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Once a week we have a half hour session where we talk about a few features in our application or explain a customer question to our employees(sales, support, technical services, and development). This session is to teach our employees the application we sell and to help them improve the service to our customers. Once every two weeks, this session is mandatory. Unfortunately, some of our employees do not take this too seriously.
How can we, as developers, gain more involvement from the rest of the company? And make them understand the application we're building, selling and supporting more?
Ask them to present the topic in front of you after some days from the session day.
Another good way is to make them suggest new features and modifications in the project.
If you have any hidden "tricks" or "easter eggs" in your application then start showing them one every week.
Make it interesting and tell them how a trick can help a customer.
Couple of points:
Make them feel important. Give them direct input using proper questions, even if you need to resort to analogies.
Speak with them, not at them. When people are being lectured there's a natural instinct to not take any notice.
Use analogies for things they do not understand, and again, give them direct input.
The main goal is giving the person a stake in the project. If they do not have anything valuable in the project (even an opinion that led to a feature classes in here), they will not care.
You can't get any more involvement from your employees because subconsciously they know they will not get any more benefits through exercise of extra involvement.
Reasons?
They may not agree with your development strategy or with your customer relationship model. So they feel as they don't really belong here.
Their work will not profit from any extra insight, so for them it's a waste of time
They don't get paid enough so they are at a minimum accepted performance
They have other personal problems in mind and don't want to take extra mental burden during their working hours
They long since learned the company does not care about their opinion and improvement ideas, so they shut down their involvement service
They're that kind of people that are not interested in being involved (hire strategy issue)
Recognized anything? Then you know what to fix.
The important thing to understand that you should not just cure the disease but the reasons of its emergence. You may threaten people with some punishment actions if they don't get involved. You may play to emulate the need for their involvement. It will work for a brief time then fade out. Until you get to the origin of the problem, nothing will help.
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I picked up coding during quarantine and haven't gone a day without learning since. I've managed to learn the basics of Ruby in little under two weeks and run a few programs/started creating a basic app. Now I have to get a hang of Ruby on Rails. Furthermore, I have started learning Data Structures & Algorithms as a separate topic to complement the programming followed by Logic & Discrete Mathematics. I'm a very fast and curious learner and simply cannot just let a question be without knowing the solution to it (which led me to making my StackOverflow account).
Learning is always easier and more engaging when you have an enthusiastic and passionate person to guide you through a subject.
I was wondering if anyone knows where I can find a good one-to-one mentor that caters to an enthusiastic beginner programmer?
Alternatively, is there a recommended online forum, group or organisation that does the same thing?
Answers would be very much appreciated.
Ultimately there isn't really a great place for this yet, perhaps because there's a point at which developers no longer wish to be mentored rather than rely upon a mutual network. StackOverflow being an obvious example.
Coding Coach tries to tie mentors and mentees together, for free. In my experience it can be quite difficult to find active mentors on the platform though.
CodeMentor isn't free but also has a large number of active mentors.
RailsLink has a channel called beginners-and-mentors for small bits of advice.
It can be quite difficult to find someone willing to engage one-to-one when you're learning because, unfortunately, it's often quite boring for the mentor. For that reason, networking with peers is a great way to learn when starting out. It also means that one 'mentor' can help a collective with greater ease.
Try reaching out to people on Twitter or other social media and try to be helpful where you can too. Even if you're only one week in you're a week ahead of someone who's not tried at all.
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I do not mean English. Just communication. I have this problem in my team that we are often discussing complicated topics, be it face to face, in emails, during meetings or in our issue tracker, and people often find it difficult to stay focused and understand each other.
What are the best resources (books, presentations) on that topic? Is there any way one can learn this quickly?
For your personal growth:
-take the intiative to be in situations that require this. Join the army! :D But on a more practical note: join a theatre group, start writing/casting a blog, TA some students (officially or not). Simply practicing this often (and getting the immediate feedback through the reaction of other people), you'll start noticing what is more effective and get in the habit of doing it.
-I recommend the book "On writing well.", William Zinnser. Well written and concise, and short enough that you have the time for it, and most concepts can be applied to communication in general, not just writing.
Note that even though it is quite easy to understand the concepts, this is very much a matter of charachter, so it'll take a while for your effort to become habit. Worth it though.
Are you also looking for ideas for your current situation, or just resources?
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I've recently been looking at Extreme Programming and wondering if it would be realistic to implement it where I work.
My question is, if you're pitching to a potential new client and you tell them that you're using XP, and you explain what their responsibilities are as the customer, are they likely to be put off selecting your company if they've never worked within an XP environment before?
What are peoples experiences of selling XP to a client given that it seems to me to be a very customer intensive software development methodology? The context here is selling medium to large websites to a a wide variety of clients.
I usually try to explain it to my clients in non-technical terms, and focus on the benefits of my business model. With XP, you'll always have a higher degree of communication with your clients. This is always a plus for them. They like to know what's going on. Focus on that. Also, focus on the idea that they are able to discuss business requirements with you as the process moves along, so they don't get tied down into doing something the way they first envisioned it 6 months ago when they didn't really know what they wanted. This will also allow your contracts to extend their lifetimes when your clients get comfortable working with you and want to continue improving their products.
I'm working on a project that uses XP. The weekly meeting with our customer and the outcome of these meetings was that good, that our customer decided do try to implement an 'agile like' process as well.
Additionally I think that agile is getting more and more common in IT projects and that more customers are satisfied by the outcome of these projects. So I think that in a couple of years it will be harder to sell a non-agige project than an agile one.
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The single most effective thing I have done to improve my soft skills is to take an acting class.
What is the single most effective thing you have done to improve your soft skills?
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What is the single most effective
thing that you have done to improve
your programming skills?
Advice
to improve programmer communication
skills
Better appreciating just quite how dumb I really am.
Starting from the perspective of assuming that you're misunderstanding what's going on helps a lot.
Started answering questions here - the ability to explain complex things in a way other people can understand them is very useful.
Not to be a smart-arse. People don't like smart-arses.
If you think you are right and everyone else is sure you are wrong, just agree and continue being right. Trying to argue it out just results in a negative outcome when people are not open to persuasion or are being stubborn.
The best way to improve your soft skills is to use your soft skills. Put on a lunch time seminar for your fellow work mates. Nothing too scary, just pick a technology that you think could be introduced in house to make things work more efficiently, put together a five minute presentation and set some time aside for questions and discussion afterwards. You might even start a trend, one day a week a different person can talk about something that interests them.
It's a tie between volunteering as newsletter editor for a local artists' group, and joining a small local theatrical dance group.
A few years ago I attended a workshop about communication. And one thing that I learned there and I will never forget was: Try to understand why people act as they act, try to understand their motivation doing things as they do. That helped me a lot, especially in managing the management...
I took a teaching course and have been doing a lot of teaching.
Where I work currently has some material about improving one's Emotional Intelligence which is something that has been quite beneficial for me as it helps demystify some of how the world works.
In terms of not learning something, working on making small talk and being a bit more laid back has also improved my skills as not everyone wants every little thing analyzed to death and beyond.
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In scenaios where an RFP is issued by a customer for a vendor to be selected based on a certain technical and financial criteria, i.e. in a fixed scope / fixed price projects, is there any methodology can be used other than WATERFALL. I.e. Can the Incremental / Iterative approach work?
Why wouldn't you be able to do iterative? You can chunk up work in any size and do design-build-test iterations. I suppose what you're asking is whether or not a lightweight methodology designed to deal with changing or undefined scope is appropriate. I dont' see why FDD is not appropriate, for example, just because you know where you are going. :)
If they want that type of proposal, then they are presumably prepared to pay the price in change orders and large buffers (in time and $$) for unknowns. And you can bid accordingly.
But once the contract is signed, the most productive methodology is what it is. And if you're flushing out the risk factors, delivering early and often, etc. you just have the benefit of writing those change orders sooner.
Agile techniques are designed to contain change, but they work just as well if change is not so great. Most of the benefits still accrue. Just divide the work up into customer stories, the stories across milestones, and start the iteration clocks running. It should work just fine. You'll have to do a little more planning up front, but that doesn't imply waterfall.
Waterfall is when you do all the planning, then all the coding, then all the testing/debugging in that order. Instead you can do just enough planning, then iterate through planning/coding/testing cycles.
I think agile and iterative approach can be used and is important in many levels. The phase of defining business needs is extremely important and should also be iterative. By requesting fixed scope / fixed price contract the customer is giving up the chance to be flexible and killing the spirit of agile. Of course you can and should do some iterations even under fixed scope contract. But the most valuable advantages of iterative approach have been lost with signing the fixed scope.