Make it easy

When I started graduate school, I could do about 12 laps. Yesterday, after almost 3 years, I swam a mile for the first time: 32 laps. As you might imagine, it took lots of work, and regular "practice", 2 or 3 times a week.

This might paint a picture of me as a very driven person or someone very conscientious about healthy living, but the fact is, I had help from external forces: free use of the pool for students, availability of the pool during late hours, cheap locker rental and towel usage fees.

Take away even one of those factors, and it's likely I wouldn't have done it.

Many times as development managers, we like to create laws that result in good code. "Check in all your code immediately, create unit tests first, indent your code" etc.

That's fine, as far as it goes, and then the second thing that has to happen is the manager needs to make it as easy as possible to obey.

I find agile methods help in this area. An experienced developer, who already believes, can set up the continuous build environment or create the TDD base modules. The others, who need coaxing along, can then participate with little, or at least much reduced, effort.

Management tools include the carrot and the stick, but for "good health" processes and admin, I suggest taking the time to make it easy.