What Makes an Effective Software Manager?
I was recently reading Code Magazine and came across an interesting editorial by Rod Paddock about effective software managers. I have worked with several decent managers, along with a few not-so-good managers, but I've only ever worked with one exceptional manager -- and the things she did were exactly what Rod described here. By the way, since I only have good things to say about her, I assume she won't mind me saying her name -- it was Stephanie Barulic (spelling?) when I was a contractor at Clarus Corporation in the good old DotCom days. We were building yet another procurement package called eMarket, based on Microsoft Commerce Server (yuck), which won Microsoft's Global eCommerce Product of the Year Award while I was there. Of course, winning awards in those days was more about being properly connected than actually having a great product, so I'm not trying to claim anything extraordinary here. I'm pretty sure Stepanie's team was the smallest team of three major teams on the project, but we consistently got more done, on time, with less bugs, than all the others.
So what did she do that was so exceptional? First, when I was first assigned to her team, she had me only work on bug fixes for a while. This was rather annoying to me, but I did my time and did it well, and I was reward by being put in charge of a major piece after that. A few others did not do so well and she had them released or re-assigned -- no other team to my knowledge ever released someone -- and the lack of quality showed at times. She also put me over someone with more seniority, and who was better connected than I was, which was not the way most others (if any) ever picked their team leaders. The other quality that Stephanie had that I absolutely think is critical, and this was mentioned in Rod's article which made me think of her, was that she was willing to make "the call"! I actually disagreed with several of her calls, although I can't even remember what they were now since that's not important -- what was important was that she made "the call" when it was necessary. This kept us more focused and working hard than any other team, with far fewer meetings than any others too. Finally, not only did she clearly say who wan't up to par, she also clearly gave credit to those on her team for the work that they did successfully.