Project Management Stack Exchange
Project Management Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [micro-management]

Questions about managers getting excessively involved with the details of projects.

As per Wikipedia:

In business management, micromanagement is a management style whereby a manager closely observes and/or controls the work of his/her subordinates or employees.

Micromanagement is generally considered to have a negative connotation, mainly due to the fact that it shows a lack of freedom in the workplace.

14 questions
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7 answers

Daily standup vs. Micro-management

Why isn't the daily scrum considered to be micromanagement? Under any other circumstances expecting to get a daily update from developers would be considered micromanagement. Maybe even pico-management. (did I just invent a term?) Even a weekly…
Danny Schoemann
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33
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5 answers

How can I manage team distractions like chit-chat?

I work with a team of developers who are talented but often distract each other with chit-chat. They can waste hours of the day with these 20-30 minute, non-project related jam sessions. Since I am PM on many of their projects I get frustrated with…
ChrisFM
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10 answers

How can I get my team to value self-organization and self-improvement?

I'm working as a project leader in a team of 5 developers and myself and taking the role of analyst. Within the company, we've been applying the agile principles for several years. Some of the principles I value most are self-organization and…
zweefs
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12
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4 answers

How to make sure a task assignment was clear?

I guess you know the situation, that with some of your colleagues you manage to establish a common way of communication right away (whatever you talk about is understood perfectly by the other one), whereas with others it takes a while or maybe…
bonifaz
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8
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1 answer

What to do when you have successfully delegated all the work and nothing is left for you?

Imagine a small software development team (say, 5 members). Having done your homework as an Agile manager and closely following Jurgen Appello's suggestion of "the more you empower your team, the better", you one day find your team having progressed…
bonifaz
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8
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3 answers

As a Scrum Master, how to handle management expectations on delivering story points?

Problem - I've been appointed as a Scrum Master to a new team and senior management (CTO) expectation is that our team should deliver more than the SP capacity we can currently realistically deliver. This SP expectation is based on previous (over an…
Ruan
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6
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2 answers

Giving PMs a view of developer resource

I run a dev team of 8. We have a few PMs here and they often ask about getting a good view of what free developer resource we have. Other parts of the business have a shared outlook calendar but for developers I feel this comes down to…
PhilG
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5
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4 answers

Technical Spec: Is more detail help or hindrance?

When writing a full Technical Spec - defining in details what every part of the system will do, show and look like - does it help to state the obvious? Let's take the easiest example: A Login Screen needs fields for username & password and their…
Danny Schoemann
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2
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5 answers

Should a PM assign fine-grained tasks to individuals, or do we have an over-zealous PM?

I work in a small digital agency where we have the following roles: 1 Managing Director 1 Partner 1 Technical Lead 1 Project Manager 1 Designer 3 Developers Our day to day work is a mixture of planned projects, support & maintenance for existing…
user1207727
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2
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3 answers

Should managers be involved in decisions about what technical practices the team adopts?

With the popularity of agile methodologies on the rise it comes the time to make decisions about what it means to be done with a given feature/task. Should the managers be involved in the decisions about which technical practices the team should or…
pgpb.padilla
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2
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How would you implement scrumban to large team performing concurrent multiple R&D projects

I'm working in a private technological center, performing only R&D projects for industrial clients and institutions... I'm looking at applying Agile methods to our activities. From all my readings, I'm looking towards scrumban. But I have doubts…
Damien Salle
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2
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2 answers

linked tools together without micro managing?

so I'm managing a project thats larger than my normal scope - and while I'm pretty much on my own, some tasks will be handed out to others, and I need to report nearly daily on where we are at. Right now I have the following documents on the…
egg
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2 answers

How to detect in recruitment, engineers that are not self-organized

I am facing a problem with some engineers and I want to know if is possible to detect some characteristics during the interviews or through some test. In my company (a software house), we are hiring software engineers. We have some tests, mostly…
Alián Rigñack Quevedo
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0
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1 answer

Necessity to micro manage off shore developers

In a large organization, every morning a manager from the HQ office has a meeting with the dev team(s) based offshore (India) and checks the work they've done. He's very tech savvy, and says that he can tell whether they're taking the piss or are…
dqm
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