Category: Uncategorized

Posted on by

Cats in the monasteries of IT

Paulo Coelho wrote a nice piece about how cats came to be regarded as necessary for meditation for a few generations in Japan. The story might resonate with just about anyone in just about any context.

In my case, it reminded me of longstanding assumptions about how things “must” be done in the IT field. The following quote sums up the state of corporate IT in a nutshell: “..society continues to create some systems which, in the fullness of time, lose their reason for existence, but continue to impose their rules.” Continue reading Cats in the monasteries of IT

Posted on by — 7 Comments

Does remote work work?

First, here’s the short version for those poor souls suffering from tl;dr (too lazy, don’t read much) syndrome, that peculiar malaise that characterizes our times:

Can working from home be effective
compared with collocated teams?
Opponents are quick with invective
and full of opinions, it seems.

But what if we increased, in some way,
the ratio of signal to noise?
Could we discover a good way to
routinely deliver with poise?

And now to business.

One of the ongoing debates in the IT world over the past few years has been about the relative merits of team collocation, including intense collaboration, paired work, and continuous osmotic communication, versus solo work, including work from home and other forms of remote work as well as office spaces fitted with individual cubicles. Continue reading Does remote work work?

Posted on by — 3 Comments

How to avoid the local optimization problem when coaching at the team level

A recent Twitter discussion inspired me to re-think a few things about how to effect meaningful change at the organizational level and the team level. (Funny how Twitter seems to serve that sort of purpose, which may be above and beyond the usage pattern its creators envisioned initially. But I digress.)

During the first few years I worked in the general area of process improvement, I functioned mainly as an “agile” coach at the team level. Through those experiences I tried to understand how each method or practice worked mechanically as well as applying the “agile” values and principles on the cultural dimension, and started to learn how psychology and organizational sociology play into software development practices and delivery methods.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that the way an individual development team goes about its work actually has relatively little impact on the effectiveness of the end-to-end delivery process. I continued to look for the key leverage points in organizations that might yield the greatest positive effect for process improvement. I often found myself venturing far afield from the teams I had been engaged to coach, because time and time again I discovered that the real problems with delivery lay well outside the team’s jurisdiction.

Continue reading How to avoid the local optimization problem when coaching at the team level

Posted on by — 14 Comments

Lack of fluency

A recent article by James Shore and Diana Larsen, Your Path through Agile Fluency: A Brief Guide to Success with Agile, has generated some buzz. I have tremendous respect for the authors, as well as for the people I’ve seen posting positive comments about the piece. To be honest, though, I’m having a lot of difficulty buying into it. I don’t want to offend any of those people. On the other hand, they might just dismiss me as stupid and not be offended at all. Either way, here goes.

The gist of the article appears to be that we can effect organizational improvement in a large company by driving change from the level of individual software development teams. The major problem with that idea, in my opinion, is the bottom-up approach. The authors suggest beginning the organizational transformation initiative from a single software development team and then extending the cultural change outward. They also want to tie together the various parts of the organization by reaching out from the team. I suspect this is because their own professional background is in the area of software development, as well as the fact that both of them have enjoyed a measure of success with the approach, at least up to the second "star." But the approach doesn’t address the core structural problems in companies; it only works around them somewhat.

Continue reading Lack of fluency

Posted on by — 4 Comments

A recipe for software development

Garlic is widely considered to offer significant health benefits. It’s also a delicious and versatile ingredient in foods. Would tomato-based pasta sauce be pasta sauce at all if you omitted garlic? (Ignore American-style fast-food pasta sauce for the moment. Canadians, before you smirk, I have just two words for you: Pizza-Pizza.)

Chocolate, as well, brings a variety of health benefits. It, too, is delicious and a versatile ingredient in foods. What would a chocolate bar be if you omitted the chocolate? (Ignore "white chocolate" for the moment. Come to think of it, just ignore "white chocolate" altogether.)

Logically, then, it follows that chocolate-covered garlic cloves must surely be among the healthiest and most delicious foods one could hope for.

But why stop there? Glass is a wonderful material that adds much to our modern way of life. There is even a form of biocompatible glass that helps broken bones heal. Clearly, glass is good for the body.

Logically, then, it follows that chocolate-covered garlic cloves with tiny shards of glass embedded in them must surely be a super health food as well as a fabulously delicious snack. What an amazing rainbow of flavors and textures in the mouth! Ah, the sultry contralto notes of the chocolate, the lingering bite of the garlic, the metallic tang of the blood. And all of that still but a prelude to the inevitable conclusion.

The same logic applies to the task of selecting tools and methods for developing application software. I recall one project in particular that illustrates this approach quite well. The company wanted to maximize their chances of delivering a high-quality, well-aligned, usable product in a reasonable time. They went in search of the Best Practices Ever for delivering software, and identified three Good Ideas. Then came the flash of insight that set the stage for success: Combining all three Good Ideas on the same project could only result in three times the Goodness!

Well, in theory, anyway. In the immortal words of American philosopher Lawrence Peter Berra, "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."

Continue reading A recipe for software development

Posted on by — 4 Comments

My personal agile journey

This is a sort of trip report. I started on a journey in 2002, and in the ensuing 10 years traversed a lot of territory, met many interesting people, and learned a great deal. The journey certainly changed me. Whether the change is for the better is still an open question. I’m talking about my journey with, alongside, around, and sometimes against the grain of the "agile" movement.

With the Agile 2012 conference just around the corner, I thought this might be an appropriate time for a personal retrospective. I’ve presented at the last five consecutive Agile conferences, and found them to be enriching experiences. This year’s event takes place about 2 miles from my former home near Dallas, Texas. It would be great to see the old familiar places and visit old friends in the area. It would be great, as well, to show some of the friends I’ve made on my "agile" journey around the town.

I won’t be there.

Continue reading My personal agile journey

Posted on by — 3 Comments

Pros and cons of dedicated teams

One concept that’s been getting a lot of play in recent years is the idea of dedicated teams. In the context of software development and support activities, the concept boils down to this:

  1. Any single team is assigned to just one development initiative or to the support of just one set of technical assets at a time; and
  2. Any individual is assigned to just one team at a time.

With this model, you might dedicate Team A to ongoing enhancement and production support of the company’s call center systems. Team A does not do any work to support other business operations or other technical assets, such as contributing to the development of a loan underwriting system, or providing production support for the company’s enterprise service bus. In addition, if Stephan is a member of Team A, he is a full-time member of Team A. He is not assigned 75% to Team A, 15% to Team B, and 10% to Team C.

The dedicated team model is an alternative to a matrixed model of personnel assignment (or “resource allocation,” if you can tolerate speaking of humans as “resources”). With a matrixed model, teams are formed specifically to carry out particular initiatives (typically when the discrete project delivery mode is used), and disbanded at the conclusion of each initiative. Individuals may be assigned to more than one of these temporary teams at the same time, and expected to split their time among multiple initiatives.

Managers who are accustomed to thinking in terms of maximizing individual resource utilization often have difficulty understanding the potential advantages of the dedicated team model. I thought it might be helpful to summarize some of those advantages:

  • Avoiding artificial dependencies between projects
  • Reducing induced administrative overhead
  • Reducing context-switching overhead
  • Increasing domain knowledge
  • Increasing team cohesion
  • Improved visibility and clarity on progress

There are also potential disadvantages to be aware of, such as:

  • Stagnation of technical skill sets
  • Boredom and its associated morale problems
  • Reduced opportunities to learn about other areas of the company’s business, with the risk of developing a narrow perspective on the work
  • Missed value from deep specialists

Continue reading Pros and cons of dedicated teams

Posted on by — 1 Comment

It’s a question of its context

I read an article in Harvard Business Review today entitled “I won’t hire people who use poor grammar,” by Kyle Wiens. Wiens assesses job candidates, in part, on the basis of their use of English grammar. He goes so far as to administer a written grammar test to all applicants.

Amusingly enough, the website generated a URL by truncating the title to “i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.” I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t, either, unless using poo happened to be part of the job description. “Seeking howler monkeys for stock floor trading positions. Throw your résumé against the wall and see if it sticks.”

Um, okay, where was I? Oh, yeah. Is Wiens’ approach excessive? Ah…wait a second. Should that be, Weins’s? Does it depend on whether you’re in the US or UK? Does it depend on which form your fourth-grade teacher thought was “the rule?” <sigh/> I guess my chances of passing Wiens’ grammar test are low. Oh, wait…is it okay to use faux XML in a narrative? I’m so confused!

Anyway, comments on the article run the gamut from strong approval to strong disapproval. I find myself both agreeing and disagreeing with Wiens.

Let’s start with the points of disagreement. That’s usually more fun.
Continue reading It’s a question of its context