Better Software - December 2008 - (Page 18)

Management Chronicles Don’t Fear the Repartee by Nance Goldstein Jill, project manager for her organization’s new software product, picked up her phone and nervously dialed a threedigit extension. “Rich, this is Jill. I just received the test results from your shop, and I can’t believe it. You’re not testing the features that we think will make this product soar in the market. You’re testing old capabilities that the market has moved beyond. “We cannot show these test results to Frank and have any hope of getting the OK to move into production any time soon. Why didn’t you give me a heads up that this was happening?” Rich, the organization’s head of testing, felt himself going icy; this is a conversation he’d had with Jill before. “You let your designers go crazy,” he said. “It makes our job impossible. We spent a ridiculous amount of time and resources designing new tests for all the snazzy features you put in. Your fancy designs—as you can see by the results— are highly unstable. We guarantee Frank that our testing focuses on reliability. We can’t possibly guarantee this product’s performance.” “The deadline for getting this into production is on top of us!” Jill said. “Maybe we’ll test here.” Jill worried about how much she had risked for the new product. From the outset she knew that Rich’s staff didn’t have the skills to understand and test the new designs. And she didn’t know how to talk to these old-school types who only think about “manufacturability.” Rich flinched. “What you should do, instead, is rein in your designers! Redesign this to improve its performance.” If Jill took on testing, corporate management would force Rich to lay off onethird of his department, as others had in the retrenchment. Both Rich and Jill are feeling attacked. They know that the actions of one threaten the professional credibility and security of the other. The steps that follow this confrontational trajectory 18 BETTER SOFTWARE DECEMBER 2008 may cost one or both of them dearly—a missed deadline, the product’s cancellation, staff layoffs, or exclusion from future projects or promotions. There’s also another challenge: They each feel unable to find a satisfactory way out of this jam, which has caused a fight. Flight is the other common response to conflict. Fighting to improve our position or disengaging to protect ourselves or our staff can lead to blaming, impasse, or losing face. Either choice fuels the conflict, now or in the future, escalating animosity and reducing the chances of solving future problems between the divisions. Conflict reduces people’s productivity and generosity toward the organization and their coworkers. In a recent study by the University of North Carolina, 53 percent of surveyed workers said they lost time at work worrying about a past or future confrontation with a coworker. The Society for Human Resource Management reports that 28 percent of office workers surveyed wasted time at work avoiding confrontational colleagues. Twenty-two percent put less effort into their work because of “bad blood” among colleagues. Even smallscale conflicts can reduce task focus and lock people into rigid black-or-white positions that do not create the best deciwww.StickyMinds.com sions [1]. The key is to be curious. Any satisfactory solution asks at least one party to step back from the fray and ask questions. These questions should focus on what each person really wants at that moment and in the future. That information can create new options the conflicting parties cannot see in the heat of the moment. Four steps can defuse the situation and improve the chances for a solution that, at the least, both parties can live with. Decode. Challenging conversations skim the surface of the real problem. To understand what’s going on and to find a path to a solution, require decoding the conversation. Revisit the conversation by writing down the following: What was I thinking and feeling after each person spoke? What assumptions was I making? What did I not say? What did she not say? This can rarely happen in the heat of a conversation; it may require a request for a five-minute break and callback. Stepping back and asking questions can uncover what really happened as the words flew. Divide. Separate the person from the issue. These conversations often leave the participants disliking one another (and maybe themselves). That easily ISTOCKPHOTO http://www.StickyMinds.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Better Software - December 2008

Better Software - December 2008 Contents Mark Your Calendar Contributors eLightenment Technically Speaking Code Craft Test Connection Management Chronicles What's a Manager to Do? Six Thinking Hats for Testers The Key to Good Interviewing 2008 Salary Survey Product Announcements 10 Things You Might Not Know About … The Last Word Ad Index

Better Software - December 2008

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