jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
Parent categories: Managing Your Career
Other tags: | Strategy: Prioritization |
Too Many Things - Sven Amann As research computing team members and managers, we all have way too many things on our plate, and the battle to being productive and effective is focussing relentlessly on our priorities and letting less important tasks slide. I actually generally do a pretty decent job of that - except when workloads peak and I’m much busier than normal, which is of course exactly when I need to be best at focussing on the priorities. In this blog post, Sven...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Prioritization |
Time management when everything’s a priority - Elizabeth Harrin, Girl’s Guide to PM Most of these items are things you will have seen before, but even pros routinely practice the basics: Schedule Your Time Know the Difference Between Urgent and Important Understand Your Priorities Delegate and Help Plan at Different Levels Know When You are Most Productive Deal With Email Integrate Your Schedules Deal With Conflicts Stay Positive I recently tackled two things on this list. I started blocking off my schedule for tasks that...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other |
Productivity Is About Your Systems, Not Your People - Daniel Markovitz It came up in our discussions of some “measuring developer productivity” articles last year that, especially in research, teams are productive, not individuals. And to make teams productive you have to spend time (leveraged!) time of making sure your team processes are working smoothly. That means ensuring good communications, making work visible (we’ve been pushing towards Jira and Confluence - it’s been a slog bug we’re starting to see the benefits) and clarifying communications...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Software Development |
Maximizing Developer Effectiveness - Tim Cochran This is aimed at software developers, but much of it would apply just as easily to those running systems or curating research data. Team members are effective if they’re quickly and frequently getting feedback - did this change work, does this solution meet the requestor’s needs - and not waiting for things or having their day chopped up into little pieces. That means as managers it’s important to make sure we have the tooling and processes in place to...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other |
Engineering Productivity Can Be Measured - Just Not How You’d Expect - Antoine Boulanger, OKAY A while ago we had a flurry of “measuring developer productivity” articles, mainly pointing out that the idea was a bit misguided. There’s a management book, “How to Measure Anything”, which I think of as “Error Bars for Business Types”. Fine book as far as that goes; not really for us as an audience. But one point that book made stuck with me - as managers, the purpose of a...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Software Development | Managing A Team: Other |
The SPACE of Developer Productivity - Nicole Forsgren, Margaret-Anne Storey, Chandra Maddila, Thomas Zimmermann, Brian Houck, and Jenna Butler, ACM Queue We’ve covered several times the challenges of measuring developer productivity, particularly individual developer productivity. Forsgren et al walk us through recent literature on the subject, disabusing us of some common myths and encouraging us to instead, as managers of developers, keep an eye on the SPACE dimensions of how well our team is doing: Satisfaction and well-being - employee satisfaction, developers having the tools...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Other |
Ditch Your To-Do List and Use These Docs To Make More Impact - Brie Wolfson, First Round Review We start off in tech with ticket trackers and to-do lists, and tend to carry that through to our first leadership jobs. But they’re inadequate when you become a manager or lead. As a leader you no longer have the comfort of merely being responsible for set of discrete tasks that can be independently ticked off. You’re probably not even only responsible for individual projects. No, you’re...
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