--Originally published at TI2011 – Miguel’s Blog
It’s time for the first reflection, I know I’m a few days late, but at least I’m doing better than last semester. For this reflection I will mostly be covering the topics that I learned reading the book Deadline. The first partial covered chapters 1 through 11. So far, I have liked the book. It has a good combination between telling a story and teaching new things. Too much story and you wouldn’t learn much, and too much stuff to learn and it would get boring. The book manages to be interesting and informative. Besides being engaging, the book provides a lot of useful information in the area of management.
The book starts with Tompkins being laid off. This is a lot more interesting during the current situation since many people are going through this right now. Unfortunately, not everyone is as lucky as Tompklins and gets a job right afterwards. Something that’s key is mentioned here, if you really want to take down a company, taking out the CEO won’t do much. You want to take out the managers in order to have a bigger impact, this goes to show how important managers are. Another concept mentioned at the beginning of the book is administrivia. Administrivia is what some may think management is all about: checking your email, doing progress tracking and doing project milestones. However, a manager is so much more than just that. A manager is about people, knowing who to hire, keeping your people motivated and managing people.
It’s until chapter 3 when we are introduced to the nation of Morovia. It’s also in this chapter that we first learn about the software management experiment. There are many variables when building a software development team: age, size, previous experience, how much do the team members know
