Customer Reviews

Amplifying Your Effectiveness: Collected Essays

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Since it is not possible to extend the length of the day, the only hope to improve your efficiency is to improve what you do with this most limited of resources. Working extended overtime has proven to be a short term solution only, as with few exceptions extended overtime leads to a general drop in productivity. The only situation where extended overtime does not appear to be a self-defeating condition is when the work is challenging enough so that it becomes a legitimate combination of livelihood, hobby and recreation. Tall order indeed!
However, the situation is not impossible if you simply take the time to explore the ways in which you can save time. The first and foremost way is to reduce the number of simultaneous projects. Study after study has demonstrated that the term momentary distraction is a gross misnomer. Any interruption takes us off task for at least ten minutes and the best essay in this book describes the plight of a man named Sam. Overseeing several projects that would each individually take only a few weeks, the constant switching created a near deadlock state in his managerial life. The simple solution is to declare one the highest priority and concentrate on it alone until it was complete. Repeating this simple process removed the deadlock and all projects were completed in a short time.
The simplest way that work can be made fun is to make the surrounding interpersonal interactions pleasant. The most interesting work in the world will not make a job fun if the interpersonal atmosphere is poisonous. This involves both selecting the right people as well as helping them enjoy each other through the emotional ups and downs of the long haul of building a major project. In my experience conducting technical interviews, the advice here of having candidates audition is the right way to select the people you want. If someone cannot handle the auditioning of their supposed skills, then it is difficult to see how they can survive the pressure of working closely and intensely with others for months at a time. The second and by far the most difficult is how to walk the fine line of allowing for individual differences without letting the differences become too individual. The advice here is good, but one could write volumes on how to practice this critical art.
As a group, IT workers commonly work 50-60 hour weeks filled with "crisis" after "crisis." The only hope to break this destructive cycle is to either cut the hours or make them more fun, and there is sound advice in this book that will help you do both.

In the preface, the editor explains that this collection of essays arose from a "brainstorming session for a conference of the same name." As you'd expect with over a dozen authors, the results are uneven. If you're involved in software development, the following chapters will justify your purchase of the book:

- Don Gray: "Solving Other People's Problems"

- S.M. & K. Roberts: "Do I want to Take This Crunch Project?"

- Gerald Weinberg: "Congruent Interviewing by Audition"

- Johanna Rothman: "It's Just the First Slip"

Although the critical reader may find some other sections offering commonplace or occasional misguided advice, the whole book is stimulating and easy to read in one sitting. Recommended for your project-management shelf.

This slim text (146 pages) is a collection of 19 brief articles concerned with the people aspects of software development.

The essays are divided into 4 parts with common themes.
1. Empowering the individual
2. Improving Interpersonal Interactions
3. Mastering Projects
4. Changing the Organization.

There are 17 different contributors -- mostly consultants, whose names are familiar from magazine contributions and software conferences. Their views are diverse and the writing is uneven.
I've always appreciated James Bach's writings which questioned conventional thinking on software testing and software QA. I also found Becky Winant's essay on "Maneuvers to Disable a Team" humorous.

This book is a collection of "pre-cedings" written by 17 software consultants for a conference of the same name. In the introduction, Weinberg explains the frequent ineffectiveness of proceedings typically distributed at the end of conferences. These essays (the entire text is less than 150 pages) present a preview of the hosts participating in the first "Amplifying Your Effectiveness" conference by demonstrating the diverse styles and interests of the authors. Weinberg explains that within any organization, improvements in effectiveness can occur at three levels - the individual ("the Self"), the team ("the Other"), and the organization as a whole ("the Context") - and that this collection attempts to address all three levels. In addition, there are three fundamental abilities that contribute to the effectiveness of a manager or any other technical leader: "the ability to observe what's happening and to understand the significance of your observations", "the ability to act congruently in difficult interpersonal situations, even though you may be confused, or angry, or so afraid you want to run away and hide", and "the ability to understand complex situations so you can plan a project and then observe and act so as to keep the project going according to plan, or modify the plan". These three abilities are also addressed in this collection because the least developed among them prevents one from amplifying effectiveness the most.

The essays are presented in four parts: "empowering the individual", "improving interpersonal interactions", "mastering projects", and "changing the organization". Based on the number of dog ears following the reading of this book, this reviewer especially enjoyed parts one and four, and essays "Do I Want to Take this Crunch Project?" by Sharon Marsh Roberts and Ken Roberts, and "Modeling Organizational Change" by Esther Derby. In the first, Roberts and Roberts draw a distinction between "crunch projects" and "pseudo-crunch projects" and how to navigate the circumstances surrounding each type of project. While Edward Yourdon's "Death March" (see my review) discusses crunch projects at length, the authors here simplify the definition of crunch project by explaining that these types of project exhibit two requirements or constraints: (1) "there are major negative consequences if the project's deadline is not met", and (2) "given the constraints of the project, the allocated resources (time, money, or people) are significantly smaller than those required to fulfill the needs of the sponsor and the customers". The ability to distinguish between the crunch project and pseudo-crunch project is important because commensurate recognition is awarded to those who complete crunch projects, but few will acknowledge efforts of the team toward a pseudo-crunch project. Not only do pseudo-crunch projects typically exhibit "pseudo-deadlines" where internal management picks a date, but there are no significant impacts on profits or external relationships if the date is missed, pseudo-crunch projects bring by their very nature personal loss and no balancing gain.

In "Modeling Organizational Change", Derby explains that when a problem exists in the way a work group functions, confronting that problem necessitates organizational change, and "by taking a critical look at your process and using some theories from organizational design, you can fix that problem - and improve your organization's ability to deliver high-quality results". Because even small systems are very complex, any action in this regard can affect more than one variable in the system, so understanding the interplay of these factors and identifying the manner in which one desires to guide the system in a particular direction are important when designing organizational change. The relatively simple examples that Derby provides to explain circular causation and corrective action are written well, and the example and accompanying diagrams that she walks through are effective in explaining her points. Other essays that this reviewer especially enjoyed were (3) "Solving Other People's Problems" by Don Gray, where the author explains "The Pause Principle", "The Pay Attention Principle", "The Partnership Principle", "The Passion Principle", and "The Person Principle", (4) "The Perils of Parallel Projects" by Johanna Rothman, where the author discusses context switching alongside a table from Weinberg's "Quality Software Management, Volume 1" that exhibits data on how much time is truly available to an individual splitting their time across multiple projects, and (6) "Life as a Software Architect" by Bob King, where the author offers a discussion of the software architect role that explains what helps him avoid what he calls the "technical trap" - three metrics called "The Visibility Ratio", "The Conflict Metric", and "The Anxiety Metric".