Interview: Ruthlessly helpful project management

Continuing my interview with Stephen Ritchie (@ruthlesshelp, blog here). author of Pro .NET Best Practices (Amazon paperback & Kindle, Barnes & Noble).   Also, Stephen describes a promotion to get 40-percent-off his book at his blog here.    We turn to the project manager’s role:

Q: Can you give an example or three of how project managers can be “ruthlessly helpful” to their development teams?

A: Here are a few:
1) Insist that programmers, engineers and other technical folks go to the whiteboard. Have them draw out and diagram their thinking. “‘Can you draw it up for everyone to see?” Force them to share their mental image and understanding. You will find that others were making bad assumptions and inferences. Never assume that your development team is on the same page without literally forcing them to be on the same page.

2) Verify that every member of our development team is 100% confident that their component or module works as they’ve intended it to work. I call this: “Never trust an engineer who hesitates to cross his own bridge.” Many developer’s are building bridges they never intend to cross. I worked on fixed-asset accounting software, but I was never an accountant. The ruthlessly helpful PM asks the developer to demonstrate their work by asking things like “… let me see it in action, give it a quick spin, show me how you’re doing on this feature …”.  These are all friendly ways to ask a developer to show you that they’re willing to cross their own bridge.

3) Don’t be surprised to find that your technical people are holding back on you. They’re waiting until there are no defects in their work. Perfectionists wish that their blind spots, omissions, and hidden weakness didn’t exist. Here’s the dilemma; they have no means to find the defects that are hidden to them. The cure they pick for this dilemma is to keep stalling until they can add every imaginable new feature and uncover any defect. The ruthlessly helpful PM knows how to find effective ways to provide the developers with dispassionate, timely, and non-judgmental feedback so they can achieve the desired results.