The management of staff in a software engineering environment is crucial. If you do not know already that at the core of any business is the staff, then let me reiterate, at the core of ANY business is its staff. You may argue that it is the quality of the product that is being used? The “Sloppy Joes” burger van enterprise has been a roaring success for the last few years because of the quality of burger? Ok, So who buys the burgers? Who makes the decisions on purchasing? Who maintains the quality of the product in the van? Are you getting the picture yet?

You can reduce anything down to the point of finding the person behind the quality or lack of quality. There are however, as described in the burger example, some other factors that will definitely “grease the wheels” of business success, such as the quality of materials used for the creation of the final product, but if we are talking about software engineering, then take a look around, see many warehouses full of database schema’s, C# repair kits and base code chassis’s?

Software engineering can be described as “the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software.”

What exactly is being produced? It is nothing physical, no burger, or bridge, or building, painting or sculpture – but an intangible and abstract product. Ok, if we do not have any physical outputs or products of software engineering then the previous statement that other physical factors will help your staff to produce quality, is invalid. Software engineering staff knowladge is (within reason) the only input to all of your produced products. How crucial to the success of a company are they looking now?

Do you look after your staff? Train your teams? Promote morale?

Guess where I’m going with this – You guessed it, look after them – easy to say but difficult to do, why? Because we have been born into a commercial, burger flipping – product focused, environment where “staff” can be sliced and diced by finance (focused on profit) and directed by senior management (focused on efficiency). And in the old school, as we all know, find efficiency how? The easiest way (efficiency = Number of burgers per hour) the best and most accurate way of measuring business efficiency right? Hell no!

To get to the bottom of what is (arguably) the best wayto measure efficiency we would have to explore Lean production and much, much more (I’ll try and come back to that in another post) but the point is that our behaviour, our habits (especially with older and usually more senior management) are still in the days of burger flipping efficiency measuring where the focus is on number of products. Now (as you will see with Lean Production) we are slowly realising (especially in software engineering) that the focus should always be on the amount of value delivered, not the number of products delivered, what measure of value will the customer receive. More value delivered for less effort equals positive efficiency and customer satisfaction. Resource efficiency and customer satisfaction means? Yes, profit.

Support the people supporting your company

The management of staff is crucial to the success of any software engineering company, when I say management here stay away from the picture you may paint of the guy leaning really hard on all his staff and getting the “most” out of them. What I want you to imagine is a guy who has an understanding of the needs of both client, customer and staff and knows how to nurture, support and appreciate his teams getting not the “most” out of them but instead, getting the “best” out of them.

Any companies ability to expand depends on it ability to recruit and retain staff!

Its reputation in the market place depends on the quality of those staff members!

Training WILL cause people to learn more about their job – including how to do it better!

Trust – ask that a job is to be done as best it can be. Trust they will (and they will, providing the reward for the job is satisfactory) and let them do it.

Create morale: reward good work, understand the dynamics of your teams and build on them.

Read all about it! I hear recently a worrying statistic that more than 90% of people do not read books, articles, blog posts or anything about their current job. I cant find the reference right now and to be perfectly honest I hope I got that wrong.

*Caution: Reading may cause drastic and unplanned increases in knowledge*