jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
Parent categories: Strategy
Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Managing Your Career: Other | Becoming A Manager: Delegation |
Scaling yourself as an engineering manager - Sally Lait When our responsibilities grow, we need to grow too. That means focussing on the truly important, not doing the things that simply don’t make the cut of the priority list, getting the help you need. Not discussed in this article, though it’s at least as important, is delegating tasks and efforts you know how to do well and were doing previously to your team members, helping them grow as well. This article also gives some time...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Working with Stakeholders |
How to say “No” right now - Lara Hogan, Wherewithall The year end is approaching, and with it deadlines and final pushes. But other stuff comes up. The solution to dealing with too much work isn’t “time management” - managing time isn’t a power granted to us. There’s only task management, and the number one task management skill is declining them. This is a good time of year to practice saying no or deferring a yes - everyone’s in the same boat and so understands....
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Working with Stakeholders |
5 Tips for Saying No To Stakeholders - Roman Pichler You can’t keep focus on your goals and priorities without saying no to requests. We’ve covered articles on this in the roundup before, and alluded to this in the stopping things advice at the beggining of the newsletter, but it’s an important topic! Pichler emphasizes: Don’t feel bad about saying No Empathize with the stakeholder Reframe the conversation - around the problem to solve and the project goals Don’t rush the decision (but don’t procrastinate...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Productivity |
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: | Managing Your Career: Productivity |
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 |
A simple framework for software engineering management - Andrei Gridnev This post describes a nice simple approach to structuring thinking about software development management; three categories of responsibilities People management - hiring, team member career development, ensuring people are content and engaged with their work Delivery leadership - execution on delivering new work or changes Technical system ownership - maintaining the technical systems under your stewardship and then labelling priority areas under each responsibility with issues - things that need to be changed ok -...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Other |
Bucketing your time - James Stanier, The Engineering Manager We’ve talked about organizing tasks in buckets before - In Issue 37 I’ve mentioned my experiments with trello, and in Issue 39 I linked to an article about having a “dashboard” that covers both issues, things to keep an eye on, and future-looking work. This is a nice article about why I find these approaches work well for me - it’s a way of systematizing the discipline of not just getting lost in the day-to-day while...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other |
Limiting Work In Progress - Daniel Truemper A trap research computing managers fall into fairly frequently (including me) is seeing the big picture, seeing all the things that need to get done, and trying to start them all at once. After all, we know about parallel computing, a wider pipeline can mean higher throughput, right? But human beings don’t work like that. You get more done by diligently limiting the amount of work in progress, which has the advantage that it requires prioritization.
Continue...How to deprioritize tasks, projects, and plans (without feeling like you’re ‘throwing away’ your time and effort) - Jory MacKay, RescueTime Focus is all about not doing things - which is tough in a research environment when there are so many interesting and valuable things that you could be doing! MacKay’s article summarizes some good strategies for not doing the right things. Timeboxing - Set limits on how long you’ll work on a task Create a ‘not to do’ list Use a weekly review to...
Continue...Research: How to Get Better at Killing Bad Projects - Ronald Klingebiel, HBR As we talked about at the start of the year, it’s hard to stop doing things, even when they don’t make sense any more. As Klingebiel reports, even big companies with well-established stage gate processes for advancing projects are tempted to fudge the requirements to let struggling projects advance and take up more resources - especially when the requirements that are struggling are (the more important!) external user requirements which are about...
Continue...Time Management Won’t Save You - Dane Jensen, HBR Just a reminder that time management will help you be more efficient at getting discrete tasks done, which is all well and good, but that’s far less important than being discerning about what you choose to do.
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Other |
Your Calendar = Your Priorities - John Cutler Cutler points out that our scarcest resource is time. There’s a saying in policy circles “Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what your priorities/values are”; in research computing managerial work, where our budget is typically pretty constrained, it’s our time which reflects our implicit priorities. Those implicit priorities may not be what they should be! Looking at your calendar (and making sure your calendar reflects what you actually do - e.g. blocking off time for...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Other |
How to Write a Strategy Statement Your Team Will Actually Remember - Michael Porter, Nobl Academy Saying “no” - Mike McQuaid Porter’s article highlights an idea that’s come up a few times in the roundup - a very clear way to write out priorities or strategy is to contrast two things, both positive, and explicitly say that your strategy values one over the other. It’s too easy to write out “motherhood and apple pie” strategies: “we value moving fast and solid code”. But those statements...
Continue...Prioritization, multiple work streams, unplanned work. Oh my! - Leeor Engel Engineering managers: How to reduce drag on your team - Chris Fraser Research computing shares with smaller, newer organizations like startups a very dynamic set of demands, requirements, and work. This distinguishes both from work in teams at many large mature organizations or in IT shops. The dynamism makes prioritization and focus especially important. Engel describes some principles for managing work in such a dynamic environment: When everything is important than nothing is important...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Other |
How To Do Less - Alex Turek Four Steps to Organizational Change Without the Drama - Deiwin Sarjas Turek walks through the steps of digging yourself and your team out of a hole via absolutely ruthless prioritization - picking exactly one priority and only advancing that goal. That means advancing it either directly through work on the priority, or through making work more effective by changing how and what work is being done. The hardest part of doing this is the communications with others, and...
Continue...The Time Management Technique That Can Work For Anyone - Nir Eyal I’m in a new workplace, with a lot going on, and it is super easy to get distracted. Worse still, I can effortlessly justify to myself being distracted and flitting between different things. “I’m still learning the landscape; it’s important for someone in my role to have a broad view of what’s going on everywhere. Who knows what might come up in that conversation tomorrow?” That’s not even really wrong! But it’s far...
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