

When and how to micromanage - Anon84
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091201/when-and-how-to-micromanage.html?partner=fogcreek

======
biotech
When I hear someone defending micromanagement, it sends a shiver down my spine
- I was once a victim of micromanagement. It sucked, and I quit. As did some
of my co-workers.

This article, however, is not really a justification of micromanagement. Joel
Spolsky suggests that you can't trust technical people who you didn't hire to
do their job properly. I wouldn't call this micromanagement.

This strategy is important in any situation in which you are forced to let a
technical person from another company do important work for you, and you or
someone you know and trust has that expertise. For example, if you are a
medical professional, and your mother is sick at the hospital, it is advisable
that you carefully monitor her treatment by nurses and doctors, to make sure
every little thing that they do it okay. Since you probably did not hire these
people, and probably don't work with them, you can't trust them. So watch them
like a hawk.

On the other hand, if you hire and train someone at your company but still
cannot trust them to do their job, then you should re-examine your hiring
process.

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tonystubblebine
Regarding the wifi issues, if you're running a tech conference and it has to
have great wifi, we're recommending Mariette Systems. I know them through
Cliff Skolnick, who used to be involved in wiring up community wifi networks
(and was a founding member of Apache). I think it's amazing that you could get
someone with that much experience to wire up your conference. It's much better
than the low-level IT guys that normally show up (or worse, the remote phone
IT support).

Here's their website: <http://www.mariette.com/Mariette_Systems.html>

And an article TechCrunch did on them:
[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/20/techcrunch50-had-
intern...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/20/techcrunch50-had-internet-and-
then-some-mariette-systems-ftw/)

You'd think this would be a solved problem by now, but judging by the number
of conferences that have bad experiences, it is not.

~~~
spolsky
Mariette Systems solved the problem for TechCrunch by using primarily WIRED
internet access, not WiFi, and the cost was absolutely breathtaking.

The ServerFault thread that followed that incident about wifi at conferences
has become the encyclopedia of how to make it work, so look there if you need
a more detailed answer than "spend a lot of money hiring the guy who knows all
the secrets." :-)

[http://serverfault.com/questions/72767/why-is-internet-
acces...](http://serverfault.com/questions/72767/why-is-internet-access-and-
wi-fi-always-so-terrible-at-large-tech-conferences)

~~~
tonystubblebine
Joel, that's interesting. I've seen them do just wifi and they serve two of
our cheaper-seeming customers--so I wasn't under that impression. When you say
breathtaking, can you put that into context for me? All conference vendors
seem to charge breathtaking amounts (I once paid $220 for electricity in order
to plug in a monitor for two hours). Is this breathtakingly-high-for-
independent-show-organizers or breathtakingly-high-for-even-major-shows?

Also, what did you use at BoS? I thought the wireless there was good.

------
ojbyrne
"At the top of every company, there's at least one person who really cares and
really wants the product and the customer experience to be great." In my
experience that person is rarely at the top.

And this article seems to be a clear example of this. "Ryan" seems clueless
and "Greg" seems to be the go-to guy.

~~~
access_denied
I got a similiar impression from watching a few Carsonified vids, off course
one has to be careful with judging too fast. I wonder why Joel wrote the
articel that way? He s basically saying in public: Ryan screwed it up but I
could wing it because I memorised my speech.

~~~
spolsky
I hope I didn't create that impression. Carsonified was an equal partner in
the event. It was the first time for both of us. We learned a lot. They
learned a lot. I made plenty of mistakes, too (at one point I actually forgot
my own passport and had to fly across country to pick it up so I could go to
Toronto). We're all newbies in this conference business.

~~~
ojbyrne
Carsonified had never done conferences before?

~~~
spolsky
Not a series of ten conferences in ten cities, running every other day. Most
of the cities on the DevDays tour were new to them.

~~~
BerislavLopac
So you basically took a UK company, used to organize large events that span
several days a few times a year (and only in UK and a few handpicked US
cities), with a lot of preparation time, and let it organize a fast-paced
series of events every other day in a number of different US cities they've
never been to? Sorry, Joel -- I really respect Ryan and his team (although I
can't grieve over Mel Kirk's leaving), but here's your fifth why right there,
if you ask me.

------
hrishimittal
Whenever I hear of the 5 Whys method, the first thing that I think of is...

Why 5? (no pun intended considering this thread is about wifi... oh dear).

But seriously, why 5 specifically? What if you need 6 to get to the root of
the problem?

~~~
anthonyb
It's a rule of thumb: you typically need >= 5 whys to get down to a reasonably
useful response.

From the article, you could stop at pretty much any point in the whole 'why
does our video suck' chain:

"One problem in Austin was that we couldn't switch video fast enough. Why?
Because we were using a cheap switch purchased at an office superstore."

At that point you could've said "Ok, let's not buy crappy switches in future",
but you would have missed the better solution (don't do things half-assed at
the last minute)

~~~
BerislavLopac
Actually, the Five Whys isn't about finding a solution, it is about finding
the core problem. I don't think that Joel's example is a good one, because
after four true layers of problems it abruptly jumps to a solution, with
absolutely no reasoning why this particular solution would be the best one,
while leaving deeper issues just to keep the number of Whys at five.

The correct Five Whys process would continue past five questions, and end in
something like "because the team is not prepared" or even "the team doesn't
have enough experience with organizing events"; something that could be solved
by, among others, preparing a checklist.

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jbert
Isn't the rule the degree of oversight required is importance-of-
task/trustworthiness-of-person?

And if you want to minimise oversight you need to avoid untrusthworty people
and/or give them unimportant (but still useful) work.

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anonjon
Why can't this just link to the original article?

Which is an ok article, and might be better summed up that when you are
dealing with an unknown quantity, you should treat them as an unknown quantity
and /not/ trust them to do their job properly. Which is fine and reasonable
and possibly common sense.

I just don't understand why this article required two levels of indirection.

~~~
spolsky
It looks like somebody already fixed that.

When I link to my own articles on Inc.com, I redirect it through my own site
because I want to track how much traffic I'm sending them. Every year when
they're considering whether to renew my contract I remind them of this. (For
the record, it averages 40,000 direct clickthroughs per month)

~~~
pg
Ok, I put the partner argument back into the link, so you'll still get credit
for the traffic.

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access_denied
The author tells how he stepped in using the "5 whys?" method. I recall
reading that Jeff Bezos used to do the same thing at some point.

