Your attention is a limited, valuable, resource. With attention I make the distinction between placing continuous attention (being pro-active) vs. temporarily placing your attention where needed (being re-active). So the question I would like to investigate is more specifically: on what to keep continuous attention.
At a high-level it can be said that the development manager has two (related) objectives: i) maximizing throughput of new product functionality and ii) minimizing product quality problems.
Mapping your attention to those objectives results in:
i) Be involved in solving problems the teams face during development. I find the best vantage point here is to be involved in DevOps because they are all day solving these (technical) pain points. But also be involved in the developers' discussion on architecture, processes and tools to spot the technical debt that is holding them back.
ii) Be involved in solving the quality (correctness, usability, efficiency, reliability, integrity, adaptability, accuracy, robustness1) problems that surface in the final product. Here the best vantage point is to be involved in release testing and monitoring of the product in production.
Note 1 What is missing: continuously paying attention to people and team dynamics. Frequently the problem analysis will reveal problems related to people (e.g. training), teams (e.g. communications) and processes (e.g. unclear responsibilities) and then you move your attention to those (re-actively) to solve the problem. When the problem has been solved your attention moves back to the main objectives.
Note 2 This is my current thinking, I acknowledge the view (HR-take) of cultivating people and teams will lead to great products. That approach requires a certain leap of faith and does not fit as well with my engineering problem-solving outlook.
No comments:
Post a Comment