Air France stops maintenance in China after screws missing from plane:

Air France suspended the maintenance of its aircraft by Chinese company Taeco after 30 screws were found to be missing from one of its planes, it said Thursday.

You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in people for whom social interaction has always been more of a puzzle to be reverse-engineered than a good time to be had, and the result is these vaguely Martian protocols.

(Via Pinboard Blog.)

Whatever else you do, give yourself a chance: Rename every project, initiative and strategic program in your organization to reflect the business change goal instead of the system name: Sales Force Effectiveness Project instead of Salesforce.com Implementation; Evidence-based Decision-making Initiative instead of Business Intelligence Implementation. The impact is surprisingly large. – Business change methodology gaps | IS Survivor Publishing.

Here is it is in a nutshell. Too often I’ve worked on building a computer program, rather than a business system. Now as I’m a computer programmer, what can you expect? Some might say, “well, I don’t want to know about the business system, just let me code”. And in some circumstances they could be right. But the thing I find is, that often the layers of people, business analysts, architects and managers are rarely thinking about the business system either, and that’s not even usually their fault either. Someone may have, long before project inception, thought they needed a “business change goal” as Bob Lewis puts it, but within a few minutes it is articulated as “we need a computer system to do X and Y” and ever since, that’s what’s been firmly in mind of everyone involved in the issue.

I always find the most useful question to ask any end-user, project manager, architect, business analyst etc, when clarifying ambiguity with them is not “what do you want the computer to do at this point?” but more importantly, “what goal are we trying to achieve?”. This allows me to formulate at least a couple of scenarios as to what the computer should “do” and allow the user to choose the most appropriate one.

This issue has become more and more apparent to me as I’ve been working these past few months on a important, high-visibility project inside a highly visible brand/player in Australian transport. The stuff I’m doing directly impacts the physical operation of the company’s equipment (and the equipment, on it); unlike most other systems I’ve built which are typically about shuffling information – usually monetary – about the place. The software I’m building has the ability to make hundreds, if not thousands of employees’ jobs easier to perform, create better integration between the company and the company’s vital partners, and maybe earn a little bit of kudos with the company’s customers as well (as they definitely use the outputs of the system). But the systems we are building are defined narrowly in scope in terms of just software components with quite limited goals. Talking to the end users and the business sponsor, when they express their needs in terms of what their jobs requires, you can see this vast field of lacunae and we’re not even impacting 10% of that. It’s frustrating to be telling them the usual mantra: “out of scope in this project”. Yet it also appears that at least certain members of management had attached a cargo-cult to the project, in that they thought it would magically solve a bunch of problems that it was never addressing, all the time while reducing the scope. Those false expectations have had to be hosed down in fairly short order. So while the need is clearly apparent to everyone involved, I certainly don’t see any effort to create a bigger “business change goal” anywhere articulated, even though its desperately needed.  Even if there is one somewhere in the higher echelons of management, there’s never been a a plan that tells us down here in implementation just where our project fits in, and how to shape it appropriately to meet those bigger goals, which is an issue. This is not just about strategic vision, but tactical necessity.

I’ll leave you with another quote from Bob’s article about the issue of “politics” (and I’m not saying that my issues above are “political”, there’s just organisational failure issues):

Politics isn’t a thin, unpleasant veneer — a distraction from the “real” work of organizational change. It constitutes, by its very definition, a great deal of the real work of organizational change.

Oh for people who know what company I’m currently engaged at, none of the above has anything to do with recent “issues” that have been in the media about that company either. It’s a deeper sort of malaise, one that’s particularly frustrating because you can sense that maybe there’s some chance that they they could be just this close to actually “getting it”, at least in regards to the project I’m on and the people whom it directly impacts.

So you improve fulfillment (improved quality) and customer service (reduced cycle time). Revenue increases. Try proving your improvements were the cause.

You can’t. You can’t even measure customer satisfaction accurately, let alone demonstrate its relationship to increased revenue.

Which is why those who “run a company by the numbers” so often rely on mindless cost-cutting: They can easily prove the connection to this-year bottom-line improvements, while those who complain about the long-term consequential damage have no proof — only their knowledge of and confidence in the business model.

Managing to the numbers | Bob Lewis @ Keep The Joint Running.

• is afraid of change
• not interested in improvement
• has a rigid top-down process development style
• doesn’t care what you think

I think the greatest problem is the organisation basically doesn’t trust it’s employees to know what they are doing. It doesn’t matter that you may know something better or that you care about improving the company’s performance.  I find when I hear this sort of phrase from in companies I’m consulting at, you soon discover all manner of other issues, idiotic decision making processes, strange convoluted internal processes, inflexible management styles, complete reliance on reporting and long meetings for project visibility, and completely rigid thinking.

What the upshot of all this is, is usually a company that then is left with workers that accept their situation rather then improving it. Ultimately, when such companies confront the reality of their situation and require change to avoid failure, they fail because their employees don’t want change – they’ve had it ground down out of them over the years.

Stasis as a corporate strategy only works for so long.

DAVID DUNNING: Well, my specialty is decision-making. How well do people make the decisions they have to make in life? And I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true. And I became fascinated with that. Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them. Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.

ERROL MORRIS: Why not?

DAVID DUNNING: If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute. The decision I just made does not make much sense. I had better go and get some independent advice.” But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer. And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas. And to our astonishment, it was very, very true.

I don’t hold that software makes an existing business process “efficient” at all. Rather I think software makes possible a new process, which should be more “efficient” in terms of money gained less dollars spent – but its a new process, not the old one. In effect, new software creates new business opportunities. New software will only make an existing, unchanged process, less efficient, if a new business process is not designed along with the new software. If the business just wants new software without changing “what they do” they are wasting their money, IMHO.

Of course there is the possibility (probability?) the business doesn’t actually understand what it is they actually do anyway. This is not an uncommon position for many businesses that are happy to cruise along in neutral making some marginal profit on some marginal activity. Usually these businesses are also found to be beating their workers with sticks (usually only metaphorical ones unless they ‘offshore’ their operation to countries where killing your workers is just a part of ‘Business as Usual’. Typically they hold that marginal process can be made ‘better’ simply with just more exhortation (or threats) to greater and greater efforts at a totally demoralized (if not actively hostile) workforce, but I suspect that’s a story for another day!

In recent times I’ve seen this often enough that I think it’s really a failing of the IT industry in general, and we need to educate business IT users about the various scenarios and categories of software.

The simplest analogy I can think of is to say the website or portal is the letter, and the platform is the word processor.  Regardless if you use Word, Wordperfect, Pages 09, your email program or just plain old ‘notepad.exe’, at the end of the day the time to write the letter is pretty much the same effort and therefore the task is basically identical. If you said “I want you to help me to write a letter to my member of parliament”, should  I ask you whether you’re using the new letter wizard in Word? Have you seen this great “clippy” feature? Have you considered the new upgrade to Office 2007? Tell you to buy a Mac? Or would I be better off asking who is your member of parliament and what’s the matter about? When we get these sorts of naive clients we need to concentrate their minds on what their actual problem is and the best way we can solve it, when they’ve got their head in the sand thinking about that great drag-and-drop wizard feature the vendor showed them they totally thinking about the completely wrong thing.

The repetative (sic) steps that a single worker performs on an assembly line is a good example of a simple task

This is a terribly Fordist/Taylorist view to take of assembly work. That most beloved of industrial examples, Toyota, takes weeks to train its process-line workers to be able not only to do the simple repetitive steps of assembly, but also to be able to identify and rectify problems with the assembly-line. As Steven Spear, author of Chasing the Rabbit (my review here) might say, anyone who thinks that “assembly line” work is simple task probably doesn’t understand the nature of their process enough to keep up with their more innovate competitors, let alone outdistance them. Understanding your process, well more importantly, your organisational goals and how your process does or does not fulfil those goals, is critical to improving your organisation, and it leads me onto the idea of “evangelism”.

I both agree and disagree with Coder Friendly’s position:

Don’t become an evangelist yourself : look at your project and decide which methodologies is the most adapted. Sometimes, Agile is not the right one but if you see that your requirements are far from agreement or certainty, Agile approaches are probably a good choice.

I agree that “evangelism” can be politically off-putting.People don’t react well to being told their old kool-aid contains poison, and to uncritically drink this new kool-aid instead. However the main problem I have with a statement like this is that non-Agile companies use this “adaptation” argument and approach, in order to keep their poor contexts alive. This is the fallacy that’s found in ‘scrum butt’: “Oh we do Scrum, but …”. The clauses after the ‘but’ are typically critical. The organisation concerned is usually trying to keep some essential organisational dysfunction alive, because of politics, resistance to change, simple misunderstanding, lack of understanding about their own process, or maybe even simple laziness. I’ve got no problem with an organisation that is mature in its use of an agile method adapting it to their local circumstance – in fact if you are doing it properly, with its emphasis on empowering teams to own their process and carrying out regular ‘inspect and adapt’ at the end of every iteration, after six or twelve months of this the process will most certainly be adapted to the local conditions.

However, the real danger is at the start of the agile adoption process, when you have people hand-waving about “can’t do that here”, for whatever value of that there is. I’ve seen it said about: pairing; story boards; acceptance criteria; automated testing; retrospectives; daily stand-up; adaptive and emergent design; and just about every other aspect of XP or Scrum process. The reason is, I think, that these organisations rarely understand what the real organisational goals actually are, and they understand even less about their existing process, to the point they just “do” the process that “is”. “It is what it is”, is a great term, and if anyone says this to you it’s just a fatalistic attempt to accept as unchanging something you can change. Accept the bad. Don’t think it could be better.  Attempts to meddle in the process, i.e. change it, induce fear, and with fear often comes timidity.

This is where you need a real agile evangelist. This is not someone who just thinks that Scrum or XP or whatever other process should be blindly substituted for the existing one, but someone who understands that process is about competitive advantage, eliminating waste, and that you have to start from a known position and continuously work towards improvement. Change is not just good, but necessary, and you need those change agents. Passion for doing things better is bad? Only in a change-averse company. So learn your existing process, thoroughly, and then learn the proposed agile process, thoroughly, and only then will you be able to ‘synthesise’ a replacement. Only I think you’ll find that replacement will look a lot more like the plain old agile process than your existing unagile process. After all, if your existing process already has adequate inspect-and-adapt cycles within it (not lip-service ones, real ones), probably you are already doing and agile or lean process even if you don’t call it that, and you’re already number one in your marketplace. If not, perhaps you require the passion of an evangelist.

Agile requires the discipline to move projects through teams. Multitasking is nuts in agile. Moving team members around to have the “best” specialist available for a particular team is nuts. Performance reviews for individuals is nuts. Managers have to change everything they do, if they want to move the organization to agile. Managers need to see the problems exposed by any given project’s transition to agile and work to remove those obstacles before transitioning to agile.

It’s too easy to think that just because you can get one of your teams to use an agile approach, that your organisation is now Agile. Too many managers “see the problems exposed by given project’s transition to agile” and decide to blame the agile process for the problems thus exposed.In far too many organisations I’ve seen have extremely capable teams delivering quality software in an agile process but remain – in some cases years later – completely unsupported by their senior management (and in some cases with very little support even from their CIO level).

That’s a very sad situation as it is and takes all your selling skills to get the management to “get with the program” so to speak. But this situation can be even more compounded when the management have been convinced that Agile is some sort of silver bullet that will cure all their issues. Whenever you are trying to sell agile to management, never waver from the fact that agile is hard (as everything worth doing is nearly always difficult anyway!). Agile takes discipline.

Johanna’s right to say you can’t adopt agile across an entire organisation in a big bang approach. But you can’t also adopt it without skill and commitment to doing so from managers and executives.