Post date: Feb 1, 2012 1:44:43 AM
As many of you know, my day job is one of software engineering manager. I've been doing this now for about fifteen years and have been told I'm pretty good at it. I certainly seem to be able to get projects completed on time with an acceptable quality level. In doing this day in and day out, I think I've learned things about this activity worth sharing with the general public. Over the next few weeks (months?), I'll be sharing these with you at the rate of about one blog entry per day (I'm like everyone else... I may skip a day here or there). The principals I'm talking about are often not applicable only to software projects - projects whose members are working on any creative endeavor (i.e., ones where there is often uncertainty around tasks, processes, project structure, or capabilities, coupled with tradeoffs between effort and quality) could potentially benefit from these blog entries. I'll try to write these principals in as neutral a manner as possible, in order to make them as applicable to as many projects types as possible. But, whenever I can, I'll try to point out specifics drawn from my experience in managing projects in both the software and music production fields to illustrate them.
I probably will not organize these principals in any particular order (I'll save that for if I ever collect them into a paper or book). You'll get tips on managing projects interspersed with those about managing people and processes. Please bear with me.
These articles will not take long to read. Most won't be more than a few paragraphs. If brevity is the soul of wit, I hope to be witty. In reality, most people talk (and write) too much. I'll try to make my writing as dense as possible, so that I will not waste your time. If you feel that the article is too dense, let me know in the comments or in an email to me. I do want your feedback, in any case. If you can bring your insight to the party in the comments, I'll take these into account and give you a shout out.
I blog about other things, as well (usually the studio, what my band is up to, and the day-to-day irritations of life). So that you can filter these out, should you choose to (and I hope you won't - I think my life is pretty interesting, software engineering notwithstanding) the title of all of the posts in this series will start with the string "Software Engineering: ". An even easier way to keep notified is to subscribe to the RSS feed for this site.
In any case, I'm looking forward to this and hope you'll enjoy it.