Tag: Agile

As a manager, I realized that it should be some guidelines or principles which can move me and my team to success. The book called Principles by Ray Dalio inspired me to start describing them in one place.

Why do I need it? I see several goals I want to cover by this:

• Unite the team around similar values, which will move us to success.
• Add clarity to my decisions and management style, and finally make them support me naturally
• Increase team efficiency and success at all
• Create an environment where the team can make right, consistent and autonomous decisions by themselves
• Help to create a convenient, transparent and predictable environment where the team members can grow, feel inspired and finally reach success
• Formalize my principles/approaches and finally make them management and extendable.
• I can share it to my manager to be on the same page.

Here on this page, I would like to aggregate such principles and use it for future as one of my instruments.

As a key sources of principle I will use my experience and books such as a Principles of Ray Dalio mentioned above, Radical Candor by Kim Scott. They look to me as sensible keys to successful management, business, and work relationships. Furthermore, I want to use a grouping approach used by Ray Dalio and extend this list in the future.

Let’s begin.

Common Principles

1. Iterative approach in all aspects of work. Small results matter. Results can be small, but delivered fast and regular.
2. Stay focused. Work should be aligned with defined goals.
3. The right idea wins. The idea based on sensible arguments, competency is more important than ideas based on employees’ status, personality, ego, authority etc.
4. Make mistakes are OK on the way to finding the best solution. IT’S NOT OK to take NO action to avoid them for then next time.
5. Each field of work should have an Owner who cares about it. If you create something, you become an Owner. The Owner is responsible for the result and the consequences it causes. Initiative without an Owner dies and, finally, brings no value. To start an initiative — as the Owner, you need to clarify the goals to be achieved, costs/investments, value it can finally bring, and how it can be measured.
6. Work should have the ability to Invest & Grow & Get Fair Value from it. This is a motivation & compensation for the Owner’s efforts.
7. Accumulate and Improve what can be reused. If you create something which can be reused — accumulate it in the right form and iteratively improve during usage. It will save time in the future, and make possible manage and get great quality,

Work Relationships

1. WHO is over then WHAT. Relationships are a value you should care about. To build something valuable and complex with the help of colleagues, it’s critical to build productive and strong relationships with them. We need to care and grow our relationships to make more complex and valuables things.
2. Relationships should be safe and transparent. We all should work to create the trustful and transparent environment where each can share ideas, get support or a provided an opposite vision. Use constructive feedback instead of pure criticism, I-message, stay polite, not rude. Don’t say bad words or critic about a person, without this person in the room.
3. Relationships should be mature. Take ownership over your relationships with colleagues and try to resolve the issue with relationships directly with them before involvement of third parties.
4. We are all humans and have not just rational, but also an irrational/emotional side. We also have not just work, but other areas of life. We accept the emotions of each other. Empathy and support of colleagues are valuable for us. The ability to share emotions without getting shame creates the ability to build complex solution and don’t accumulate negative experiences but detect issues and solve it.
5. Be objective
6. There’s no shame in not knowing something. No shame to ask for help. No shame to asking questions.
7. Questions and suggestions are not critics. Please don’t hesitate to do it. Try not to use evaluation.
8. If you criticize — suggest a solution, if you suggest a solution — be ready to help with it.
9. Resolving issues with another department should go through department management.
10. Team is a value we need to care about. That includes support of productive work relationships, team culture and values, team individuality. It’s constant with the Software Development Team Manifesto.
11. The skill to act as a Team Player is essential for an employee.

Work Culture

1. Bring the “best You” to work. Do all need to be productive at work: support work-life balance, care about your health, sleep well.
2. Idea/message is more significant than how it looks.
3. If you’re meeting’s owner/organizer — please have a plan, facilitate the meeting, follow the plan

Management Principles

Here I will collect principles specific for managers.

1. Work you assign should be sensible
2. Work you assign should be fairly paid based on the value it creates
3. Care about Team Motivation. A motivated, result-oriented and professional Team can bring more value than just a professional Team or group of independent employees. It includes growing of each team member, knowing it motivators etc.
4. Working in accordance to a sensible plan has more chances to be successfully completed.

Values

to support previous Principles

1. Values to follow:
   > Goal-orientation
   > Teamwork
   > Excellence
   > Inspiration
2. Values are strict for all team