In the start of this chapter it was very interesting how they evaluate the teams in terms of how they did the design of the project, I consider important that the biggest team did worse than the other teams because for planning is harder to that with a lot of people instead of just few people that design everything and then divided the work to the rest of the team, but the problem with that is that you have people that is not working until the design is finished.
The problem of not making a good partition and design from the beginning is that you consume a lot of time just in meetings with your teammates to organize how you can do the job, that means more interaction that consume a lot of your time just planning something that should have been planned from the beginning and now you are wasting time in doing the planning and coding at the same time.
I agree with the graph above, the ideal form of starting a project first is to have low staff numbers, this is because at the beginning you are not coding or dividing the work, at the beginning you should be doing some planning and design how the project is going to be divided, how many modules and then with all the design you can start getting more staff and assign them a specific part of the project and thanks to that avoid a lot of meetings and the most avoiding frustration among your staff.
So in conclusion is better to design everything fist with few people that letting a lot of people to start the design, because in the last case the design would be divided into teams and then it will end like an attempt of design and at the end the design would be created while coding, instead of coding in base of the design.
In this chapter it was mentioned how in a single organization everyone has different goals and is important to understand this because if you try that all the members of the organization or the team has the same goal it will be bad in terms of motivation. So in my opinion is very important to understand that everyone in the team has their own motivations and create facilities to make those goals easier will increase the motivation that the members have in the project.
Another thing I consider important in this chapter is that in every project there is always conflict and is important to accept this and start working on how to solve them and try to reach an agreement in the matter, and try to remember those persons or groups that are in conflict that all of them are part of the same team and the problem they are facing are in the opposite side so they together have to solve that situation.
Chapter 18
In the chapter when they were talking about the importance of keeping the workers happy and motivated them to stay in the team instead of having a team asking to change to another project is very important because in this case Mr .T sacrifice a hour of work to give more time to their workers to relax and have good time and thanks to that those employees stay in the project that is much better than having to change teams and spend time training them to do another work.
I like how Mr . T said that conflict is not something reprehensible, I agree with that because people will work better if they can think freely, because if you try to prevent conflict by punishment then some members in the team will start to avoid thinking by themselves and just following what they have to do or even worse asking to change to another job or quit. So it was very interesting how Mr. T do everything wrong when he tried to mediate between two persons in conflict in my opinion I would have done exactly the same mistakes
So in conclusion in this chapter it takes one of the point the novel said at the beginning of the importance of let the members of the team to express themselve and have someone to heard them and jell thanks to that you can improve their conditions in their work and making feel better.
Interlude
I agree in the part that said Belinda about how Mr. Tompkins was obligated to lie to Belok, this because Mr. T told Belok a lot of time that that deadline was impossible and he didn’t care that and Belok kept telling Mr .T that the deadline was that one and it will not be change. This is a clear example of why you have to consider what are the feelings of your workers because if you make them feel uncomfortable they will start avoiding you through different methods like lying or trying to avoid talking to you.
I like the part when Aristotle told Mr. Tompkins that he had a manager that started to do his job by fear this is bad because as I said in some chapters before a manager that use fear to motivate people is not a very good manager, this because people perform worse in a state of fear instead of making them feel part of a team where their contribution is important and that feeling makes people feel good about themselves.
So using fear or contempt to motivate the employees is a sign that the manager is not good, this because all that causes are negative effects in the team and I agree in the part that if a upper manager motivate their people by fear then another lower manager is going to copy that style of managing the project an so on, so as we saw in the last chapter just by making people feel fear and pressure that does not mean that they are going to think and do their jobs faster.
Moving on in the part they started to talk about the spec documentation it was very interesting how in a professional project somethings that happen in school can appear, that specification documents that didn’t say anything about the project were the product of individual shame, it had happened to me in the school that I wrote some complex code and part of my team instead of asking me what I was doing in that part of the code or why a made that part in that way, they don’t ask because of shame and then I realised that part of the code was wrong. So in the case of the novel it happened something similar, the documentation that said all the specifications for that big project of million of dollars was all wrong because it didn’t fulfill its duty and professionals were ashamed of making questions about the document thinking that they were the ones that were in fault.
So in conclusion I consider important that all the documentation in the case of programming is as clear as possible and to prevent that is important to solve all the conflicts they are present in the project so in this way you can have all clear and understood before actually making a documentation about the specs of a project, because without a good specification document you would have a really bad time doing that project.
In this chapter at the beginning I consider minister Belok is a very bad manager, first he didn’t care about what is the opinion of the workers in the different projects, he just wanted to win and win money without any investment, other thing is that he had the idea that the work would be faster if you put more and more people into it instead of making smart decisions and if it wasn’t enough he had the brilliant idea to hire courses that the only thing those courses are going to do is delay the projects. This man is the clear example of how you don’t want to run a project or different projects, because in reality the only thing you are doing is giving extra job to your people that can’t be done, so what is the point of doing this.
In the part that Belinda and Mr. T are talking about how good projects have overtime work and the importance of pressure I agree with them in the part that good projects have overtime work, this because you can face some problems that are necessary to fix at that moment, but too much overtime work can be bad for the projects you are running, first because the workers in this case programmers get tired and lose motivation with too much work then you add more pressure that can be in my point of view unhealthy and can burn out the workers and all this for nothing because the project can’t be done faster than is currently be done, you are just going to make people in the project to make more errors and be more anxious about the project.
In conclusion I agree with what their data said about how pressure does not make a significant improvement in terms of time in a project, that’s because people can’t work faster than they normally do with some pressure, but without pressure some people don’t do their work so I believe a way to create a better work space is to make them responsible of something, in this way they know that some work has to be done and is their responsibility to accomplish that work as part of a team.
This second partial was a lot different from the first one, first because the COVID-19 so all the classes became online, for some people this change was very challenging because they don’t have the sufficient self control to make all their works from home because at home, you have a lot more distractions and you have the computer in front of you instead of a teacher in the same place as you are, so thanks to that I learned how to work better at home while taking classes without distractions.
Another thing this partial change compared to the last one was the dynamics of the classes, I consider this second partial was very helpful because we heard experiences of people that are already working and doing well and how they started in that world. These things are important because at the Tec de Monterrey we learn how to do some basic things about programming, but we have to start making our own experiences first to know what we want to become at the future and learn more things about what we are doing instead of only learn from the classes because as the guest speakers said you learn a lot more when you are doing the things at work than in the school.
So in general the things I consider the most important and where the majority of guest speakers agree on are first making contacts, I am a person that I like to make thing alone but I have to change this mindset because the majority of the opportunities you have in a professional career are thanks to the contacts you have, because you can be very good at something but if nobody knows you is very difficult to have opportunities at work. So to improve this I decided to start doing more things in the part of back end and start asking people for recommendations about things related in that topic and start knowing people that are in the same field and creating contacts but not just because I want them to talk about me, I would like to make contacts for asking help and they asking help to me.
Hand draw social network on black board using chalk
Other point I consider important is to start saving money from now on, because you have to think at long term, this is a very important thing to start doing because in my case I just receive money and I want to spend that in something new that I don’t need, but I would be cool to have it, but the problem with that is that I am not thinking in a long term vision instead of buying that cool thing right now I can wait and if everything goes well in the future I can have a lot more money to buy more and better things and have a better quality of life.
And the last thing I want to mention is one recommendation that one of the guest speakers told us, I was to start working for free, I consider this is a helpful thing to do because first you are working without any responsibility so you can make mistakes and learn from them, then you gain experience and last you can know if you can live all your life working doing that or it is not for you and you can search for another thing to do, I did something similar in a project called reta 6-0, I start working on this project with my friend Fabián and I learned a lot of things first in the part of front end and some things in the part of back end and how to make api rest, use django and other important tools that can be helpful in the future.
Logo de reta 6-0
Talking about what I am expecting in the future in this course, first I would like to continue to have some guest speakers I don’t know if the third partial is going to be different but I consider that having guest speakers that share their experiences are very helpful because we learn a lot more that just thing in the school, and we hear how is the reality of the labour market.
In this chapter in the part that Mr. Tompkins and the Audit Group manager start talking about the importance of a following the same methods, it was very illogical from my point of view how the manager said that even if the project has something that can’t be apply to that process you must follow it is kind of nonsense because the process you use to produce in this case software must be the one that allow you as a team to complete the project without problems in my opinion, so in this part I consider that is important to have a process that you can replicate the times you want but also do some changes to the process if necessary.
Another thing that I have experience with is the specification document, instead of using a other document in the project of reta 6-0 we use the user manual as the specification document, this thanks that in this document are all the functionality that the web page in my case needs so it would be a waste of time to write the same thing in another format, is just better to make use of your time in production if you have already a document even if is in another format,, so in conclusion of this chapter I agree with Mr .Tompkins about the danger of standard process can make you miss important shortcuts.
Chapter 14
In this chapter I agree in the part they talk about the importance of not showing you dislike to someone at the moment of speaking because if you show to the person you are talking to some anger or dislike all you said would be in vain.
I like the idea of the Mr. Kenoros that said the process improvement is to subtract steps, I consider it a good idea because is logical that if you have a process and you try to make it faster by adding steps is kind of counterproductive because in order to complete those extra steps you will need more time, in the example they give it was very interesting how the most expensive part of the project in terms of time is debugging so to reduce the time debugging you can expend more time in the design until is so good than later you can start coding and reduce the quantity of bugs in the project and in consequence expend less time debugging and if everything works well you can reduce time.
Another important thing at the end of the chapter is when you are working in a project and then your boss decided to make changes is important that the boss stay with you explaining those changes and answer some questions because in my experience when you are working with a certain process and then it change and you are alone without someone to answer questions is going to be worse in every aspect even in time.
