Automate Life - Remote Management is a Necessity

Does your project run when you are not present? Have you leverage global resources to work on delivering your project? It is a global economy and even an individual can outsource work.

How to hire remote resources -

• Write a job description. Clearly state the skillset, language ability, is phone conversation required, programming skills, management talent, past work, hours available (make sure its when you are)
• Talk to potential people on the phone. Ask questions. Make sure you can understand and they can clearly articulate their examples and results. Validate language skills are adequate or you will quickly become frustrated quickly.
• If you have your own business, use services such as elance, brickyard, etc; If you work for a large company than you may have different options on staffing internally or externally to take advantage of best skilled people for job on your project
• Spend time getting them up to speed on objectives, priorities, communication process, confirming requests and how they will proceed so work can be accomplished correctly and efficiently
• If a problem arises, determine if it's your fault and how it can be corrected. What caused the problem? If resource needs to be replaced, then act quickly and don't let problem linger
• Delegate effectively. Make clear what their responsibility is. Who are their contact points and when should they contact you.

After you have staff on board, then you need to critically evaluate how your time is spent. In college class, I learned about Pareto's law. Basically 20% of your time delivers 80% of results, 20% of development time will deliver 80% solution, and the theory can be applied to many aspects of how you live. What activities prevent you from doing the 20% that no one else can do? What activities can you pass on to other resources, get an assistant and eliminate from your day? Spending your time on activities using your brilliance is what will bring exponential results in your program. Trying to do too many activities just wastes time and is not efficient. Multitasking can be the biggest distraction from productive work. Automating the tasks and delegating work is key to creating the time to accelerate your project forward and maximize profits in your program.

Project Acronyms from Tech Projects

The realities of technical driven projects, is more often than not they become a force of their own due to personalities, lack of management decisions or unclear value and objectives to make decisions from
In Scott Berkun blog, is a myriad of acronyms for the many types of development occurring today-
http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2007/asshole-driven-development/

Which ones have you experienced? For me, I have lived through many of the scenarios described. Some were rescuable projects and others were killed with cause. The brightest group of talent doesn't guarantee success. Identifying these trends, picking tactics to counteract strong personalities, build support with team and management become the necessity more than tech know how. If you could pick the ideal acronym for your project development, what would it be?