Tough Love

For most of this week I have been working alongside Judge Dread* in an attempt to get this wobbly wagon running smoothly. There is nothing particularly scary about the solution but the team structure and management is all a bit flaky and, as a result, there are some considerable challenges to overcome if they are to be ready for their major review next Wednesday.

After several days of subtle suggestion and delivery of informal coaching we have run out of time and patience. As a result the theme for today was delivery of blunt consequential messages along the lines of stop doing "x" and start doing "y" or you will fail. The Lead Solutioner is a nice guy who wants to get everything just so but, and Judge Dread puts it quite succinctly, he needs to find his inner bastard and start telling people what he fucking wants and when he fucking wants it!

His main problems are inexperience and a poorly selected team where the main SMI is wholly inappropriately skilled. As a result he has been concentrating on technical and ignoring the management parts of his job title. Today we have attempted to pull him up from the technical depths and get him to concentrate on the route through to a successful review rather than development of a polished cost model.

After a day of coaching that was definitely used some of the skills I have picked up as the father of a sixteen year old boy I headed home and took T&M out for a walk. I could not believe how cold and windy it was after the glorious sunshine of Tuesday evening.

I was half tempted to light a fire when I got home.

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* JD is an ex-solutioner who now assesses the "Deliverability" of our solutions. He isn't too bad provided one is aware of the following; firstly, he wasn't that great as a solutioner and never worked on anything particularly huge and secondly don't trust him, especially when you can't see him ... he likes to have little conversations behind closed doors