Critical Technical Management - News About The Third Bridge

For SoftwareSuccess.com

Last fall, Berkeley, Calif, developer Lyris Technologies faced a problem. Profits were up, and sales of its list hosting and anti-spam software products were booming, but the engineering effort was stalled. In 18 months, Lyris issued just one major software release. "No one could get control," says new director of engineering Neal McGowan, who was given the turnaround task. "Some of the five programmers weren't speaking to each other. The department had a really bad rep within the company, and we had to turn that around."

Mission accomplished: In just six months, McGowan's team has cranked out three major releases, and processes were in place. "We've created a team out of these people," McGowan says, "and we've allowed the owner to go back to running the company, rather than the company and the engineering department."

McGowan gave much of the credit to Susan Haumeder , who's Alameda, CA, management training firm The Third Bridge provides coaching and mentoring to technical managers. Haumeder devised a test to help you gauge the health of your engineering environment. Not only will this indicate your capacity for high productivity, it will also show you how your organization would look to a new programmer. "Lyris improved their score on this test by eight points to realize their gains."

Take our test yourself.

MARGARET STEEN, San Jose, THE MERCURY NEWS

…"Never in my career as a technical manager was
I ever measured on retaining people," said Susan Haumeder, who spent years managing software development and IT teams before turning to executive coaching a couple of years ago. That's changing, though, as companies realize that throwing high salaries, signing bonuses and perks at the engineers who are crucial to corporate success is just a starting point.

"It doesn't do you any good to have 20 hotshot engineers if you've got nobody to manage them that really knows how to do that," said Haumeder, who now owns The Third Bridge coaching firm in Alameda. Haumeder says she has seen some extreme behavior from socially inept engineers, ranging from outright hostility, which she describes as "the childish tantrum," to passive-aggressive refusals to cooperate or work with anyone else.

But mostly, she said, she sees what should have been small problems turn into large ones. For example, when an employee turns in work that isn't up to the manager's standards but the manager doesn't let the employee know, the result is often an ongoing problem: an employee who consistently turns in unacceptable work.