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"Do your best" is philosophy, not a plan.

Paul has started an occasional series of observations on management practice in the development world.

Here are some reasons "do your best" is a poor management plan:

  • It?s not measurable.


  • A worker?s ?best? is a contingent target; it depends on how you marshal your limited resources (time, energy, attention, etc). If you do your absolute top best on one task, it reduces the amount of resources available for another task, so you have not done your "best" on everything. This means there is always something for the manager to point at and say "you?re not doing your best."

  • Even assuming that it is a legitimate goal, there is no way to exceed the expectation of "your best." This means doing your absolute top best at all times is only "breaking even" as far as the manager is concerned. This is demoralizing to a worker; every single time he misses even a small thing, he gets picked-at for not doing his best. This leads to lower performance, since the goal of ?your best? can never be truly met at all times.


  • It is lazy and greedy on the part of the manager. His job is to meet measurable goals, not to wring workers dry. The line about "then I?ve cheated you of '20'" above is an example of this.





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[tags] developers, managers, series, plan, philosophy, paul, blog [/tags]

Comments

  1. Aren't there supposed to be measurable goals for the worker detailed and agreed to by the manager?

    btw, thanks for the mom's day wishes! My prayers are with you :)!

    ReplyDelete
  2. measures in the developers world ... no way!
    there are habits:
    Clean Code or Dirty Code,
    Documented code or scripted-like code,
    Rocker or non-rocker,
    roller or non-roller,...

    This is us, now find a manager to suit us.... that's the hard tip!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yes, indeed there should be some kind of 'List of expectations' and actually when there is there is no problem but the scenario here is that the manager only asking for 'Please do your best' to avoid planning.


    You welcome Khaltu

    ReplyDelete
  4. wallah el a3deh bel bait bte3mal 3amayelha :p
    Nice Post :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. This post can get me talking for days and days... But... just a few comments!

    - Our problem is not restricted in planning, it's also in the manner we execute our plans in. And if you are talking about IT I recommend reading articles and papers by Frederick P. Brooks (http://www.cs.unc.edu/~brooks/) and Antony Bryant (http://www.idea-group.com/cases/authors.asp?id=271&pub_id=215).

    - nasimjo: It's ALL about measures and standards dear... that's why the Software Engineering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering) discipline was invented in the first place!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Do ur best and do what u can in everything or u'll regret thats life rule for me :)

    ReplyDelete

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