I wrote this originally a few years ago for teams whose members were new to each other; these suggestions acted as a guide to understanding my perspectives. I know that everyone has different points of view on how to run a project. By making myself the locus of attention, the idea was that the team could debate with me about the details and we could come to a consensus that worked for everyone.
Preamble aside, let's read on!
I’ve written this document because, over the past few years, I have encountered one too many situations with developers not living up to their own expectations.
As a developer myself with a couple of decades of experience under my belt, I’ve seen a lot of examples of how code can go wrong and how painful it can be to fix them when the PM comes along with a new feature request or important bug fix. As a project manager I’ve had to deal with the consequences of those poor coding decisions, spending an inordinate amount of time and social and political capital trying to smooth things over when a client gets upset because we went over time and budget.