Managing the Unmanageable: One Book, Three Ways to Use It
Mickey Mantle and Ron Lichty, two software industry veterans with over 70 years of combined experience, have crafted a book that will help any software manager be more successful. Having spent their careers developing software, leading software development projects, and managing programmers and teams, they have now distilled their experience into a book that every beginning programming manager should read and have on their bookshelves for reference.
It’s a book that will also help executives who struggle sponsoring projects dependent upon software success – CEOs, COOs, CTOs, and others – understand the craft of software development and the intricacies of how to manage software people and teams to deliver software projects successfully.
This book will help any software manager get a handle on their own unmanageable challenges.
True to its subtitle, the book is comprised of Rules, Tools and Insights for managing software people and teams:
Rules
Nearly 300 rules of thumb and nuggets of wisdom from software luminaries, managers, and developers – succinct insights into managing programmers and development teams – are collected into three sections:
- Managing
- Managing People
- Managing Teams to Successfully Deliver
Tools
The book delivers dozens of tools the authors have collected or created over the years to help manage programmers: they share their sample job descriptions, interview summaries, interview questions, goal setting templates, developer skills inventories, code review guides, sample project workbooks, and many other tools that will save managers hours and days of time and effort.
Insights
The authors share, in nine chapters, their hard-won experience gained from programming, managing and delivering software spanning two managerial lifetimes of companies and situations. The insights are sprinkled with anecdotes from their experience as well as rules of thumb and nuggets of wisdom they gleaned from their gurus.
- Chapter 1 - Why Programmers Seem Unmanageable
- Chapter 2 - Understanding Programmers
- Chapter 3 - Finding and Hiring Great Programmers
- Chapter 4 - Getting New Programmers Started Off Right
- Chapter 5 - Becoming an Effective Programming Manager: Managing Down
- Chapter 6 - Becoming an Effective Programming Manager: Managing Up, Out, and Yourself
- Chapter 7 - Motivating Programmers
- Chapter 8 - Establishing a Successful Programming Culture
- Chapter 9 - Managing Successful Software Delivery