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Transitioning From Developer To Management?
An anonymous reader writes "After 15+ years as a code monkey, mostly doing back-end systems design / development, I was surprised by recent developments at my workplace that have resulted in my being transitioned into a dual architect / managerial role within the next few weeks. While I am somewhat confident at this point in my career in my experience and training for an architect-type position, I have serious concerns about being able to properly fulfill the role as manager. Aside from 'Become a manager in 2 days' type books, what resources would you recommend I look to for guidance in this transition?"
I had this really stupid class in college called "Organizational Behavior". To this day, I still don't know what I was supposed to learn in that class. Despite the class being boring and pointless, the professor was actually a very interesting guy. He said something one time that always stuck with me: "Leadership is the reduction of uncertainty." If you think about it, it's true: your employees have to be certain they are doing the right thing, be certain of the requirements, and be certain they will get the support they need. Your customers have to be certain that you're meeting their needs. If you can do all those things, than you're probably doing a good job.
I also agree with the "good manager = good buffer" statement, but I'd even take it a step further. Great managers have requirements analysts, support personnel, etc. get the information from the customer. Then they form a plan and assign tasks to their development team. In my experience, this works rather well.
I'm totally going off on a tangent... back to your original question. Karl Wiegers' Software Requirements and More About Software Requirements are both geared towards requirements analysis, but have a lot of info that anybody in IT (and especially project managers) would find pretty useful... Both are worth checking out. I've also heard lots of praise for The Mythical Man-Month, but I've never gotten a chance to read it. Besides those, I would skip books on general management techniques and go straight for anything on software engineering or project management. The R.S. Pressman website probably has even more recommendations.