Seven Deadly Habits of Ineffective Software Managers

Ken Whitaker of Leading Software Maniacs (LSM) has more than 25 years of software development executive leadership and training experience in a variety of technology roles and industries. He has led commercial software teams at Software Publishing (remember Harvard Graphics?), Data General, embedded systems software companies, and enterprise software suppliers. Ken is an active PMI member, Project Management Professional (PMP) certified, and a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM). Sources for LSM's material come from case studies, personal leadership experience, the PMI Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) and Ken's leadership books: Managing Software Maniacs, Principles of Software Development Leadership and I'm Not God, I'm Just a Project Manager.

  Agile   Applications Delivery   Information Technology   Quality   Talent Management   Testing/Test Management  

These stories should introduce you to the trials and tribulations of software development management, and all of these apply to project management. Happy reading (and don’t get too depressed)!

Habit 1: Releasing a product before it is ready.
There’s always the pressure to deliver a product to market before it is ready--especially if the software engineers on the team feel like it is “nearly done” and the testers aren’t sure it will ever be done. Regardless of executive pressure or team denial, listen to your testers on the team. They tend to have the right impression if a project works or not. On one occasion, a VP of marketing tried to convince me and the executive team that “shipping early shows attention to the customer and first to market. You can always demonstrate customer responsiveness by how fast you fix things. No one really expects software to be bug free anyway.”

My experience has been quite the opposite. You usually have one chance to delight a customer--and in the case of a product release that becomes a quality disaster, you’ve probably lost that customer for life. Also, there’s the old adage that “good news travels, but bad news travels faster.” You don’t want that! Your company’s reputation needs to be maintained.

Habit 2: Hiring someone who is not quite qualified (…

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