1 Accept responsibility. It is the project manager’s job to highlight what
needs to be done, not to assign work.
2 Ask for quality work. The relationship between the project managers,
product managers, and the designers/developers needs to be based on trust
- trust that everyone wants to do a good job. The manager’s role in this
becomes not overseeing the work, as much as providing the tools and
means for quality work to get done.
3 Encourage incremental change. The project manager provides guidance
along the way based on feedback from all stakeholders and workers, not a
big policy manual at the beginning. ~
4 Embrace local adaptations. Be aware of how the requirement: to develop
immediate and flexible products clashes with the organizational culture for
slow and deliberate development, and find a way to resolve the misfit.
5 Keep meetings to a minimum. As the project matures meetings should
actually decrease. Meetings impose a lot of overhead - in particular long,
all-hands meetings, lengthy status reports, constant paperwork. Whatever
is required to keep everyone informed shouldn’t take much time to fulfill.
During the execution phase everyone should be executing, not always
reporting.
6 Employ honest measurements. Whatever metrics you use to gather feed-
back data should be at realistic levels of accuracy. Don’t try to account for
every second of work, or even minutes of work. Imagine that your watch
can only calculate to the nearest hour, or even day. Otherwise, workers
in the execution phase will most likely inflate the hours in order to cover
themselves.