You adopt practice to “make the team go”. However, every practice you adopt has a cost. The time you spend “making the practice go” is somewhat then a cost of making the team go. I like to talk about the cost of your practices as “Feed the Beast!” But what you really want to make your team go is to “Ride the Beast!” where the practices we have adopted start to carry the team faster than they could go without them.Continue Reading
Articles by Rich
A Fascination With Governance
If a little is good, then a bunch must be better, until it isn’t. I was having a conversation on the train the other day on the way home from work. I was sitting with an acquaintance that I ride with from time to time and we were both complaining about the week we were having. And we started to realize that we were both frustrated by a similar problem – but seen from a different view.
My friend told a story about how he had to travel on business and how he had found a hotel closer to his client’s offices so he wouldn’t need cab service. The problem was that the hotel was not part of his company’s preferred vendor list, and it was $10 more expensive than the hotel 30 minutes away that was preferred. His experience from previous trips showed that he spent $45 on cab fair, so the net savings would have still been $35. So far, so good. However, since the hotel was not a preferred vendor, his expense needed management approval. So he went to his manager, and yada, yada, yada – the CFO of his business unit had to sign the form before he could get his expenses approved, even with a $35 savings. My guess is that that the cost of all the management attention on this expense cost his company something close to $250. So much for the $35 savings – his little deviation from policy cost $215.Continue Reading
Being Agile (is not the goal)
Just reacting to a thought that floated around me in a meeting today. Someone complained that a certain way of doing something “wasn’t very agile”. That’s not very agile.
I recognize that I have said it myself. That’s not very agile. As if… Agile is the goal.Continue Reading
Measurement and Management
Over the years this blog has evolved, as my job has changed. From software delivery manager, consulting architect, to enterprise business architect. It has often been about management and leadership because those topics have been at the front of my immediate list of problems in delivering software. Today I read this thoughtful post… by Henry Mintzberg that arrived in the form of a retweet from a respected blogger and agilista.
In the post Henry pretty much destroys the old aphorism “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Except even after reading his rather thorough diatribe, I disagree, and I don’t think he actually offered any suggestions for how to manage things that “can’t be measured”. In fact, what he seems to be railing against is something that he says way towards the bottom – which is measurement as a substitute for management.Continue Reading
A Proliferation of Architects
One of the things that I have observed over the course of this century is the transition away from traditional “Data Processing” titles like programmer, programmer analyst, systems analyst, etc. The key evidence of this trend is the proliferating of self-aggrandizing titles involving the term architect. In 1985 when I graduated, I don’t remember every hearing of a software architect or a network architect, or God forbid an enterprise architect or an application architect or a solutions architect or any such thing.
I suppose it started with the transition from Mainframe style computers toward what we now refer to as distributed systems. First everything was mainframe and dumb terminals, then it was PC’s. Then it was networks of PC’s and Servers. For a while it was Client/Server and then multi-tier or n-tier and finally the generalization of the term distributed systems. Different computers doing different parts of the work in different places, mostly by “collaborating” with each other.
The programmers who worked on distributed systems had much more diverse titles. They were software developers, application developers, database developers, user interface developers, and with the advent of the internet and the world wide web, there were web developers. Back in the day, there were programmers who worked on the internals of systems that no user would ever see. Those people were called systems programmers, now in the age of distributed systems, their new self-aggrandized title was software engineer! Then as these servers and n-tier platforms started to become more complex, every server product needed a dedicated administrator so the unix operating system need a unix admin and the database needed a database admin and pretty soon we had java “containers” that needed their own admins. The networks that connected all the computers together needed administrators and pretty soon the whole thing got very complicated.
As these systems grew more and more complex, we started to realize that the genius-wizards who were good enough at their job to be able to see the big picture and to help us straighten things out when they got wrapped around the axle deserved a special title “Architect”. This brings me to the ultimate question for this blog post:
“What the hell does an architect have to do with information technology?”
Information Driven Projects
When you look at software development or corporate change projects, you often see some creative fiction. There is fiction in the plans, fiction in the designs and fiction in the requirements. This fiction is created by the notion that “Before we can start, we have to know everything required to get to done.”
Intuitively, we all know that this is not really true. We all know that information will “emerge” from our activities that will change how we get to done. We learn from our mistakes. We try things that don’t produce as good a result as we want. We clarify our understanding of the problem as we demonstrate portions of the solution.Continue Reading
Elastic Staffing Challenges
I have been away from this blog for a while. In fact, I don’t remember when I last posted (I looked it up it was May.) In my hiatus, I have worked on some other writing projects and spent some time with Zed A. Shaw’s excellent “Learn Python the Hard Way”. As a matter of fact I. will post my impressions of that book soon. Preview: It is an interesting take from an interesting guy at solving the coding bootstrap problem.’
Today I want to talk about something else that has been bothering me for a while. The notion of an elastic software delivery staff. This is not a new problem, in fact, it is as old as software. Fred Brooks wrote “The Mythical Man Month” almost 40 years ago, based on experience almost 50 years ago. I was introduced to that book in 1984 while I was studying computer graphics with Sam Uselton at the University of Tulsa.
When you haven’t tried to “run” a software delivery team or project, the tremendous wisdom in that book pretty much goes in one ear and out the other. You don’t have the experiential context to comprehend the problem space. When I read Scott Adams brilliant Dilbert comic strip today, I see much of the same problem space. There are types of work that don’t scale well. Our traditional strategies for elastic staffing that developed during the industrial age don’t really work effectively for this kind of work.Continue Reading
Business Capability Model
Current group I am working in is responsible for functional architecture. In spite of the fact that I don’t have any practical experience, I have been asked to help define a practice in Business Capability Modeling.
I think the reason for that is that I have some practical insight into the requirements that functional architecture or functional systems design places on a business capability model.
The most core principle of functional architecture involves the semantics of units of work. In fact business capability modeling is about defining the semantics of units of work – so there is my connection point.Continue Reading
Learn To Code – Now
I recently spent some time working my way through “Learn Python The Hard Way” by Zed A. Shaw. Zed is a programmer who has accomplished more than most in his short time on Earth. He is outspoken and often edgy, and has a reputation for being both brilliant and blunt. Zed is the creator of the Mongrel server engine that powers many Ruby on Rails sites.
Zed comes off as a Hard Ass, more than anything, and his proposed methodology to learn programming is hard, as in hard assed, not hard as in difficult. Learn Python The Hard Way is old school. Which is good, because I am old. It reminds me of learning Fortran in my freshman year of college in 1980. Hollerith cards. 039 keypunch machines. All batch processing. When you are dealing with “physical” cards, and physical sorting of program steps, and waiting an hour to see if your code compiled, let alone executed to completion or got a correct answer you tend to do alot more “desk checking” than we do today. That is the thing that I like about LPTHW is that it teaches some technique around old school desk checking. Like reading your code backwards to find errors, something that we often did on green bar paper at a table at Helmut’s Alpine Kitchen at two o’clock in the morning with a pot of coffee and an order of biscuits and gravy.Continue Reading
Learn To Code – Languages
Its 2014, almost 2015 and conventional wisdom about computers and programming have changed dramatically in the last 30 years since I graduated college. The number of people who use computers have changed from 10% to 90% in that period of time. My Google Nexus phone has way more memory and compute power than the mainframe I learned programming on in college. The PC that I bought in 1986 had a 20 megabyte hard drive – that would hold about 10 images shot on the camera embedded in my phone, or one shot in raw mode on my DSLR.
In the 1950’s into the 1970’s, computers were physically large, occupying large rooms and requiring many attendants or operators to manage. In the 1970’s the microchip or integrated circuit technology allowed computers to be built that would fit on a desk. Now we all need a laptop, a tablet and a phone and maybe a watch or a pair of glasses that are all computers of some kind. We have computers in our cars, smart homes. All our video gaming consoles are just computers.
Conventional wisdom which 30 years ago saw that computer programming was a highly specialized skill, now sees that everyone should learn how to code, even if they don’t do it very often. This is because as computers become more ubiquitous, we need to understand them – the same way that every should know basic auto maintenance like changing the oil or mounting the spare tire when you get a flat. The same way we know how to unclog a toilet or sink drain or oil squeaky hinges in our home. Computers are so much a part of every day life that we need to understand more about how they work.
So lets just accept the conventional wisdom for a moment. What does learning to code mean? What is code exactly and how does one learn it?Continue Reading