As explained in my introductory post on the Exception-Tolerant Organization, ETOs emphasize their strengths and compensate for weaknesses by working together and communicating openly. If the concept sounds simple, that's because it is simple. But with all of the advanced ways, means, and tools we have at our disposal to collaborate and communicate openly, we still find in today's world places and situations where these fundamentals are simply not done.
Working together involves several cultural practices within an organization:
- Total team involvement from the start
- Proactively seeking the improvement of the organization
- Staying open to new ideas and possibilities
- Shared goals without harmful personal agendas
The first point is easier done than said, but the other three involve a resistance factor to change within our organizations. ETOs have the cultural grounding to foster and promote all four points above. As discussed in Part 2, ETOs systematically implement the communication pathways and processes to support these points.
But as is often the case in life, the greater challenge in overcoming obstacles can come from within ourselves, especially on the last point above. We don't always realize that we are more in competition with ourselves than we are at odds with others, and many times we are better served improving ourselves and overcoming our own shortcomings. Instead, we often put up walls where requirements and miracle solutions are volleyed back and forth, neither ever really satisfying the concerns or goals of the parties on both sides of the wall. But when we take down the walls and mprove ourselves, our best foot is then truly placed forward for the benefit of our organizations. Our strengths become the organization's strongest capabilities to be deployed across the greatest spectrum of benefit. And our weaknesses are compensated for by our continuous self-improvement, by identifying risks early, and especially by communicating openly.
Communicating openly, at its most basic level, involves face-to-face discussion, debate, and sometimes conflict - something that people can tend to avoid, in both their personal and professional lives. But for open communication to be effective, an environment needs to be created by the organization where intense debate and disagreement are tolerated, and conflicts can be satisfying to resolve. The organization should make it clear that it is okay to disagree and debate issues, but the result of each debate should still include a clear decision to move forward along a certain path of action.
As an exercise, have everyone in your organization begin to answer these questions out loud daily. Ideally, everyone related to a project or a core business of your organization should be in the same room (or on conference if necessary):
- What did I accomplish yesterday?
- What am I working on today?
- What obstacles or problems am I facing?
- How confident am I that the current goals will be accomplished on-time?
For the last question, use some kind of rating scale. Example: have each person rate their confidence from 1 to 5, with 5 being the most confident. Any answers below a 4 should be a cause for concern and those concerns should be addressed openly. The Agile practice called Scrum advocates the daily use of these questions.
Communicating openly also involves the appropriate use of communication tools. Communications involving urgency or time sensitivity should use direct methods: direct-line phone, internet, and video calls; direct text messages/pages; and of course face-to-face conversation. The use of email and instant messaging, while becoming increasingly mobile and location-independent, should not be relied on for urgent time-sensitive communication. These communication methods often have either multiple inboxes or streams/threads of communication occurring simultaneously, have lengthy queues of messages attached to them, or depend on having your communication device successfully "subscribe" to that message stream. The number of inboxes/threads and the size of the inbox queues are things that you cannot guarantee to be small enough so that your urgent message is received timely. Eliminate this frustration up front by identifying early a reachable line of communication to use for urgent matters.
Some very simple and fantastic exercises in working together and communicating openly (many taking 10 minutes or less to complete with a noisy room full of people) can be found here. While some of these are focused on Agile principles and practices, many of these deal with the core issues of communication and collaboration, and may help to expand your thinking. My thinking was certainly expanded after participating in some of the exercises. My thanks to Michael De La Maza for bringing these to my attention.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Monday, November 10, 2008
Challenging Our Assumptions
At a recent party I sat with a technology team whose members were dejected from having their latest project terminated by their company. This team spoke fondly about their months of development, their early adoption of cloud computing methods and technologies, and even their conferences and consultations with members of NASA regarding the use of advanced technologies. They shook their heads and couldn't understand why the system didn't succeed.
This team had hailed the project as the next great data transmission hub for the team's company. They specified communication protocols and APIs, worked with the application developers to foster understanding, and even reviewed a few sample data streams to understand the problem space. The project seemed to have everything going for it. But during construction of this hub, the team made a fateful design assumption regarding the separation of data streams within communication channels.
This assumption was that data streams could be separated by a data pattern that would "never be seen" in the actual live data itself. The team was warned by the application developers and certain managers that the possibility of this data pattern showing up in live data was in fact likely. Still, the team moved forward with completion of the system, performed some successful testing with a thin time-slice of data transmissions over a period of several days, and then went live with the system.
Within three hours of the system going live, this data pattern delimiter showed up in several places in the live data. As a result, the system was delivering incomplete data and crossing data transmission streams. Processes that were dependent on this new data transmission hub had to be reverted back to their old transmission methods. Beyond changing the data pattern delimiter to something else that might "never be seen" in the actual live data, the team did not have an alternative solution to this problem. And thus a short time later, the project was terminated.
Unfortunately for this team, a fundamental design assumption was made early on that contradicted directly with the problem space that their solution would address. The lack of challenge, investigation, and thorough testing of this assumption sealed the project's fate. While we are often proud of our assumptions, we are made better when our assumptions are challenged and tested at the earliest possible opportunity.
This team had hailed the project as the next great data transmission hub for the team's company. They specified communication protocols and APIs, worked with the application developers to foster understanding, and even reviewed a few sample data streams to understand the problem space. The project seemed to have everything going for it. But during construction of this hub, the team made a fateful design assumption regarding the separation of data streams within communication channels.
This assumption was that data streams could be separated by a data pattern that would "never be seen" in the actual live data itself. The team was warned by the application developers and certain managers that the possibility of this data pattern showing up in live data was in fact likely. Still, the team moved forward with completion of the system, performed some successful testing with a thin time-slice of data transmissions over a period of several days, and then went live with the system.
Within three hours of the system going live, this data pattern delimiter showed up in several places in the live data. As a result, the system was delivering incomplete data and crossing data transmission streams. Processes that were dependent on this new data transmission hub had to be reverted back to their old transmission methods. Beyond changing the data pattern delimiter to something else that might "never be seen" in the actual live data, the team did not have an alternative solution to this problem. And thus a short time later, the project was terminated.
Unfortunately for this team, a fundamental design assumption was made early on that contradicted directly with the problem space that their solution would address. The lack of challenge, investigation, and thorough testing of this assumption sealed the project's fate. While we are often proud of our assumptions, we are made better when our assumptions are challenged and tested at the earliest possible opportunity.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Project and Technology Development Methodologies
Rather than be the trillionth blogger writing on the subject of Agile, refactoring, Test-Driven-Development, domain-driven-design, and other practices and paradigms, I'll lay out some pragmatic principles to keep in mind when executing projects, no matter which development practices you adopt. In the rush to absorb the hottest trends, we should keep in mind the tried-and-true principles that still work:
Start with iterative and incremental. Project phases are well and good, but in order to complete a project successfully, the path to completion needs to be traversed. And yes, you must have an idea of your destination. But will you wait until all requirements are specified to the last detail before moving on to any architecture or design concerns? Will you have a design project phase that takes into account the current state but fails to connect with the changes in the world three months later when the design phase is completed?
If you break down your project phases into iterations, with a guaranteed feedback session at the end of each iteration, you will be much more likely to keep up with changing requirements and conditions. You will also be able to identify failing efforts sooner, before they cause damage later.
Start as soon as you can. One of the common reasons for project slippage is that some critical component or project dependency was not available earlier in the project cycle. Was it because the need for this component was not forseen? No, it was just not available at the appropriate time. One way to mitigate this is to start working on these components after just enough baseline requirements have been gathered. You may spend a little more up front to support this initial development, but it will cost you far more in the long run should you end up in an ill-timed slippage scenario. The ways it may cost you range from longer development cycles to mis-timed market entry to project personnel turnover. These are big-ticket costs.
Military leaders are trained to make decisions with 40% to 70% of the information necessary, and regularly provide feedback as more information is available. You can do the same on projects and be very effective.
Do your Risk Management. As stated so eloquently in the fantastic treatise on software project management Waltzing With Bears, "Risk Management is Project Management for adults." Listing and valuing project risks is something that can be done to 100% completion up front. But the great (and sometimes painfully realized) thing about Risk Management is that 100% completion is often not enough. Here is a great place to be iterative and incremental in providing feedback loops on the state of risks, mitigating circumstances, and changing requirements. If you build the iterations and feedback loops into your risk management on a project, the rest of your project practice will need to follow suit just to keep up.
You'll also be more inclined to tackle project deliverables that resolve the greatest risks first. The sooner these risks are resolved, the more accurately you can publish a date range for delivery.
Test early and continuously. Your project exists in some form from start to finish. It may start on paper, and live in hardware and software at the finish. But in whatever form it exists, it can be tested. As new requirements are gathered and formulated, test cases can be drafted and pitted against the project's assumptions. As new hardware is installed, its images and monitoring agents can be configured and proven. As new code is written, test cases can be written before or alongside the code.
Don't wait for a project to be 50% or 75% completed to start drafting up test cases and setting up a test facility. Automate much of your tests if you can, so that they can be run at least once a day. Automation is again a case of a little more effort up front, saving much more cost and headache later.
Start with iterative and incremental. Project phases are well and good, but in order to complete a project successfully, the path to completion needs to be traversed. And yes, you must have an idea of your destination. But will you wait until all requirements are specified to the last detail before moving on to any architecture or design concerns? Will you have a design project phase that takes into account the current state but fails to connect with the changes in the world three months later when the design phase is completed?
If you break down your project phases into iterations, with a guaranteed feedback session at the end of each iteration, you will be much more likely to keep up with changing requirements and conditions. You will also be able to identify failing efforts sooner, before they cause damage later.
Start as soon as you can. One of the common reasons for project slippage is that some critical component or project dependency was not available earlier in the project cycle. Was it because the need for this component was not forseen? No, it was just not available at the appropriate time. One way to mitigate this is to start working on these components after just enough baseline requirements have been gathered. You may spend a little more up front to support this initial development, but it will cost you far more in the long run should you end up in an ill-timed slippage scenario. The ways it may cost you range from longer development cycles to mis-timed market entry to project personnel turnover. These are big-ticket costs.
Military leaders are trained to make decisions with 40% to 70% of the information necessary, and regularly provide feedback as more information is available. You can do the same on projects and be very effective.
Do your Risk Management. As stated so eloquently in the fantastic treatise on software project management Waltzing With Bears, "Risk Management is Project Management for adults." Listing and valuing project risks is something that can be done to 100% completion up front. But the great (and sometimes painfully realized) thing about Risk Management is that 100% completion is often not enough. Here is a great place to be iterative and incremental in providing feedback loops on the state of risks, mitigating circumstances, and changing requirements. If you build the iterations and feedback loops into your risk management on a project, the rest of your project practice will need to follow suit just to keep up.
You'll also be more inclined to tackle project deliverables that resolve the greatest risks first. The sooner these risks are resolved, the more accurately you can publish a date range for delivery.
Test early and continuously. Your project exists in some form from start to finish. It may start on paper, and live in hardware and software at the finish. But in whatever form it exists, it can be tested. As new requirements are gathered and formulated, test cases can be drafted and pitted against the project's assumptions. As new hardware is installed, its images and monitoring agents can be configured and proven. As new code is written, test cases can be written before or alongside the code.
Don't wait for a project to be 50% or 75% completed to start drafting up test cases and setting up a test facility. Automate much of your tests if you can, so that they can be run at least once a day. Automation is again a case of a little more effort up front, saving much more cost and headache later.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
The Exception-Tolerant Organization - Part 2
As explained in my introductory post on the Exception-Tolerant Organization, ETOs build the communication pathways, business processes, and technology features to handle exceptions systematically. Where the business processes and technology features are largely matters of construction, the essential communication pathways can often be the component most elusive to an organization.
To relate this to a recent business event: an organization was forming a new business venture, bringing mature and existing technologies and processes in house from one of their partners. In the suite of this venture's features, there was one particularly public-facing feature that was not even close to being on par with the rest. Very early on in the business venture, one principal surmised that this feature had the strong potential to sully the reputation of the organization, and told the other principals of his analysis and recommendations for a course of action. A few principals were sorely disappointed that this was brought to their attention so early in the business venture, as they felt that this "negative" analysis was not what was needed during the venture's "honeymoon" period.
About one year later, the other principals began to see the strongly negative customer reactions to this public-facing feature. When they approached the principal who originally gave his analysis, they said to him "You didn't tell me it was THAT bad." In this case, the communication pathways were cut off early in the venture, perhaps when they were needed the most. And when they were opened again a year later, it was done in a reactive fashion that does not lend itself towards a systematic way to handle exceptions.
So how can you create these communication pathways? You can begin an email thread, as the principal above did, but these threads either are ignored early, or become so long that the interest drops off quickly. You can appoint a single point of contact to receive and dispatch the exceptions, but that person ends up being a single choke point more often than not. Or you can set up a system purely to capture issues and exceptions for review, which relies on people willing to take the few necessary minutes to input their issues into the system. This system can provide an effective entry point for exceptions and issues, if your organization is culturally adaptable to putting an entry, approval, and management process in place. The organization above did go and implement such a system.
Whether this type of system is a cultural fit for your organization or not, a regularly-scheduled gathering of the principals solely for the purpose of reviewing exceptions would go a long way towards getting the effort off the ground. Your organization may need to lighten the "status meeting" load somewhat to make room for this type of gathering. But because of the regular schedule, you are that much closer to systematically handling your exceptions.
As stated above, the business processes and technology features are largely matters of construction. But where business processes are concerned, many organizations focus on constructing processes for project lifecycles, development lifecycles, change control, and administration. These can be helpful in measuring performance when they are not over-engineered, but they are all are intended to handle the "normal" course of business. This still leaves out the what-just-happened, where-do-we-go, and what-do-we-do when an exception does occur.
As a starting point, take the lead from technology support teams. Great technology support teams have an initial point of contact, an exception entry and tracking system, and "run books" that contain procedures written in detailed step-wise fashion documenting EXACTLY what to do when a particular exception occurs. When an exception occurs and is identified, the support team executes the procedures step for step. If there is an exception that they cannot identify, they still have a procedure for this case that may involve contacting someone with more knowledge of the systems.
Handling exceptions in this way leaves little guesswork as to how to initially react. For many exceptions, recovery is a matter of reacting safely and sanely first, and then following the steps. So for your organization's exception-handling process, write down in step-wise fashion what people should do when there is an emergency exception, a impactful exception, and a minor exception. Every detail, including which people/departments should be contacted, the appropriate time frames to wait for responses, and any system or documentation entries should be noted. As a bonus, when you are out of the office and someone is covering for you, they can cover for you as effectively as possible during times of exception by following the steps.
For those of you who dislike process and procedure, keep in mind that the exception procedures exist to assist you, not to burden you. Your brain-power is most needed for problem-solving during the exception period - not remembering to make entries in systems A, B, and C; and worse, not remembering to notify people critical to your business. Another point of assistance is rendered when you can collect data from your exception-handling system and analyze the types and frequencies of the exceptions that occur in your organization. This may lead to some business insights your organization may otherwise not have reached.
Technology features for handling exceptions will be covered in a later post, but it is sufficient to say for now that your technology features that handle exceptions should interface and operate just like the technology features that run the normal business.
To relate this to a recent business event: an organization was forming a new business venture, bringing mature and existing technologies and processes in house from one of their partners. In the suite of this venture's features, there was one particularly public-facing feature that was not even close to being on par with the rest. Very early on in the business venture, one principal surmised that this feature had the strong potential to sully the reputation of the organization, and told the other principals of his analysis and recommendations for a course of action. A few principals were sorely disappointed that this was brought to their attention so early in the business venture, as they felt that this "negative" analysis was not what was needed during the venture's "honeymoon" period.
About one year later, the other principals began to see the strongly negative customer reactions to this public-facing feature. When they approached the principal who originally gave his analysis, they said to him "You didn't tell me it was THAT bad." In this case, the communication pathways were cut off early in the venture, perhaps when they were needed the most. And when they were opened again a year later, it was done in a reactive fashion that does not lend itself towards a systematic way to handle exceptions.
So how can you create these communication pathways? You can begin an email thread, as the principal above did, but these threads either are ignored early, or become so long that the interest drops off quickly. You can appoint a single point of contact to receive and dispatch the exceptions, but that person ends up being a single choke point more often than not. Or you can set up a system purely to capture issues and exceptions for review, which relies on people willing to take the few necessary minutes to input their issues into the system. This system can provide an effective entry point for exceptions and issues, if your organization is culturally adaptable to putting an entry, approval, and management process in place. The organization above did go and implement such a system.
Whether this type of system is a cultural fit for your organization or not, a regularly-scheduled gathering of the principals solely for the purpose of reviewing exceptions would go a long way towards getting the effort off the ground. Your organization may need to lighten the "status meeting" load somewhat to make room for this type of gathering. But because of the regular schedule, you are that much closer to systematically handling your exceptions.
As stated above, the business processes and technology features are largely matters of construction. But where business processes are concerned, many organizations focus on constructing processes for project lifecycles, development lifecycles, change control, and administration. These can be helpful in measuring performance when they are not over-engineered, but they are all are intended to handle the "normal" course of business. This still leaves out the what-just-happened, where-do-we-go, and what-do-we-do when an exception does occur.
As a starting point, take the lead from technology support teams. Great technology support teams have an initial point of contact, an exception entry and tracking system, and "run books" that contain procedures written in detailed step-wise fashion documenting EXACTLY what to do when a particular exception occurs. When an exception occurs and is identified, the support team executes the procedures step for step. If there is an exception that they cannot identify, they still have a procedure for this case that may involve contacting someone with more knowledge of the systems.
Handling exceptions in this way leaves little guesswork as to how to initially react. For many exceptions, recovery is a matter of reacting safely and sanely first, and then following the steps. So for your organization's exception-handling process, write down in step-wise fashion what people should do when there is an emergency exception, a impactful exception, and a minor exception. Every detail, including which people/departments should be contacted, the appropriate time frames to wait for responses, and any system or documentation entries should be noted. As a bonus, when you are out of the office and someone is covering for you, they can cover for you as effectively as possible during times of exception by following the steps.
For those of you who dislike process and procedure, keep in mind that the exception procedures exist to assist you, not to burden you. Your brain-power is most needed for problem-solving during the exception period - not remembering to make entries in systems A, B, and C; and worse, not remembering to notify people critical to your business. Another point of assistance is rendered when you can collect data from your exception-handling system and analyze the types and frequencies of the exceptions that occur in your organization. This may lead to some business insights your organization may otherwise not have reached.
Technology features for handling exceptions will be covered in a later post, but it is sufficient to say for now that your technology features that handle exceptions should interface and operate just like the technology features that run the normal business.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
2008 Fairfield/Westchester .NET Code Camp
I will be presenting at the 2008 Fairfield/Westchester .NET Code Camp on Saturday November 8, 2008. The Code Camp is an all-day conference that allows allows professional developers and students the opportunity to hear from experts in the field on a variety of topics, from programming language tools to Web 2.0 development to the latest and greatest in Microsoft technologies. Several Microsoft MVPs, Evangelists, and some of my past colleagues will be presenting. The camp will be held at UCONN Stamford Campus in Stamford, CT, and you can get all the details here.
As part of the Web 2.0/Agile track, I will be leading a live interactive Test-Driven Development session, which will allow you to observe a test-driven approach to solving a real-world problem. I hope to see you there!
As part of the Web 2.0/Agile track, I will be leading a live interactive Test-Driven Development session, which will allow you to observe a test-driven approach to solving a real-world problem. I hope to see you there!
Friday, October 17, 2008
Does Our Technology Equate To Lies?
I recently had a conversation with a CTO with experience heading large and global teams. His recent work had concentrated on installing SOA-based systems into his organizations. He brought a viewpoint of his to my attention that related custom software development to a lie. The lie that you tell yourself, he said, was that a custom or one-off module or block of code solves your business problem the way you want it to. You're lying to yourself because the problem wasn't solved in an configurable, and maintainable, and service-oriented way.
He went on to support this statement by relating a story about lining up the dates in a fiscal calendar of a system that did not lend itself easily to change. A custom solution working around the constraints of an existing system was needed to meet the demands of the business, and he was not quite satisfied that the solution had to be of a custom nature. In his view, he preferred the solution to be service-oriented and configurable.
While I understand the CTO's view towards a service-oriented and configurable architecture, I don't think that his lie is attached to the appropriate concepts. Service-oriented or not, you can effectively eliminate the lie he speaks of by managing the lifecycle of the customized solutions.
If your business is sufficiently pained by the problem where you need a customized solution implemented and deployed urgently, and the solution has been appropriately constructed and tested, then by all means deploy it. But if the custom solution is not the most optimal, configurable, or maintainable, then put an expiration date on it and schedule the time and resources to implement the optimal solution by the expiration date. This way you would provide urgently-needed relief of the pain your business is experiencing, while having an outlook toward the optimal future.
But it is crucial that the follow-up happens. The common occurrence, and the real fear here, is that once a solution is implemented and deployed, people move on to solving the next problem or working on the next great project without coming back to readdress that sub-optimal solution. This custom development often ends up being yet another buried non-catalogued nugget of logic.
In the CTO's anecdote above, the custom solution is necessary to work around the larger system's constraints. But what if this custom development was configurable, maintainable, and service-oriented from the start? It is still a separate custom component, one more component to be maintained in the catalog of assets. In maintaining a service-oriented architecture, having an up-to-date and discoverable catalog of components, the contracts they satisfy, and their development artifacts is key to performing effective maintenance. SOA implementations typically have more components than non-service solutions, not less. SOA implementations without these catalogs can quickly become burdensome and error-prone to maintain.
So I think that the real ways organizations lie about custom software development are:
- not assigning an expiration date to sub-optimal solutions, and not managing the transition process from sub-optimal to optimal
- not maintaining an effective catalog of solutions, contracts, and components
- expecting a silver bullet or all-inclusive solution to eliminate the need for custom development
- not actually solving the organization's problems because no custom (or market-leading) solution is considered to be the optimal solution for the business
Unlike the CTO's organization, I've seen organizations with very painful problems put off implementing solutions for years because the solution candidates don't fit into the "optimal" category, service-oriented or not. If the solutions are not considered to be the holy grail, then nothing will be implemented at all. And the business continues to limp along in pain without further technology assistance.
Wrapping up my conversation with the CTO, he was considering implementing one of the larger off-the-shelf tools that can effectively assist in service orientation. He left me with the impression that these solutions, their price tag, and their large deployment footprint offered him great comfort in removing the custom development lies from his organization. But alas, that is a lie for another day.
He went on to support this statement by relating a story about lining up the dates in a fiscal calendar of a system that did not lend itself easily to change. A custom solution working around the constraints of an existing system was needed to meet the demands of the business, and he was not quite satisfied that the solution had to be of a custom nature. In his view, he preferred the solution to be service-oriented and configurable.
While I understand the CTO's view towards a service-oriented and configurable architecture, I don't think that his lie is attached to the appropriate concepts. Service-oriented or not, you can effectively eliminate the lie he speaks of by managing the lifecycle of the customized solutions.
If your business is sufficiently pained by the problem where you need a customized solution implemented and deployed urgently, and the solution has been appropriately constructed and tested, then by all means deploy it. But if the custom solution is not the most optimal, configurable, or maintainable, then put an expiration date on it and schedule the time and resources to implement the optimal solution by the expiration date. This way you would provide urgently-needed relief of the pain your business is experiencing, while having an outlook toward the optimal future.
But it is crucial that the follow-up happens. The common occurrence, and the real fear here, is that once a solution is implemented and deployed, people move on to solving the next problem or working on the next great project without coming back to readdress that sub-optimal solution. This custom development often ends up being yet another buried non-catalogued nugget of logic.
In the CTO's anecdote above, the custom solution is necessary to work around the larger system's constraints. But what if this custom development was configurable, maintainable, and service-oriented from the start? It is still a separate custom component, one more component to be maintained in the catalog of assets. In maintaining a service-oriented architecture, having an up-to-date and discoverable catalog of components, the contracts they satisfy, and their development artifacts is key to performing effective maintenance. SOA implementations typically have more components than non-service solutions, not less. SOA implementations without these catalogs can quickly become burdensome and error-prone to maintain.
So I think that the real ways organizations lie about custom software development are:
- not assigning an expiration date to sub-optimal solutions, and not managing the transition process from sub-optimal to optimal
- not maintaining an effective catalog of solutions, contracts, and components
- expecting a silver bullet or all-inclusive solution to eliminate the need for custom development
- not actually solving the organization's problems because no custom (or market-leading) solution is considered to be the optimal solution for the business
Unlike the CTO's organization, I've seen organizations with very painful problems put off implementing solutions for years because the solution candidates don't fit into the "optimal" category, service-oriented or not. If the solutions are not considered to be the holy grail, then nothing will be implemented at all. And the business continues to limp along in pain without further technology assistance.
Wrapping up my conversation with the CTO, he was considering implementing one of the larger off-the-shelf tools that can effectively assist in service orientation. He left me with the impression that these solutions, their price tag, and their large deployment footprint offered him great comfort in removing the custom development lies from his organization. But alas, that is a lie for another day.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Invited To An Idea
Once upon a time a company had an idea - an idea whose direction was generally contrary to the overall company's market. This company made their idea wildly successful, as the great sages of the company built systems and processes to effectively implement the company's idea. But the great sages became trapped by their systems, because they required so much of their hands-on manual effort and control to execute successfully.
Enter our hero. Early in our hero's career, a few great sages invited our hero to become part of this company's idea. They did this by inviting our hero into their office and explaining the reports they needed to systematize and automate their manual systems. The great sages also explained that having these reports in place would free them to continue implementing the company's idea.
The great sages took their time with our hero, explaining why the reports were important and badly needed, and how the reports fit into supporting the company's idea. They always took time to answer our hero's questions and concerns about the reports.
These reports solved certain problems with supporting the company's idea, and freed the great sages to pursue supporting the company's idea further. This led to building robust systems, and led to freedom for many to further implement the company's idea. Over time our hero became a great sage at the company, one who would be free to enlist others and further implement the company's idea.
But after the years of work successfully implementing the company's idea, our hero was still not free.
There were certain functions in the systems that required only our hero. Our hero had willingly executed these functions because our hero believed strongly in the company's idea. And when there were problems with the systems requiring corrective action, our hero was there to the rescue nearly ever single time.
Over the years our hero grew to be responsible for executing more than double the number of functions than was originally intended. The company's great sages became used to the excellent service of our hero, and cheered our hero on all the way. Our hero had been invited to become part of the company's idea, but instead our hero had unwittingly been self-installed as a key cog in the systems implementing the idea. Under this arrangement, our hero could not be free.
When our hero finally realized the situation, our hero took corrective action. Our hero systematized and automated greater and faster than ever before - freeing our hero, and many others, from having to execute the functions that our hero solely used to perform.
But by this time, the company hit some turbulent times, lost sight of its idea, and lost one-third of its people. The company was no longer interested in inviting people to become part of its idea. But people were still needed to handle exceptions and support the company's idea using the systems the great sages and our hero had put in place. And without these people, our hero could not be free.
Our hero realized that at this point the only way to achieve true freedom to pursue the company's idea was by freeing himself from the company. And so our hero, exhausted but thoroughly grateful for the experience, moved on from the company.
Has your organization invited you to become part of its idea? Have you become stuck in the execution of your organization's systems like our hero was? Can you see a way to systematize and automate to free yourself, before moving on becomes the only path to freedom?
Enter our hero. Early in our hero's career, a few great sages invited our hero to become part of this company's idea. They did this by inviting our hero into their office and explaining the reports they needed to systematize and automate their manual systems. The great sages also explained that having these reports in place would free them to continue implementing the company's idea.
The great sages took their time with our hero, explaining why the reports were important and badly needed, and how the reports fit into supporting the company's idea. They always took time to answer our hero's questions and concerns about the reports.
These reports solved certain problems with supporting the company's idea, and freed the great sages to pursue supporting the company's idea further. This led to building robust systems, and led to freedom for many to further implement the company's idea. Over time our hero became a great sage at the company, one who would be free to enlist others and further implement the company's idea.
But after the years of work successfully implementing the company's idea, our hero was still not free.
There were certain functions in the systems that required only our hero. Our hero had willingly executed these functions because our hero believed strongly in the company's idea. And when there were problems with the systems requiring corrective action, our hero was there to the rescue nearly ever single time.
Over the years our hero grew to be responsible for executing more than double the number of functions than was originally intended. The company's great sages became used to the excellent service of our hero, and cheered our hero on all the way. Our hero had been invited to become part of the company's idea, but instead our hero had unwittingly been self-installed as a key cog in the systems implementing the idea. Under this arrangement, our hero could not be free.
When our hero finally realized the situation, our hero took corrective action. Our hero systematized and automated greater and faster than ever before - freeing our hero, and many others, from having to execute the functions that our hero solely used to perform.
But by this time, the company hit some turbulent times, lost sight of its idea, and lost one-third of its people. The company was no longer interested in inviting people to become part of its idea. But people were still needed to handle exceptions and support the company's idea using the systems the great sages and our hero had put in place. And without these people, our hero could not be free.
Our hero realized that at this point the only way to achieve true freedom to pursue the company's idea was by freeing himself from the company. And so our hero, exhausted but thoroughly grateful for the experience, moved on from the company.
Has your organization invited you to become part of its idea? Have you become stuck in the execution of your organization's systems like our hero was? Can you see a way to systematize and automate to free yourself, before moving on becomes the only path to freedom?
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