Exciting: Something different for those Leading & Managing Agile

“Some readers have found it curious that The Mythical Man Month devotes most of the essays to the managerial aspects of software engineering, rather than the many technical issues. This bias ... sprang from [my] conviction that the quality of the people on a project, and their organization and management, are much more important factors in the success than are the tools they use or the technical approaches they take.” Frederick P. Brooks, The Mythical Man Month - Anniversary Edition (1995a, p.276)

This is one of my favourite quotes about software development.

Those of you who followed my management mini-series last year might remember some of my conclusions, specifically:

• Management is still needed in most software teams
• Even if you don’t have dedicated managers there is still management work to do; and without dedicated management that management work gets spread around so in a self-organizing team more people need to do management work

I can’t remember if I said it in that series or in another post: the quality of management in software development is often poor.

So now I’m going to do something about it.

Part of the problem is that very very few software engineers ever take time to learn about management. Sure they learn about Java, BDD, AWS, CSS etc. etc. but most people learn “managing” by watching the people who had the job before them. Unfortunately that tends to propagate poor management.

Why don’t people take the time to learn management skills the way they do technical skills?

A few days in the classroom learning about Java is great, why not spend a little time learning about management?

Now most readers probably know that I provide training, usually agile training to teams, but I have long felt that simply offering a two day training course for current and future managers wouldn’t be enough. I’ve long dreamt of offering a course that ran over a series of weeks, that allowed people to mix classroom learning and discussion of topics with hands on practice and, perhaps more importantly, reflection and group discussion.

Now I’m partnering up with Learning Connexions to offer just this course - I’m more excited about this than anything I have been in a while!

It’s going to run this autumn, September to December, half a day every two weeks.

In each session I’ll present some material but more importantly we’ll have discussions between people doing work. We’ll try and apply the material to real work. I expect group discussions will go beyond the stated subjects and allow everyone - me included! - to learn from one another.

Not only is this a new course it is a new way of approaching learning in work. Since it is new the course we are going to keep the price down. We’re running it on Friday afternoons so hopefully it won’t interfere with the usual work week too much.

Here are the hypothesis I’m testing:

• Software development can be improved if software management can be improved: current software managers, aspiring software managers and software engineers will all do a better job if they take time to pro-actively learn about key issues in the software industry.
• People will learn more and deeper if it is organised as a little and often.
• Encouraging self reflection and group discussion about topics and real life problems will enhance learning.

The hypothesis you would be testing by coming along are:

• I will learn more by discussing key topics with a cross section of my peers
• An investment of six-half says and a little less than £1000 will pay back in increased effectiveness, productivity, organization, focus….

I hope, I very much hope we can make this work…. - please get over to Learning Connexions and book Leading & Managing Agile today. Even if you cannot attend I’d love to know your thoughts on this, please give me feedback - comment here or mail me direct, allan@allankelly.net.

And apologies, I’m going to be talking more about this in the next few weeks as I put material together and get more and more excited!