In a conference room somewhere in corporate America, a software developer was asked to give estimates on vaguely defined feature requests. And then, get this, he had the gall to probe for more information.
The business analyst quickly grew impatient, and regained control of the meeting. "Seems like a size small to me," he said with a huffy tone.
The developer looked again at the screen. It read "Implement custom rules for new client". He thought to himself, "what difference does it make what the estimate is? How did that #noestimates guy on the internet get anyone to listen to him?"
Another developer chimed in "I think it's a medium sized effort." Our hero nodded along indifferently. "How long does a medium take in days?" the boss asked.
There were a million holes to be poked in the user story, but sadly no one in the room had the necessary attention span to talk about them for more than thirty seconds. As is tradition, everything gets a meaningless estimate assigned to it. The developers will be left to their own devices to sort out the particulars when they begin work on it, 7 months from now.
Immediately after implementing his best interpretation of the feature, the dev will get to explain to the QA how to test it. The QA was too busy testing to be present in today's meeting.
"Ok, I've got to cut this off here, I've got another meeting in 5 minutes" the BA announced, "We'll have to finish up these last 6 items in an impromptu meeting. But, they're easy ... I mean they're easy to talk about."
The developer walked out to the parking lot, and kicked a can for about 50 paces before discarding it into the grass.
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
Friday, March 30, 2018
Metrics
The state of the IT industry is quite sad. The plight of the IT cost center is that it doesn't have any good way to tie dollars spent to dollars earned. If I invest $1M in IT, how do I equate that to a business outcome? I have to wonder, couldn't I have gotten the same business outcome for half a million?
IT managers are desperate for metrics. They are starving for some way to demonstrably show that they are not squandering money. It's the old "build things right versus build the right things" argument. Because IT doesn't have a large stake in determining what the "right" things are, they are left with determining whether or not they did the best they could with what they had. And anecdata will not do. We need metrics! They don't necessarily care if they are meaningful metrics, because it's better to be the guy with bad data than it is to be the guy with no data.
What is our defect rate? How do we measure quality? Productivity? How good are we at onboarding new team members? Are we up to snuff on all of our compliance concerns? Let's get some process around this stuff! That's likely what you will hear after a big company has acquired a few smaller companies. The smaller companies flew on light (no) process and got by on their skill and being nimble (wanted to use the word agility but the term is too overloaded). These small companies got to be profitable enough to become acquisition targets. Then when they get acquired, the new IT manager, who has never built anything from the ground up, surveys his mixed bag of teams with varying degrees of process rigor and maturity, and decrees that we are going to drive consistency.
The talented developers groan. The ones who crave a little autonomy are now facing the prospect of becoming a mindless ticket monkey. But isn't that what it's really about? Reducing your dependency on skill and talent. Predictability is now of the utmost importance. Predictably mediocre is better than sporadically excellent. And that has to be a conscious choice, doesn't it? The people pushing this type of process rigor can't really think that they will be breeding a vibrant culture that attracts bright minds, can they?
Keep in mind that I am speaking specifically about the IT Cost Center in the context of a medium sized company pushing to become a big one. Picture a company inside of the healtcare/insurance/banking/finance space that was recently acquired.
What is the bright side here if you happen to be one of those knowledge workers who likes to color outside the lines?
IT managers are desperate for metrics. They are starving for some way to demonstrably show that they are not squandering money. It's the old "build things right versus build the right things" argument. Because IT doesn't have a large stake in determining what the "right" things are, they are left with determining whether or not they did the best they could with what they had. And anecdata will not do. We need metrics! They don't necessarily care if they are meaningful metrics, because it's better to be the guy with bad data than it is to be the guy with no data.
What is our defect rate? How do we measure quality? Productivity? How good are we at onboarding new team members? Are we up to snuff on all of our compliance concerns? Let's get some process around this stuff! That's likely what you will hear after a big company has acquired a few smaller companies. The smaller companies flew on light (no) process and got by on their skill and being nimble (wanted to use the word agility but the term is too overloaded). These small companies got to be profitable enough to become acquisition targets. Then when they get acquired, the new IT manager, who has never built anything from the ground up, surveys his mixed bag of teams with varying degrees of process rigor and maturity, and decrees that we are going to drive consistency.
The talented developers groan. The ones who crave a little autonomy are now facing the prospect of becoming a mindless ticket monkey. But isn't that what it's really about? Reducing your dependency on skill and talent. Predictability is now of the utmost importance. Predictably mediocre is better than sporadically excellent. And that has to be a conscious choice, doesn't it? The people pushing this type of process rigor can't really think that they will be breeding a vibrant culture that attracts bright minds, can they?
Keep in mind that I am speaking specifically about the IT Cost Center in the context of a medium sized company pushing to become a big one. Picture a company inside of the healtcare/insurance/banking/finance space that was recently acquired.
What is the bright side here if you happen to be one of those knowledge workers who likes to color outside the lines?
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