Posts in the Project Management category

Impostor Syndrome - and how to turn down the volume on it

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Everyone gets impostor syndrome. I get impostor syndrome. Even Neil Gaiman gets impostor syndrome. Even Neil Armstrong gets impostor syndrome - seriously. Check it out.

Image result for neil armstrong on moon

. o O ( I'm not really sure what I'm doing here. Shit... they even trust Buzz with the camera more than me. I'm probably going to get fired when I get back to Earth for being incompetent. I don't know why they picked me for this anyway )

Especially me. Most days of the week (working in software, and especially working at Microsoft, which in some corners has a culture of aggressive debate), I'm surrounded by incredibly driven, passionate, smart intellectuals who love to argue.

This can take a huge toll on you. Because it turns the dial on impostor syndrome up to 11. It's very rare that someone can have deep specialist knowledge on everything - and you'll always run across people who know more than you. You can have a bad day. You can meet someone better than you at some things and feel like they're better than you at everything.

You can do things to help with it though. To turn that dial back down to a 3 or a 4 instead of 11. Here's the things I've found that worked for me:

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Is a “Fail Fast” methodology a good idea for new projects?

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The whole idea of having a “fail-fast” philosophy for new projects is problematic in a lot of ways. Here’s the deal: “Fail Fast" is a strategy that only works for about half of the people out there who might be working on a project.

Imagine you were totally omniscient, and could split your developers into two teams based on their character traits and working styles.

Let's call these two teams  Team Burny-Ouchy and Team Cassandra.

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It’s Not Rocket Surgery–Managing Teams Across Disciplines and Under Pressure

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(this is a local copy of the blog post It’s Not Rocket Surgery – Managing Teams Across Disciplines and Under Pressure – which you can find on #AltDevBlogADay)

Howdy folks;

First an apology – I’ve been meaning to write an entire series of follow up posts to my previous one on #AltDevBlogADay ($10,000 is the Magic Number), but I’ve not had the time – yet. I intend to fix that, so stay tuned.

In the mean time, I recently had the pleasure of presenting a talk at GDC 2012 in the Producer Boot Camp tutorials track on how to be a producer in the games industry. Well, that and the kinds of issues you’ll see as teams grow and evolve over time.

I’ve got the slides up online now, so even though you can’t hear my dulcet tones, you should be able to imagine Morgan Freeman narrating for you as you read the accompanying speaker notes. Except this should be a weird English/American Morgan Freeman, who isn’t half as sexy. (more...)