RE: Expectations too high?

[mlist -at- safenet-inc -dot- com]

TechComm Dood opined:
> > I've taken to scheduling a weekly meeting with each 
> developer.  We sit down
> > for 15-30 minutes, and I ask them questions about their 
> areas of expertise.
> > At first they didn't want to commit to these meetings, but 
> I got the project
> > manager in my corner, and now no one seems to mind.  My 
> trick is to keep the
> > meetings short and bring gifts of coffee, soda, cookies, etc.
 
> Ugh, I absolutely loathe this approach. I call it "feeding the
> problem". You're fostering the continuation of the problem by
> rewarding them for giving you minimal time and involvement. If you
> want to reward them, do so when they go above and beyond the call of
> duty (as they'd see it). The trick is to get integrated into their
> workflows, not to get a piece of their attention for 15 minutes a
> week.

Ditto that.

I just came out of a meeting, led by the Product Verification 
(that's QA to the rest of you) Manager, trying to sort out what's 
what with the current project. So we had the PV tester, me, the 
builds maven (she assembles the material from me and the developers 
into the CD that the customers will get), and three developers.

The object was to check status and see what was broken and what 
needed to be pushed along. This is a new product, so we're 
supporting just a few platforms, initially. Still...

Somebody mentioned installation and scripting and stuff like 
that. A couple of people noted that one of the requirements 
was for RH Enterprise Server. Whoops! Seems that that's different 
enough that it's gotta be a whole separate build from the other 
Linux flavors we've supported. And well, we won't be doing a 
binary RPM for that one, so users will need to be told how/what 
to compile and verify.  Nice to know... not just for me to 
document, but for the PV guy who is supposed to be testing 
it all. So we'll need to specify which kernel? Which compiler?
What else that's different from RH 8?

Anyway, as the group interacted, other little surprises and
gotchas came up. None were catastrophic, but all were known 
to just one or two people who hadn't thought that anybody 
else needed to be informed. Two of the people who did the 
most digging were me and a developer who had been a tester.

My point is that this was a real, working meeting, and not 
something cobbled together for the benefit of "the writer".
Because all the parties were there for progress, and for 
defending/promoting their interests, and to find out when/how 
they'd be getting needed material from each other, everybody 
was awake and interested. Lots of good stuff came up that, 
for example, I as a writer would not have thought to ask 
an individual SME or even a passive herd of them in a 
special for-the-writer meeting.

It was the self-interested interaction that brought up many 
important points that otherwise would have been just as 
surprising at a later date, but horribly late to deal with.

Kevin (who'll take his SMEs in the wild, thank you  :-)

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