Buu Nguyen's Blog

Behind closed doors – Secrets of great management, by Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby, walks the readers through a story of a mid-level manager, Sam, who turns a group of “disconnected” people into a single jelled team who works together to achieve the organization goals.

In this book, you can again find the style with which “One Minute Manager” and “Whale Done” were written, which is very easy to read. Though being thin, many principles, techniques can be learnt from this book such as: how to effectively coach people, how to give feedbacks properly and why that matters, how to focus people on the common organization goals instead of their own priorities, how to cope with unexpected realities etc. In fact, most of the principles & practices are not new and have been discussed before by works of Fred Brooks, Tom DeMarco, Steve McConnel, and Kent Beck, however, I believe this is a very good summary of those practices and principles, in a real-life context.

Perhaps the most valuable thing I learn from this book is about giving feedbacks. I know many managers who do not specify clear goals to their members, and even when they do, they don’t constantly offer feedbacks to the members as to how they are performing. As a result, productivity is often lost since people will not always work towards the most value-added things for the organization, without even being aware of it. Even worse, people who work hard for the organization will be disappointed not to see their work appreciated in a timely manner or mediocre people not even “touched” by the managers. Regarding goal setting, managers must also remember about how to specify goals that are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound) for their members to work for. This is another thing that managers often fail to do, and they usually assume that people always know what they have to do.

Despite the fact that this book is a good and easy read, it could have been better if the authors spend more time telling story and describing the thinking process of Sam, instead of intermixing the story with academic-like text on the principles and practices, which I think boring. So, if you need an quick summary over the proven trends of software development management, I highly recommend this book.