Kosmothink

Luis Seabra Coelho asked me to contribute a guest post on his blog Ah-Ha Moments

Eureka! People are not robots!

Here’s an excerpt from my Ah-Ha moment in Project Management.

“..the client’s deadlines were fast approaching, the quality of our work was ok, not great. And after about a month, I started to become the momma on the team, not in a good way, but in a “I’m going to tell on you to momma” kind of way. It was nuts. Some people quit.

Around that time I was reading a blog about Google, and how Google allows their folks to have one day a week to work on an independent project and I thought… A-HA… That’s it. At Google, employees are trusted to do great work and to manage their time. The company realizes that smart people do better when they can be the masters of their own destinies and therefore builds in the time for that during the week.

Instead of a full day, I set up working groups that would meet for one hour. The groups were built around software disciplines; systems engineering, business architecture, testing, training, and QA and change management. When I introduced the groups, I emphasized freedom. They were free to attend or not attend. They were free to go to any group meeting. They were free to discuss what they wanted to as long as it pertained to the discipline, even if that meant they weren’t necessarily discussing client deliverables. They were free to ask me not to attend, if they didn’t want the “boss lady” there.

And our productivity….toook offf!!! “

Read about our great results  here.