Shameless Self Promotion ;-)™ © ®

I recently had a very bad experience of my career. I have been putting up nearly 14+ hours everyday at my work and even after that out come was either dis appointing or below expectations. I have been through hard times but never faced the scenario where in stead of recognition and appraisal I got criticised heavily for whatever I did. Naturally it was demotivating and disheartening. But this all was due to some of my mistakes and I learned a lesson.

Most of the time I forget things, like pens, notepads, similar smaller things and also some very important critical things such as keys, cell phone, wallet and keeping the team updated on my status. This has happened with me very often but at work my colleagues and other stakeholders knew what was going on. I usually set up reminders in Outlook. I have moved to Linux and Outlook is not possible now. Result, no reminders, no control on emails, verbal communication and no logging or documentation. Which clubbed with work flow of project in turn resulted in chaos. So I learned

• MOMs – Every action in an organisation can be documented. Some actions are very trivial and can be ignored. Some can never be ignore, for instance meetings. Meetings, brainstorming sessions, conf calls whatever one may call these events and actions involves discussing ideas, sharing knowledge, experiences. Until and unless one sets up a recording mechanism all the audio data is lost as soon as discussion is over. Prepare a MOM or minutes of meeting. I had privilege of having a documentation expert for just preparing MOMs. MOMs help, they save live. In my opinion every meeting that involves discussing some thing that can affect future course of the project must have a MOM. And MOM must clearly specify action items, possible dates for those actions and responsible persons.
• Document experience & knowledge – Try to document experiences and knowledge. Its not a hidden secret that documentation helps. If you know how to set up the development environment. Document it in simple language with example. Share with others. This simply saves your time. Others can simply read the document and set up the environment and if they can’t they aren’t competent enough to work with you. A knowledge-base can help (usually dumb) QA engineers, sales team, management and at least an intern.
• Track documentation – If it was just documentation I may have survived easily. But its not all. Recently, I spend more than 24 hours in a stretch working on some thing which I could have done leisurely. The task was well documented. But I simply didnt pay attention to document. Result, I worked day and night and next day and next night. 40 hours in total. Lesson learned, take some time and read the documentation. Read documentation carefully. Usually well managed software projects have good set of documentation. One can manage documents in SVN and its easy to look at SVN changes and notice if a document have been update.
• Query tracker – If there is a task there will be a query. One thing I love about query tracker is it can be easily converted into a knowledge-base and in my opinion a query tracker must always be open and loaded with queries at all the stages of project. A query tracker is a very simple spreadsheet with columns named Query, Query status {open|close|pending}, Date & Comments. One may add or remove the columns in the tracker but essentially it tracks queries. Queries can range from” How do I set up dev env?” to the types of “What the hell___ is?”. Answer to first could be, “Hey buddy just refer to set-up-dev-env.doc from how-to sub folder in docs in SVN”. Easy. Maintain the query tracker in SVN and keep it updated.
• Communicate & maintain a status – Communicate with peers and stake holders and maintain a status. If I was assigned a task, the peers and stakeholders expect a status. In a team every peer depends on other peers and naturally needs to know “what’s up” with the other guy. This is the point where I lag most. I tend to forget send status mails, discuss things, I am lost in my own world. Or shall I say in my own world domination dreams. D’oh. What so ever, I suck at this point. There was a time I used to run in meetings and keep talking to my team. But that was a small team and small company environment. I somehow can not digest the fact that compared to my work experience I am still at a lower stature and my subconscious feels that my peers are not worth of receiving my attention and I dont communicate with them. WTF!!! This is neither good for me nor for the project. Result is that my seniors have given up and they just want me to send a simple daily update of whatever I have done. This is nothing to be proud of. This simply sends a signal that I am high headed guy. 

All said and done, I dont know how soon I will become a good manager.

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