I am not sure if title of this post is clear or not. I wanted to pose this question to Higher Management in Software companies and also wanted to know about %age of managers who dare to accept the mistakes and try to correct themselves.
Here are basic things I want to highlight through a basic story :-
- As a Lead/Manager, do you panic in bad situations?
- As a Lead/Manager, do you take responsibility of any mistake or just pick someone from your team to point all the fingers?
- As a Lead/Manager, what do you think about your responsibilities?
- As a Lead/Manager, How many times, do you lead by example in bad situations?
- As a Lead/Manager, how many times you give 100% credit to your team for any achievement?
In most of the projects team dynamics are unique but still there are some common things, out of which some are good for healthy work enviornment and some are not. Most of the times things keep running on right path unless deviated by various external situations. Have you started getting confused?
Here I am going to tell a short story of an incident when one of an important member of corporate management find some problem with an alreased version of software. During his usage found that a particular behavior in software is not very intutive and wanted to know the logic of it's design. He sent an email to director who is heading the software engineering team for that product.
Director called a meeting with Engineering Manager and Quality Manager of that team.Both of them had almost no clue why this feature is behaving like this. Please note that it was a problem when things were giving correct results and the workflow are not intuitive.
Just after the meeting Engineering Manager asked Quality Manager, this behavior seems very wiered and why didn't we catch this problem. Although Quality Manager was not very convices and he felt that behavior was decent. It was more of perspective problem.
Before we start with next part of the story, let me throw some light on the issue raised ! Actually this was 7th release of the software and so called problematic area was there in the application from first version of the software.
Both the managers thought about it and got to know that feature was designed 4 years back for first version of the software. Co-incidently the quality engineer who tested this software in first release was still working on same feature and he was an expert of that area. Quality Manager calls him and ask why this behavior is so wierd rather asking the rationale of the design. Although the Tester explained each and everything, s/he was not able to relate why this question was asked after 4 years of this design. Lots of other meetings happened that what should the team do about it. Many folks even talked about releasing an update by changing the behavior.
During one of these meetings some of the Managers conveyed that they were never aware of this particular thing and this should have been taken care long time back. From this point, the tester was very disappointed and tried to figure out details related to this behavior and s/he found following details:-
1. S/he found an email where design proposed by Product Management was very well appreciated by all the Manager however the feature development and testing team had some concerns with this design. As it was not useful for 15% of the users and this software had lacks of users acorss the country.
2. Tester also found a bug which had all the statistics with a proposal of giving two workflows to use the feature and the other one was the expected by the VP. And this bug was deferred by these Managers only !
3. Few more emails where reference of this behavior was discussed in detail.
WHAT WOULD YOU CONCLUDE OUT OF THIS AND HOW THE RESPECT METER REACT ON THIS?
Now here are some basic questions that arise :-
1. Was this a so big issue?
2. Was there any need to discuss this thing in so much detail?
3. Shouldn't these managers figure out details for conveying it to higher management without much Panic?
4. was this something to discuss with so much parties involved?
5. Can a Manager say that he was not aware of software behavior?
6. And lot many others...
I think I started with something very sepcific and lossing track... So I am stopping here for you guys to think and will share the next part soon :)
Here are basic things I want to highlight through a basic story :-
- As a Lead/Manager, do you panic in bad situations?
- As a Lead/Manager, do you take responsibility of any mistake or just pick someone from your team to point all the fingers?
- As a Lead/Manager, what do you think about your responsibilities?
- As a Lead/Manager, How many times, do you lead by example in bad situations?
- As a Lead/Manager, how many times you give 100% credit to your team for any achievement?
In most of the projects team dynamics are unique but still there are some common things, out of which some are good for healthy work enviornment and some are not. Most of the times things keep running on right path unless deviated by various external situations. Have you started getting confused?
Here I am going to tell a short story of an incident when one of an important member of corporate management find some problem with an alreased version of software. During his usage found that a particular behavior in software is not very intutive and wanted to know the logic of it's design. He sent an email to director who is heading the software engineering team for that product.
Director called a meeting with Engineering Manager and Quality Manager of that team.Both of them had almost no clue why this feature is behaving like this. Please note that it was a problem when things were giving correct results and the workflow are not intuitive.
Just after the meeting Engineering Manager asked Quality Manager, this behavior seems very wiered and why didn't we catch this problem. Although Quality Manager was not very convices and he felt that behavior was decent. It was more of perspective problem.
Before we start with next part of the story, let me throw some light on the issue raised ! Actually this was 7th release of the software and so called problematic area was there in the application from first version of the software.
Both the managers thought about it and got to know that feature was designed 4 years back for first version of the software. Co-incidently the quality engineer who tested this software in first release was still working on same feature and he was an expert of that area. Quality Manager calls him and ask why this behavior is so wierd rather asking the rationale of the design. Although the Tester explained each and everything, s/he was not able to relate why this question was asked after 4 years of this design. Lots of other meetings happened that what should the team do about it. Many folks even talked about releasing an update by changing the behavior.
During one of these meetings some of the Managers conveyed that they were never aware of this particular thing and this should have been taken care long time back. From this point, the tester was very disappointed and tried to figure out details related to this behavior and s/he found following details:-
1. S/he found an email where design proposed by Product Management was very well appreciated by all the Manager however the feature development and testing team had some concerns with this design. As it was not useful for 15% of the users and this software had lacks of users acorss the country.
2. Tester also found a bug which had all the statistics with a proposal of giving two workflows to use the feature and the other one was the expected by the VP. And this bug was deferred by these Managers only !
3. Few more emails where reference of this behavior was discussed in detail.
WHAT WOULD YOU CONCLUDE OUT OF THIS AND HOW THE RESPECT METER REACT ON THIS?
Now here are some basic questions that arise :-
1. Was this a so big issue?
2. Was there any need to discuss this thing in so much detail?
3. Shouldn't these managers figure out details for conveying it to higher management without much Panic?
4. was this something to discuss with so much parties involved?
5. Can a Manager say that he was not aware of software behavior?
6. And lot many others...
I think I started with something very sepcific and lossing track... So I am stopping here for you guys to think and will share the next part soon :)
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