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The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Project Managers – Carol Smith
- Works in summer of code office, previous network operations, enterprise software
- 11 interviews at google to get her position
- Habit 1 – spend more than 2 weeks in meetings with engineers, “makers schedule vs managers schedule” by Paul Graham
- Habit 2 – Assuming all the engineers you work with are purposefully tryin g to do a bad job and sabotage the project
- Assume competence – People want to take pride in their work and do a good job
- Habit 3 – Keep a checklist – creates a big gant chart, bugs engineers constantly about status
- Needs to be familiar with technology and project to understand what engineering is talking about when there are problems
- Habit 4 – Let middle and senior level managers meddle with timeline
- maintain credibility and managers will feel less inclined to meddle
- Habit 5- make everything an emergency
- Don’t cry wolf – get people to understand if you do say something has to be done today it really does
- Habit 6 – Break down rapport with engineers whenever possible
- cookies
- don’t use small cookies to reward directly, use to build rapport not reward directly
- Habit 7 – Assume that the dates engineers give you are spot on
- engineers will try and tell you something will please you, under promise and overdeliver, take past estimates from that person into account
