Computer Engineering 203 R Smith

1
What are Engineering Management Skills?

• Engineering Management requires a combination of
  both technical skills and soft skills.
• Technical skills designing software, testing,
  writing code
• Soft skills team building, communicating,
  decision making, improving the skills of your
  team
• Activities that are both gathering requirements,
  planning
• Other activities and skills

2
Soft Skills are a Foundation for successfully
using the Technical Skills.

• Developers are often given the job of manager
  based on their technical skills.
• Attributes for managers
• What makes a good manager?
• Good leadership/just being loud?
• Managers responsibilities
• In broad terms what does a manager do?
• Specific Skills
• What skills are needed to be a successful manager?

3
What are the skills of someone you would work for?

• What is important for the project?
• What is important for you to work for them?
• What is important for you to be successful?
• What is success in your organization?

4
Attributes of Managers

• Capable of evaluating risk and uncertainty
• Being able to live with risk and uncertainty
• Honesty and integrity
• Understanding of personnel problems
• Communicates clearly and completely
• Alertness and quickness
• Versatility

5
Attributes of Managers

• Energy and toughness
• If you have no energy then why expect your team
  to?
• Decision-making ability
• Pro-active
• You can not wait to be told.
• Cool headed
• Know when to get mad.
• Is being mad all the time effective?

6
Managers Responsibilities

• Interface Management
• Project Interfaces
• Management Interfaces
• Customer Interfaces
• Information Flow
• Resource Management
• Time (schedule)
• Manpower

7
Managers Responsibilities

• Money
• Facilities
• Equipment
• Information/Technology
• Planning and Control
• Reduced risks
• Identification of alternatives
• Resolution of conflicts
• Running the project core team

8
Specific Skills for Managers

• Team building
• Getting team members committed
• Clearly defining goals and objectives
• Good working relationships
• Being aware of the projects culture
• Planning skills
• Conflict resolution

9
Specific Skills for Managers

• Organizational skills
• Entrepreneurial skills
• Administrative skills
• Resource allocation skills
• Decision making skills
• Technical skills

10
Specific Skills for Managers

• Leadership
• The process whereby one individual influences
  other group members toward the attainment of
  defined group or organizational goals.
• Non-coercive influence
• Coercive influence takes constant energy

11
Specific Skills for Managers

• Leadership/Management
• Leadership is where to go
• Leadership motivates
• Management is how to get there
• Management implements

12
Useful Team Skills

• There are many team skills, the following skills
  are useful across a broad range of activities.
• Communicating
• Team building
• Facilitating
• Making deccisions
• Postmortems/Retrospectives
• Principled Negotiation
• Inspections
• These skills will be practiced in team exercises
  through out the semester.

13
Useful Team Skills

• In Software Development and especially in the
  valley, lower level managements role is often
  accomplished through influence and facilitation
  rather than direction.
• Why?
• Lack of formal procedures and policies.
• Strong technical contributors, often more senior
  than management.
• Many groups at the same level with conflicting
  priorities.

14
Communications

• Communication is critical to all management
  activities.
• Tools for effective communications
• Removing ambiguity
• Resolving Cultural and Frame of Reference
  differences
• The role of metrics in communications

15
Team Building

• What is a team?
• A small number of people with complimentary
  skills who are committed to a common purpose,
  performance goals, and approach for which they
  hold themselves mutually accountable.
• Identity, membership, roles and responsibilities
• Clear vision, objectives and purpose
• Management must make these clear if team members
  are to know what they are doing.
• Allows teams to have some level of self direction.

16
How Teams Function Using a Learning Cycle

• Understand and frame the problem
• Do not accept the problem at face value.
• Look for root causes.
• Plan
• Challenge assumptions, decide on actions
• Act
• Follow the plan!
• Reflect and Learn
• What can we do better?
• Involve the team in reflection

17
Team Building

• What happens when there is no clear identity or
  direction?
• Priority conflicts happen
• Lack of focus
• Easy to sit around and wait to be told what to
  do.
• In some sense managements goal should be to
  eliminate the need for management.
• Self-organizing teams

18
FacilitatingGetting the Job Done

• Facilitation is a useful skill in getting teams
  to meet objectives.
• Facilitation gives guidance as required and is
  non-interfering.
• Facilitating
• Keep focus, single topic at a time, quality
  discussion
• Everyone needs to know why they are there
• Allow everyone to speak in a safe environment
• Avoid name calling, excessive joking
• Make good use of time
• Avoid discussion loops, side tracking

19
Postmortems/Retrospectives

• Postmortem, Latin for after death
• Regardless of what it is called successful
  management learns form the past.
• Being conscious of what you are doing and have
  done.
• The facilitators role is to create a safe
  environment in which to get honest feedback.

20
Postmortems/Retrospectives

• Study both failures and successes
• Define the purpose of the retrospective
• Define success
• Decide who should attend
• Create a safe environment
• Establish ground rules
• Establish the timeline and mine it.
• What actually happened and when.

21
Postmortems/Retrospectives

• What worked and what did not work.
• Capture the data.
• Determine what you are going to do about it.
• Conducting a Retrospective and doing nothing
  about it is a pure waste of time and undermines
  any future retrospectives.

22
Postmortems/Retrospectives

• When we do not learn from our mistakes we are
  forced to repeat them.

23
Reaching Decisions

• An important skill is helping teams reach
  decisions.
• Making progress without knowing the entire
  process.
• Getting support for decisions.
• Lack of a perfect plan.

24
Principled Negotiation

• Soft Negotiation
• Searching for agreement
• Avoiding conflict
• True buy in?
• Hard Negotiation
• Looking for victory
• Wanting to win
• True buy in?

25
Principled Negotiation

• Ensure that everyone understands everyone elses
  objectives and positions.
• Separate people from the problem.
• Keep emotions out of the equation.
• Develop win-win solutions.
• Look for alternatives.
• Use objective data
• The need for metrics.

26
Inspections

• A method for improving both understanding and
  quality of all work products.
• Inspections can be done at any stage of the
  development process.
• Inspections are a formal/disciplined review of
  work products with set roles for those who
  participate.

27
Benefits from Inspections

• Detection of defects at an earlier stage
• Finding defects at an earlier stage lowers the
  cost of correction.
• Expanding the understanding of the code
• This means we have multiple developers able to
  contribute to the improvement of the work
  product.

28
Inspections

• Inspection roles moderator, reader, scribe,
  reviewers
• Focus is on detecting flaws not correcting them
  on the spot.
• Materials are reviewed individually before the
  inspection meeting.
• This helps reduce both meeting time and group
  think.

29
Inspections

• During the inspection each line is read.
• A disciplined approach is used to ensure
  everything in the work product is covered.
• Flaws are corrected following the meeting.
• Only those defects that will be corrected should
  be checked for during the inspection.

30
Issues with Inspections

• Detecting problems that never need to be
  corrected wastes effort.
• Not following through
• Picking at details
• Inspecting too much
• 80/20 rule
• Solving problems rather than identifying them