For whole my conscious project management career I was and I am now a believer that manager’s great goal and destination is to help other people to be successful in what they are doing. Indeed, manager does nothing with his own hands. He has to do everything to make sure his subordinates are productive, creative and effective.

From my experience it is very important to give all team members a “sense of utility”, they need to see that what they are doing is important to someone, that someone appreciates their accomplishments. At the end of the day you want to develop pride of workmanship (how it is called in new MSF) in your people. Roots of this principle are in Edward W. Deming’s 14 Points for Management (pay attention to point #7).

If it is not possible to provide developers with connection to user and customer, or when these connections have long round-trips; as a manager you can take this on yourself. To do that I regularly, at least once a day, I walk around the office to talk with developers at their workplaces. I want to find out what they are working on, what difficulties they have, give advice and compliment for accomplishments. Not only I want to show them my care, I really want to help them do their job better. And I do that via informal one-on-one meetings that generally allow developers to feel more comfortable than on formal scheduled in advance meetings. Recently I came across interesting discussion of this technique by Jim and Michele McCarthy. I suggest you check out their podcast to learn more about One-on-One.

ReformingProjectManagement is running a poll to find out "What Has the Gantt Chart Done for You Lately?".

From my personal experience Gantt chart did not prove to be extremely useful for the amount of effort required to maintain it. But most of my projects involved a great deal of uncertainty and changes/clarifications along the course of the project. So I will not manifest Gantt chart to be bad or ineffective tool, just it was not well suited for my particular situation.

It would be interesting to see what others say on this matter.

At last I've put online my presentations from Microsoft Developers' Days'06.  If you are new to AJAX you'll find useful ASP.NET AJAX overview presentation. Windows Presentation Foundation presentation may also be of interest to you. You can check out both presentations (in Russian) here.

Reading an article from eWeek "Programmers to Blame for Hard-to-Use Software" I ask myself is that really programmers that we should blame? Look at cell phone or even TV-set users. Aren't they suffering from the same problems? Bjarne Stroustrup was one of the first to notice this:

"I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone."

So, is the problem in cell phones or TV-sets manufacturers and designers? No! The problem is in the market that demands new products with new features. It does not matter whether the feature is useful or not. You just have to have them more than competitor has.

So, again, think twice before adding new "feature" to your product. Maybe it would be better to make existing functions more useful and usable?

I delivered 2 presentations. One about AJAX in general and Microsoft's implementation of AJAX for ASP.NET in particular. In second presentation I've done brief overview of Windows Presentation Foundation technology. Both presentations are in Russian. ASP.NET AJAX Overview Presentation (PDF)

Windows Presentation Foundation Overview Presentation (PDF)

This presentation was delivered several times as an add-on to Microsoft Official Curriculum course 1846 "Microsoft Solutions Framework Essentials". It covers new ideas behind 4th version of MSFand they can be used to improve outputs from software development processes. MSF v.4 Innovations Presentation (PDF)

This presentation was delivered on October 27, 2005, by my collegue Vladimir Pavlov and I on the first Software Engineering Conference (Russia) in Moscow. Extending SPEM For Distributed Software Development Projects (PDF)

This presentation was delivered on October 26, 2005, as a part of CMMI-P-SPEM experiment on the first Software Engineering Conference (Russia) in Moscow. Introduction to SPEM (PDF)

At this event I delivered 2 talks. First one was concerned with ASP.NET application security and was based on series of demos of vulnerabilities and possible solutions for this problems. Another presentation described ideas behind major architecture change in ASP.NET 2.0 - Provider Model. An examples of extensibility that was made possible by new model were also given. This presentation is in Russian. Provider Model Presentation (PDF)

Quick review of new capabilities of Visual Basic.NET 2005, published in "Chip" magazine. If you are still using Visual Basic 6 and think, where to move further, this article will show you one of possible ways. Intro to Visual Basic.NET 2005 Express Edition (in Russian)