
For some time now, I have thought that high-level project roadmaps (Gantt charts in particular) are one of the most worthless documents that a software project team can produce.
- SXSW: Lessons Learned at 37 Signals - ReadWriteWeb readwriteweb.com
- Fire the workaholics - (37signals) 37signals.com
Here’s another take on that: Fire the people who are workaholics!
- ProofHQ, proofing made easy proofhq.com
An online proofing system that helps you manage the way that you and your team review, proof and approve documents.
- Slashdot | Best Practices For Process Documentation? ask.slashdot.org
I know that this is all a waste of time if there's no follow-through from management. But assuming that the required support is there, how do you guys do process documentation?
- An Entirely Other Day - Wide vs. Deep blog.eod.com
Some people are naturally wide, some people are naturally deep. But the assumption is, in most business contexts, that you can — and should want to — jump between the two as the need or situation dictates. But this is a load of crap.
- Managing design designcouncil.org.uk
Articles on how design is managed, with practical ideas and real-life examples of design being used for business success.
- The Information Architect as Change Agent - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design boxesandarrows.com
How many projects have you worked on where the implementation team gave any consideration to the way people would be affected by the changes the new system would impose on them?
- Founder's Syndrome: How Corporations Suffer -- and Can Recover managementhelp.org
This syndrome occurs when, rather than working toward its overall mission, the organization operates primarily according to the personality of a prominent person in the organization, for example, the founder, board chair/president, chief executive, etc
- Test Early » Fire your best people…reward the lazy ones testearly.com
It’s the difference between troubleshooters and troublepreventors.