People Management, Part 1

People Management Week 13 Part 1 1 People i Software in f Development l • People p are the most important p asset for organizations g • The tasks of a manager are essentially people-oriented. Unless there is some understanding of people, management will be unsuccessful • Poor people management is an important contributor to project failure 3 Topics Covered • Selecting staff • Motivating people • Managing M i groups • People Capability Maturity Model • Types of difficult persons and tactics 4 Selecting Staff • An important project management task is team selection • Information on selection comes from: – Information provided by the candidates – Information gained by interviewing and talking with candidates – Recommendations and comments from other p people p who know or who have worked with the candidates 5 Staff Selection Case Study Alice is a software project manager working in a company that develops alarm systems. This company wishes to enter the growing market of assistive technology to help elderly and disabled people live independently. Alice has been asked to lead a team of 6 developers that can develop new products based around the company’s alarm technology. Her first role is to select team members either from software engineers already in the company or from outside. To help select a team, Alice first assesses the skills that she will need: These are: • • • • Experience with existing alarm technology, as it is reused User interface design experience because the users are untrained and may be di bl d and disabled d hence h need d facilities f ili i such h as variable i bl font f sizes, i etc. Ideally, someone who has experience of designing assistive technology systems. Otherwise, someone with experience of interfacing to hardware units as all systems y beingg developed p involve some hardware control. General purpose development skills. 6 Staff Selection Case Study The next stage is to try and find people from within the company with the necessary skills. However, the company has expanded significantly and has few staff available. The best that Alice can negotiate is to have help from an alarm expert (Fred) for 2 days/week. She therefore decides to advertise for new project staff, listing the attributes that she’d like: • • • • • Programming experience in C. She has decided to develop all the assistive technology control software in C. Experience p in user interface design. g A UI designer g is essential but there may not be a need for a full‐time appointment. Experience in hardware interfacing with C and using remote development systems. All the devices used have complex hardware interfaces. interfaces Experience of working with hardware engineers. At times, it will be necessary to build completely new hardware. A sympathetic personality so that they can relate to and work with elderly people who are providing requirements for and are testing the system. 7 Staff Selection Case Study Alice gets 30 responses to the advertisement and, from the applicants, is able to identify suitable candidates with hardware interfacing (Dorothy) and user interface design experience (Ed). She also decides to hire two new graduates (Brian and Bob) who have some C programming experience but who will essentially have to be trained in the company. All that remains then is to appoint a more senior programmer to join the development team and Alice has two choices choices. Carol has several year C programming experience and has recently taken a short career break to have children. Dave has a comparable amount of programming experience and is a programming enthusiast. He spends most of his spare time working on open source development projects and has encyclopedic knowledge of C and C++. After interviewing both Carol and Dave, Alice decided to offer the job to Carol although Dave has deeper programming knowledge. 8 Lessons • Managers in a company may not wish to lose people to a new project project. Part Part-time time involvement may be inevitable • Skills such as UI design and hardware interfacing are in short supply • Recent graduates may not have specific skills but may be a way of introducing new skills • Technical proficiency may be less important than social skills 9 Staff Selection Factors Factor Application domain experience Explanation For a project to develop a successful system, the developers must understand the application domain. It is essential that some members of a development p team have some domain experience. Platform experience This may be significant if low‐level programming is involved. Otherwise, this is not usually a critical attitude. Programming language experience This is normally only significant for short duration projects where there is not enough time to learn a new language. While learning a language itself is not difficult, it takes several months to become proficient in using the associated libraries and components. Problem solving ability This is a very important for software engineers who constantly have to solve technical problems problems. However, However it is almost impossible to judge without knowing the work of the potential team member. 10 Staff Selection Factors Factor Educational background Explanation This may provide an indicator of what the candidate knows and his or her ability to learn. This factor becomes increasingly irrelevant as engineers gain experience across a range of projects. Communication ability Project staff must be able to communicate orally and in writing with other engineers, managers and customers. Adaptability Adaptability may be judged by looking at the experience that candidates have had. This is an important attribute, as it indicates an ability to learn. Attitude Project staff should have a positive attitude toward their work and should be willing to learn new skills. This is an important attitude but often very difficult to assess. Personality This is an important attribute but difficult to assess. Candidates must be reasonably compatible with other team members. No particular type of personality is more or less suited to software 11 engineering. Human Needs Hierarchy y - Maslow SelfRealization needs Esteem needs Social needs Safety needs Physiological needs 12 Motivating People • An important role of a manager is to motivate the people working on a project • Motivation is a complex issue but it appears that there are different types of motivation based on: – Basic needs (e.g. food, sleep, safety, etc.) – Social needs (e.g. to be accepted as part of a group) – Personal needs (e.g. respect, self-esteem, self-realization, learning, responsibility, etc.) 13 People Working in Software D Development l Need dS Satisfaction i f i • Social – Provide communal facilities – Allow informal communications • Esteem – Recognition of achievements – Appropriate rewards • Self-realization S lf li ti – Personal development – Responsibility 14 Individual Motivation Alice’s assistive technology project starts well. Good working relationships develop within the team and creative new ideas are developed. The company decides to develop a peer‐to‐peer messaging system using digital television linked to the alarm network for communications. However, some months h into the h project, Alice l notices that h Dorothy, h the h hardware h d design d expert starts coming into work late, the quality of her work deteriorates and, increasingly, she does not appear to be communicating with other members of the team. team Alice talks about the problem with other team members to try to find out if Dorothy’s personal circumstances have changed and if this might be affecting her work work. They don’t don t know of anything so Alice decides to talk with Dorothy to try to understand the problem. 15 Individual Motivation After some initial denials that there is a problem, Dorothy admits that she lost interest in the job. She expected she would be able to develop and use her hardware interfacing skills. However, because of the product direction that has been chosen, she has little opportunity for this. Basically, she h is working k as a C programmer with h other h team members. b While h l she h admits that the work is challenging, she is concerned that she is not developing her interfacing skills. She is worried that finding a job that involves hardware interfacing will be difficult after this project . Because she does not want to upset the team by revealing that she is thinking about the next project, she has decided that it is best to minimize conversation with them. them 16 Lessons • Personal difficulties commonly affect motivation because people cannot concentrate on their work • Give people time and support to resolve the issues, and meanwhile need to make it clear that the people concerned still have a responsibility to their employer 17 Motivation Balance • Individual motivations are made up of elements of each class • The balance can change depending on personal circumstances and external events • However, people are not just motivated by personal factors but also by being part of a group and culture • People go to work because they are motivated by the people p p that theyy work with 18 Organizing Groups • Most software engineering is a group activity – The development schedule for most non-trivial software projects is such that they cannot be completed by one person working ki alone l – As a general rule, software engineering project groups should have normallyy no more than eight or ten members 19 Organizing Groups (cont (cont’d) d) • Putting together a group that works efficiently is a critical management task • It is obviously important that the group should have the right balance of technical skills, experience and personalities • However, successful groups are more than simply a collection of individuals with the right balance of skills • A good group has a team spirit so that the people involved are motivated by the success of the group as well as their personal pe so a goals goa s 20 Personality types • Task-oriented – The motivation for doing the work is the work itself • Self-oriented – The work is a means to an end which is the achievement of individual goals Interaction-oriented oriented • Interaction – The principal motivation is the presence and actions of co-workers. People go to work because they like to go to work 21