Leadership & Management

Anything related to leadership and management things.

Dear Leaders

At any point in time, one is leading or being led by someone. Everyone is a leader within a context. You might be led by a leader in your company. Mostly because you are the bottom of the organization. However, when you are at home, you lead your family. If you are a wife, you lead your husband (sorry guys, it is just the fact). If you are a husband, you lead your kids (how dare you lead your wife 😛 ).

I just take a small context for this post: You lead a development team. Take a more common scenario that I have seen:

You lead a developer team.

A leader can be a technical leader, a scrum master, a manager, … The context is pretty much the same: You take care of a team.

There Small Things

Three things I consider the most important: Accountability, Mentor, and Cheer Leader.

Accountability

I like military principles. When a soldier is in a battle, his captain and comrades are his life. He trusts them. I know, in our IT job, most of the time it is not a Dead-Or-Alive situation. That might be a reason why leaders do not care so much about building accountability.

Mentor

Did you forget to help your member growing? Deep inside, everyone wants to grow. They want to be useful. They are expecting someone to guide them, to help them in a positive way. That is you__leader.

Should you add “Mentor” in your responsibility bell? Your call! I highly suggest you should.

By helping other, you are helping yourself. You help them grow, they will lift you up.

Cheer Leader

Well, this is not a football match. But you get the idea. Make the team closer, talk more to each other, discuss openly.

Working is not easy. There is stress. But, there should be joy most of the time.

Another Sand in the Sea

There are thousands of articles, books, seminars, classes … about “Leader and Management” topic. They are useful resources. I have read some of them. The more I read the more confuse I am.

Finally, I found out: Hey, wait a minute! There are too much! Maybe I should start with 3 small things and change my mindset.

Everyone has deserved a chance to grow. So I am!

 

Scrum Gathering 2015

I had a chance to attend the first Scrum Gathering 2015 in Vietnam. It was the first time of many things – more detail later. The event was about Agile/Scrum. Therefore, before I talk about my personal impression and feeling, you should clearly state about my background of Agile/Scrum:

NOT MUCH

I have been coding for long time and have been reading and applying (kind of) for quite a while. However, I am not applying Agile/Scrum as the scrum materials.

And I was not going to the event to learn Agile/Scrum either. I went because:

  1. It was an international event, speakers are well known – or at least I heard about them
  2. I have not ever been in any community conference
  3. Mind open: See how they are doing out there
  4. Meet new people

So, what did i feel? I felt good (event I had sickness that day 🙁 ). I felt involved. I met people from different countries, with different job titles. They were talking a lot about agile, about scrum, about processes, … They are truly professional. And I felt “LOST” in the beginning. I did not know how and where to get started. However, very quickly the community atmosphere helped me get started

Hey, man, you are here for a reason. Let’s open and talk to people

And I started to talk. Things just kept going as it should be.

However, there was one problem:

I do not know what to ask speaker

That was when I realized that I have many things to learn. I might write more about that in some later posts.

Next are some of the thoughts i had during the event, especially when people asked speaker of how to solve this issue, that issue, …

I started to think: Hey, wait a second! They focus a lot on this phase: Scrum welcomes changes. So they expect scrum to give them the tool to deal with changes from client/customer. And we also have the same philosophy in coding. We are as developer/architect told to design/code in such a way that: you can deal with requirement changes easily or less costly.

No one mentioned about that in the event 🙁 And when i mentioned about that in the discussion. They seems to ignore that, and show the gesture that: Yeah, we know and just move on with their discussion.

Everything comes to code, btw 🙂

PS: I had many things in my head after the event. However, the Mr. Bacteria knocked me down. Therefore, those are information that left in my head. I want to write them down before they’ve gone 😛

PS2: I will join this event next year for sure 🙂

MVP – Microsoft Vietnam Community

Last week, i had a change to take part in a community diner event, held by Microsoft Vietnam. It was so amazing. It was really a normal talk between us, which made us comfortable. It was the first meet of new Microsoft – related worker. The goal is to build up a community in Vietnam through the MVP – Most Valuable Professional program.

I knew this program for long time; however, i did not care about it for some reasons. Now, there is a program in Vietnam started by Microsoft Vietnam. I care. I want to be in this program.

I got a form to fill in and sent back to register. By doing that, i confirm that i will do more to get that MVP. Easy? No. Some ideas came in my mind:

  1. Need to move the blog to my own – Buy a new domain and host blog.
  2. Figure out what i should focus on – technical stuffs.
  3. Plan for community contributions.

Step by step.

Step into hospitality business

Sound like weird, right? Since i am a developer, building software. Being at Xnhotel for more a week already. After some days getting familiar with people and setting up stuffs, i have been starting discussion with the team and our PM about the new software: Central Reservation System, CRS.

I got some raw explanation before, and my first thought was that it is quite simple. However, within 2 days meeting, our PM went in more detail -> surprise me. The business rule of hotel, reservation exactly is soooo complex, so many scenarios.

In summary, i have 2 obstacles:

  1. I do not know about hotel reservation, and according to what i have gotten so far, i have not made any booking.
  2. Languages: Vocabulary using in hospitality.

I also admit that, this is the first time i get involved in a development from scratch, understanding business rules, write down document for requirements. Of course, i do not do all that stuffs. I am participating in that job. Quite nice and interested in.

Working with customer

I am not really a freelancer or finding some projects outside. However sometimes i have got some requests from my friends or relatives. Usually they’ve come up with simple idea: asking me to build a website for them. Discussing some core features and then asked me for a price. How can i point out a price with just a bit detail? Yeah i was put in a hole. I wrote them out a bit clearer and then told them a cost for those.

Wow simple as it was. However, here were the customer characteristics came in. They said: OK we forget the price sine it is done. You know what’s next? They slowly came up with new small things, extension of the big picture before.

The devil came to play here. I was not working in contract with them, just in relationship. How can you refuse just a little thing. A little thing, a little thing, …. and then you got a BIG thing 🙁

The day tomorrow, they sent me an email telling all what they wanted, of course, the same price. I could not say a word, well shorted order of more than 10 features. Of course, i sent them what we all agreed the previous day. Surely i got some excuses from them. However i knew the truth behind that scene.

Price and quality go together. They know that, but in negotiation, they try to ignore the quality first, do not mention about it to get a lower price. When the price is fixed, yeah quality comes to play.

BE CAREFUL WITH CUSTOMER NO MATTER WHO THEY ARE