Tuesday, January 6th, 2009
2:00 to 3:00 p.m. US Eastern Time
via teleconference
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No matter how successful you've been in the past, corporate budgets don't have room for so-called nonessentials, so the company is asking you to "do more with less." The problem is, everyone's already working their hardest, in a demoralizing environment.
As a project manager or team leader, you might be losing sleep, feeling stressed, or drinking more than usual. You need to fulfill project goals with some of your best minds laid off or distracted. Your team memory is full of holes where professionals used to be. Everyone is discouraged; nobody has energy. Perhaps you're afraid for your own job, or the experience of letting friends and colleagues go has left you feeling shell-shocked.
The Player/Coach Solution is for developers, project managers, team leaders, business analysts, quality assurance people, or anyone else who makes software development teams work. Whatever your current job role, if you are not satisfied with the quality and timeliness of your deliverables--or if you feel there has to be a better way to get it all done--this is for you.
The thing that sucks is that you're good at your job. As a leader, you've mastered the planning tools and you understand your team as individuals. They are good people. They are capable. You know they want to do good work. But they are shorthanded and troubled--so delivery dates slip, and quality does too. It's not your fault, but it is your responsibility, and you're already maxing your resources.
If you're not the manager, you're probably resenting the implication that you're not doing enough to cover for the colleagues who are gone. You're walking a tightrope--the longer the hours, the more likely you are to make a significant mistake. You can't afford to slow down, but you don't have the time to work any faster!
You know it's true. If it were possible to do "more" work with "less" support, you'd be doing it already. Asking a stressed-out team to work harder, just at the time when they're not up to it, isn't the solution. You know they're discouraged and overwhelmed, not lazy.
In fact, the solution is to do less with less, and still meet your objectives. It sounds crazy, but it's possible to pull this off and support your team at the same time. I call my technique for doing this the "Player/Coach Solution," because it pulls leadership into a more active development role while it shares some decision-making power with team members.
The Player/Coach Solution is extraordinarily simple, because it is based on what you already know. It all comes from three obvious principles:
Look, you know your team has been working hard. But even if staffing levels haven't changed, you've been facing disruption, disappointments, and missed opportunities. It's not from not working hard enough; it's because the whole process is being undermined by fear, exhaustion, and unhealthy competition. The answer is not to push more. You have to address these motivational problems and cut through the organizational hassles. The good news is that making these changes gets easier when times are tough.
The Player/Coach Solution works with your existing management structure to ease stress, demonstrate return on investment, and help smart people do better work.
Well, all right, there is a little non-linear psychoblurb stuff. You can't avoid that when the subject is helping people do their best work under difficult circumstances--in fact, that's where the "methodology" writers get it wrong. They talk as though we're all the same, we're always full of enthusiasm, we take orders with perky precision, we never get discouraged, and above all we never shade the truth in our status reports.
If that resembles any I.T. department you've ever seen, I want to observe it for a while. Because I've always wanted to see robots perform the kind of complex, unpredictable problem solving that software professionals do every day. That would be kind of cool.
But until then, a lot of us are working with procedures and systems that reward inefficiency, demotivate our most creative efforts, and get in the way of finding the best answer quickly.
For smart people, "doing better work" comes naturally--that's why we call them smart! Humans are really good at spotting new ideas, combining those ideas with what they already know, and applying the results to make things better... otherwise known as learning. The Player/Coach Solution puts learning at the center of software development, not off to the side as "training" downtime.
I borrowed a lot from the life work of Gerald Weinberg ("helping smart people be happy"), some from Kent Beck (the Extreme Programming guy), and actually quite a bit from Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, which most people (probably including Klein herself) think is about politics. But my main source is twenty years of working alongside other software developers in dozens of technical and political environments. Some patterns come around again and again in that time; they have nothing to do with the programming language or operating system of the day, and everything to do with love and learning.
Normally, you'd have to hire me as a consultant to see the player/coach in action; it's what I do in person with teams that need a boost. But maybe that's not practical for you at this time, or you'd prefer to work it out yourself with some pointers. So I decided to share the Player/Coach concept on a free teleconference that's just an hour long so you can get on with your work day.
No matter what, if you're feeling this pain and need help, there is support for you.
To be included in my upcoming teleclass on "The Player/Coach Solution," just fill in this form so I can get back to you right away with a teleconference number and access code to use when you dial in. And, just so you know, this will also add you to the email list I use to send updates and offers and announcements every now and then--really no more than once a week or so, promise.
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...thank you for wanting to participate in this teleclass. I've learned so many interesting and fun things about working in this field for the past twenty-odd years! I'm taking those findings, blending them with my own crazy hippie-in-a-suit attitude, and sharing the results with people who are freaked out, stressed out, or burned out.
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