The best way to get developers to build something great is to make them believe your goal is worthwhile. If you do, control from the top will not only be unnecessary; it will be impossible. That’s the best situation you can hope to create, and frankly I love that so many people don’t believe that, since it makes things so much easier for those of us who do.
I’ve used Duncan’s new phrase, “Management by Fiction,” about 100 times since hearing about it earlier in the week. Such an accurate description for bad management.
O’Reilly Connection aggregates technical things that people in your network of friends are doing and then provides it as an RSS feed. It’s only got O’Reilly articles, weblogs, codezoo tips, and article/weblog comments so far, but it’s already my favorite feature. Here’s the RSS feed from my network.
Today’s batch of items turned up the secret of project management:
If there’s a secret (and this is what the agile development community has been saying for a while — neither Andy nor I make a secret of that) it’s that you have to be relentlessly honest about what you can and cannot handle. You don’t have to have perfect knowledge, but you have to stop deluding yourself and your customer that changes are free, that you’ve made more progress than you have, and that your initial estimates and guesses are completely right and will never change.
Also, I found out that I’m lovable. Not sure how I feel about that.
I’m working on aggregating more, like external RSS feeds, open source contributions, credit reports and del.icio.us links.
