How would you manage an existing software team?
DanielBMarkham: It all sounds good, but I would be careful about planning.As a manager coming in from the outside, you're going to want long-range plans. What we've found is that coders are notoriously unable (along with the rest of us) to predict on a long-term basis.That doesn't mean don't plan months and years out, but it means as far as commitment, have your programmers commit to little chunks of work at a time. Put together a big list of stuff that needs doing (but not too big, maybe 50-100 items max), then pick a time frame, like every two weeks. For each time frame, ask your programmers to commit to doing whatever they think they can from the list. At the end of the time frame, have them demo what they've done -- and fight the urge to micro-manage in the middle.By having fixed timeboxes, a prioritized list of stuff, and giving control over commitment to the team, you can have lots of little wins over time, which is a great morale booster and also helps you spot problems much earlier than with a long-range plan.