Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Happy Hogmanay

For those of you not reading this weblog in Scottish, “Happy New Year’s Eve”. As ever the best party is in Edinburgh and as I write this around noon PST, it ought to be in full swing back home. The Scots enjoy Hogmanay and New Year’s Day so much - typically staying up until the wee hours have started elementary school - that 2nd of January is a holiday. So I’m guessing that people back home don’t get back to work until Tuesday. Lucky them!

If your New Year’s resolution is to “go agile in 2004” then I would urge you to remember that management is a necessary and vital part of that process. When looking for a management approach for agile development, I urge you to consider the wisdom and humor of Mike Myers and remember that “If it is not Scottish it’s crap” Happy New Year!

Tuesday, December 30, 2003

A Plee for a More Sober Future

McKinsey Quarterly argues for a more sober future and a more rational approach to assessment of management. This article by Ian Davis argues that longer time windows are required for assessing the performance of an organization against its goal. The short-termism of the 1980’s and 1990’s has left a terrible legacy and resulted in many bad management decisions, the reward of bad managers and the punishment of many good ones.

If I have an issue with article it is the “hopefulness” of it. Sure it would be better if we redefined success over a longer time window, if we nurtured talent better and assessed its development over longer periods and if we looked to a wider role for business in society - more than just making profits and returning value to stockholders. In fact this 3rd theme is a key lesson from Built to Last by Collins and Porras. However, some others such as Warren Buffet argue that the only role for in the incorporated enterprise is to return value to the stockholders in the most economically efficient manner possible within the law. Society will then regulate in other ways what is or is not ethical. This is an argument for a central control of ethics and values rather than a distributed one. Davis seems to be arguing that a more distributed approach where companies self-regulate their own behavior for the longer term will produce better results.

So if we feel that a self-regulating world would be better and we would like companies to behave more soberly in 2004 and beyond, how do we go from here to there? That is the real question and it remains unanswered by McKinsey Quarterly and Mr. Davis.

Monday, December 29, 2003

Philosophy of Uncertainty

I found this really appropriate quotation from the English philosopher Sir Francis Bacon. I wish I’d found this before the book went to print as it would have been a really good quotation for the start of Chapter 4 Dealing with Uncertainty or Chapter 7 Agile Project Management.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. Bacon, Francis, Advancement of Learning, 1

Sunday, December 28, 2003

200 Fold Improvement - A Great Yarn

Developers and managers alike often laugh at the suggestion that 4 fold improvements in programmer productivity are possible with changes in working practices. Numbers like 10 fold seem like fantasy. Most people I speak to think I’m crazy when I tell them that I believe that 40 fold improvements will be possible within 15 years and that history will look back on the first 40 years for software engineering as a craft era.

There is a split opinion on the usefulness of history. Henry Ford declared that it was “Bunk!” Whilst we are often reminded that “those who do not learn the lessons from history are condemned to repeat it”. For those of you who align with that second sentiment then you may enjoy this article, A Great Yarn from The Economist Christmas Special.

The article charts the history of cotton. What has that got to do with software development? In my opinion - a lot! Why?

The industrial revolution has a lot in common with the information revolution through which we are living. Landed gentry farmers from England used their wealth to expand into plantations in the colonies. This meant running banana, sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas staffed by slaves from Africa. The raw material was brought back to England for added-value processing and then sold throughout the rapidly expanding British Empire.

Processes like spinning cotton were the high technology of their day. Investment banking was basically invented during his period to facilitate the flow of capital from the gentry farmers with raw material wealth to those with ideas for spinning jennies and steam engines and locomotive power and steam powered looms and so on and so on. It was the venture capital industry of its day. A virtuous cycle was started where wealthy people invested in new ideas which generated yet more wealth. The Economist does a good job of explaining this for cotton - a key element in the industrial revolution and the creation (eventually) of untold new wealth and higher standards of living for all.

Note how closely the now unfashionable use of imported slave labor reflects the use today of the H1B and (even more so) L1 Visa in Silicon Valley. Rapid expansion fueled by new technology creates labor shortages. Migrant workers fill that demand.

The most important details in this article for me are the statistics. Over a 70 year period cotton production got 200 times better. Not only did this not destroy jobs but instead it created yet greater demand for the product and generated yet more wealth.

I firmly believe that a confluence of two things - management science and knowledge of best working practices, together with improved tools - is creating the beginnings of the “spinning jenny effect” for software development. OMG’s MDA or Steve Mellor’s “executable UML” or OASIS ebXML or BPM may not be the right tools but they are going the right way. Combine the right answer in tools with the knowledge we are gaining about agile software engineering and it’s a sure thing that we are on the verge of a paradigm shifting change for the better. The craft era is ending and 70 years from now an article in The Economist Christmas Special will look back at the changes in software and knowledge work and reflect that there has been a huge improvement in productivity (of at least 40 fold).

Saturday, December 27, 2003

Some Holiday Constraints

I was watching the DVD of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer with my daughter last night. I was amused to note that the constraint in the elf toy factory is the paint shop operated by an elf called Herbie - remember the walk in the hills example from The Goal where the slowest boy is also Herbie. How do we know Herbie is the constraint? Because the foreman sees the inventory building up in front of him. Why is Herbie the constraint? Because he is not motivated in his job and his throughput is reduced through lack of proper motivation. Herbie wants to give up being the factory constraint and become a dentist instead. As I’ve pointed out before, dentists really understand how to be the constraint and how to manage around it.

I see a parable in the life of Herbie and the elf toy factory. I’m not the first person to observe that software engineers need to be properly motivated to be productive and I have often talked of the role of leadership and management in creating a properly motivating environment and jobs for software engineers. However, I may have been the first person to point out that lack of motivation can cause developers to become the system constraint. I spend a lot of effort in the book making this clear. The techniques in “Agile Management…” help a manager to identify the constraint. In the case of a lack of motivation, I delegate to others, the problem of elevating the constraint. There has been mush written by the likes of Jerry Weinberg, Tom De Marco, Tim Lister, and Larry Constantine on how to motivate software engineers. I didn’t need to repeat their advice.

In the movie, the foreman elf “motivates” Herbie by telling him that he should shut up and put up, and that his life is that of a toy factory elf - forget becoming a dentist. The result is that Herbie drops out and becomes a “misfit”. I’m sad to reflect that I have seen many similar attempts at motivation over this last 2 years during the recession in IT. All too often, management will tell developers that they are “lucky to have a job” and to “stop asking for help” and to “just get busy coding”.

My prediction then for 2004 is that as the economy improves (even if this is temporary) it will unleash a backlog of pent up frustration and we will see excessive staff churn as geeks move on in search of a better boss, a better, more motivating environment and new challenge.

[Updated 12/28/03 1330 PST]