>Sometimes they come in late and leave early, sometimes they work from home and I can tell by what they produce they spent half the day doing something else.
Honest question.
You say you manage 20 people. How are your able to judge for 20 people at least weekly if the work they did was in line with your expectations?
I feel like I basically have to read and understand every line written by each developer on my team in order to really get a grasp at whether they're productive or not.
Sometimes people produce very little code but maybe that little code solves a very hard to find bug.
It's something I'm really struggling with as a manager:
My boss asks me if the people on my team are worth their money and I am really not sure how to answer this.
I manage a mix of developers, architects, project managers and business processors/developers. I measure their productivity on team results compared to their team predictions as well as my own experience. I do have a long history of doing development projects in the public sector with a primary focus on increasing efficiency and benefit realization, but a lot of it is honestly gut feeling and softer management strategies where I encourage openness.
If people aren’t feeling well, maybe they are going through a divorce, maybe they’ve run out of motivation I want them to share it, so we can help them get to where they want to be or give them time to process.
I guess I could have a single inefficient worker and never spot it through measurements, but I typically notice because it changes the team dynamic and the way people interact.
I understand why this would worry some managers, but I don’t believe you can apply factory line thinking or strategies to brain-workers because it doesn’t suit them, especially not if you want them to cooperate in actual teams and not just be a bunch of grouped individuals competing not to be measured as the bottom 15%.
I am Scandinavian though, and our work-culture is very different from the American.
> I understand why this would worry some managers, but I don’t believe you can apply factory line thinking or strategies to brain-workers because it doesn’t suit them, especially not if you want them to cooperate in actual teams and not just be a bunch of grouped individuals competing not to be measured as the bottom 15%.
I agree and I hope you're not suggesting that I'm doing that.
My problem is that "I trust my gut" doesn't work very well either as a strategy fot me because I just don't have that body of experience to draw from.
For development stuff like planning poker works in that it gives you an estimate to go from. Maybe they exceeded their estimate for good reasons, but it’s a good place to start a discussion from. It also makes your programmers better at estimating.
For things like project management you have schedules and plans.
And then there is always customer/client satisfaction.
Aside from that you also have a boss who has expectations for you, are you meeting those? If your boss is not just satisfied but happy with your perfomance output you’re probably doing well.
So, at my company, we have yearly reviews. Instead of looking at how productive people are from week to week, people are allowed to vary in their productivity throughout the year. Theoretically (although this never happens in practice because humans) an employee could deliver enough tangible value in the first half of the year and take the rest of the year off. It is the employees’ responsibility to show how productive they have been. That productivity is preferably measured in relatively tangible terms (backed by data), such as number of customers impacted, cost/revenue changes, or time savings. This requires a lot of trust, and places a lot of importance on the hiring bar, but it pays off.
Honest question.
You say you manage 20 people. How are your able to judge for 20 people at least weekly if the work they did was in line with your expectations?
I feel like I basically have to read and understand every line written by each developer on my team in order to really get a grasp at whether they're productive or not.
Sometimes people produce very little code but maybe that little code solves a very hard to find bug.
It's something I'm really struggling with as a manager:
My boss asks me if the people on my team are worth their money and I am really not sure how to answer this.