Assessing Your Own Experience

  • When was the last time you reviewed your schedule for things that you’re doing but that aren’t providing a lot of value for you or your team? Look back on the past couple of weeks. Look forward to the next couple of weeks. What did you accomplish, and what do you hope to accomplish?
  • If you are still writing code, how does this fit in with the rest of your schedule? Are you doing it after hours? What’s driving you to continue to spend this time?
  • What was the last task you delegated to a member of one of your teams? Was it simple or complex? How is the person you delegated to handling the new task?
  • Who are the rising leaders of your teams? What is your plan for coaching them to take on bigger leadership roles? What tasks are you giving them to prepare them for more responsibility?
  • Does the process of writing, releasing, and supporting code seem to function smoothly on your teams? When was the last time there was a noticeable incident with part of this process? What happened, and how did the team respond to it? How often does the process encounter these exceptional conditions?
  • When was the last time you pushed your team to cut the scope of a project? When you cut scope do you cut features, technical quality, or both? How do you decide?
  • When was the last time you sent email after 8 pm or on the weekend? Did the person you sent that email to respond? Did you need him or her to respond?

1 David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (New York: Penguin, 2001).

2 Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).

3 Tom Christiansen, brian d foy, Larry Wall, and Jon Orwant, Programming Perl, 4th edition (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2012).