Soft Skills
Time
Calendar
If you want to create a meeting for only reminding purpose (like: UAT not available during this time period), or to show you are on vacation, you should configure the meeting as “free-time”, so it doesn’t block the time for your friend for actual meetings.
12 hours clock am/pm
It is not always clear how to represent the start and end of a day with 12hours format. To prevent confusion NIST defined it like this: Start of the day: 12:01 am End of the day: 11:59 pm
| 12-hour | 24-hour |
|---|---|
| Midnight (start of day) 12 midnight 12:00 a.m. |
00:00 |
| 12:01 a.m. | 00:01 |
| 01:00 a.m. | 01:00 |
| 11:00 a.m. | 11:00 |
| 11:59 a.m. | 11:59 |
| Noon 12 noon 12:00 p.m. |
12:00 |
| 12:01 p.m. | 12:01 |
| 01:00 p.m. | 13:00 |
| 11:00 p.m. | 23:00 |
| 11:59 p.m. | 23:59 |
| Midnight (end of day) or shown as start of next day |
24:00 |
Acronyms
- LOB (Line of business). Big companies split into line of business
- AOB (Any other business) is used for a last point in agendas to emphasize every other topic can be discussed as well.
- PPMO (Project Portfolio management office). Supports project in terms of finance, hiring, on/off-boarding, timesheets, holidays, project roadmap etc.
- IMHO (In my humble opinion)
- TBH (To be honest)
- COTS (Customized off the shelf) software.
LGTM -> Looks good to me LGCO -> looks good carry on
Effects and laws to describe a standard situation
Conway’s law
This law says an enterprise architecture (how we slice our components) converges with the internal structure of the company’s staff
Dunning-kruger effect
This effect says people with low abilities overestimate their abilities and people with high abilities underestimate their abilities.
Goodhart’s law
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
Leading
Blaming
When there is someone exposed like a project-leader it is easy to blame him/her and talk bad about their way of leading.
People think they can lead the team much better than the current leader.
In a lot of cases we also assume the leader has hidden agendas, is lying about stuff, or at least doesn’t tell the whole truth.
In all cases where the leadership actually changed, I took the chance to talk privately with them and could speak very openly about the past times. To my surprise it always turns out that they just were humans, did their job and tried their best to hold multiple groups/stakeholders (with different ambitions) together.
Identification of a team
As a team leader you can give your team an identity. This helps everyone to express in the name of a group and to feel they are in the same boat.
- Team name(s) like superheroes
- Release names like mountains or planets
A good example: Design every team member as LEGO figure. Minifigs
Layers of resistance
Out of the book discussion about Righting software and why do people discuss the same thing over and over again.
A reason might be that they did not peel the onion from the outside.
https://education.biu.ac.il/sites/education/files/shared/layers-of-resistance.pdf