Author: JP

It’s been an unusual weekend. Spent most of it closeted away with a bunch of very talented people, at an event organised by the Trinity Forum, headlined When No One Sees: The Importance of Character in an Age of Image. It worked a bit like an unconference: a small group of attendees, a core agenda run workshop style, lightly moderated and completely dependent on a participative audience. The format was garnished by some excellent guest speakers at mealtimes, and the surroundings were superb. More of that later.

I was very taken by something said by one of the visiting speakers. Headmaster of one of the larger private schools, he described his job as “being responsible for 1250 teenage boys every Saturday night”.

We were looking at the role of education and educationalists in the formation of character; it was a fascinating debate, bloglike in its tangential nature. At some point in the discussion, he was describing aspects of the pupils’ engagement with theatre and drama, and he made the observation:

We don’t use prompters

I think this is key. A simple decision — doing away with prompting — had a worthwhile impact on the takent and character of the students. They changed the way they prepared; they changed the way they responded when facing a problem; they changed the way they stepped in to help when others faced problems.

We need to keep examining what we do: every time we promote an inspection/repair culture, we tend to implement safety nets; the safety nets encourage slipshod behaviour, and soon we find that all we are promoting is mediocrity.

If achieving mediocrity wasn’t bad enough, we tend to make it worse. Far too often, the mediocrity attracts another foul behaviour, an audit culture where the measurement process becomes more important than that which is being measured.  How else can mediocrity rise?

Bing tiddle tiddle bang

Bing tiddle fiddle bing

Bing fiddle fiddle tiddle tiddle

Bing fiddle tiddle tiddle BONG!

So went Zatapathique and singers in the Europolice Song Contest many years ago, parodying Lulu’s win with Boom Bang-a-Bang in 1969. She sang:

…My heart goes Boom Bang-a-Bang Boom Bang-a-Bang when you are near…. Peter Warne/Alan Moorhouse, 1969

Dom alerted me to this little tidbit from the Register, letting me know that my iPod may interfere with my Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator. I find myself more inclined to take Monty Python’s line rather than Lulu’s, even though it is, oddly enough, Eurovision tomorrow. So I shall continue to wear my iPod with pride; the only concession I will make is one that I have been making ever since the pacemaker was fitted: no electronic devices or trailing leads near the left pectoral. Now you know.

More blog serendipity. I’d seen this slideshow quite some time ago, but never got around to posting about it; it was one of those things that I thought everyone must have seen, and I try very hard to stay as a “thinker” blog rather than a “linker” blog. Then, yesterday, I was talking to Malc, who had found the slideshow while visiting some other site I had linked to.  Later yesterday, when I was talking to someone else at work, the topic came up again, and I began to realise that perhaps not everyone had seen it. So here it is.

It’s only six minutes long. Well worth it. Karl Fisch, the author, originally called it Globalisation and the Information Age, I believe. Which is a good description of what it’s about. I suspect the name changed to Shift Happens after modifications by Scott McLeod. My thanks to both of them.

It’s now available via my Vodpod on the sidebar, or at this link.

There’s no real point in having “Agile” IT departments in waterfall business contexts; in fact it isn’t even possible. Agile is first and foremost a mindset; it leads to a way of working; the way of working has a number of desirable outcomes; many of the desirable outcomes are manifested in successful IT implementations.

But there’s no Agile without active and enthusiastic business participation. Which leads to a problem. It is not uncommon to find significant pockets of organisational cynicism about IT; partly as a consequence to the boom and bust of the late 1990s, partly in response to the Battle of Professions, and partly resulting from poor experiences with IT in the past, there are many executives that find it hard to trust IT. As the saying goes:

Perception is reality distorted by the lens of experience.

As a result, many organisations find themselves at a pretty pass, a singularly vicious circle. They don’t believe in their IT departments because they “don’t deliver”. The departments don’t deliver because the requirements are unstable and hard to articulate. To solve this they need to think and act Agile. This requires them to trust their IT folks. But they don’t. Because they “don’t deliver”.

How can we get around this? By educating everyone. Which is why I post regularly about Agile, seeking to describe what happens in analogues, so that we can achieve a greater understanding of what Agile means.

So today’s sideways look at Agile is rooted in journalism. Let’s take a look at what happens in a weekly magazine.

1. The time and date of production are immovable and regular. Every week, at a fixed time, the presses must roll and the magazine must hit the neswstands and the postal services.
2. So there’s always an immovable deadline, as a result of which we see a number of desirable behaviours, outlined below.
3. The first is an understanding of the critical chain of events that would lead to the achievement of that deadline, working backwards from the desired outcome. When the page proofs must be okayed. When the pages must be made up. When the galley proofs must be okayed. Editorial copy deadlines. Advertising copy deadlines. You get my drift. Note that these sub-deadlines are independent of the content of any particular issue.
4. In similar fashion, there is a stream of activity that distinguishes a particular issue from another. The theme of the issue, the editorial direction, the cover story, the cover illustration, content-driven layout and graphics, and so on. These too have deadlines, with sub-deadlines easy to infer.
5. The deadlines implied in points 3 and 4 often interact with each other, making planning and predictability very hard. Unless some steps are taken to reduce complexity of interaction.
6. Which brings us to a level of relentless standardisation. Advertisements are taken in standardised sizes, thereby simplifying the layout process. Style guides are drawn up in order to improve the quality and consistency of the output, reducing error rates to do with spelling and punctuation, with fonts and formats, with look and feel in general.
7. There’s always a modicum of stuff ganging aft agley, so there have to be some contingency measures, some Blue Peter things-prepared-earlier. Articles kept in abeyance for that time when you need to pull an article in a hurry. Arrangements with customers for discounted “late-availability” advertising slots. Ready-to-use topical filler.
8. And all this happens with teams of people working together in an environment of high pressure. Poring through drafts of what each issue looks like, critiquing mockups, pulling out all the stops to make deadline, then celebrating the outcome.

What do I know? I haven’t really been a journalist for over a quarter of a century, but that’s what it was like back when. And the parallels are interesting.

• “Requirements” captured by iteration through a series of drafts.
• Focus on outputs rather than inputs, a clear understanding of the critical chain of activities and the underlying constraints.
• A base of reusable components made available in a predefined architecture.
• Slack built in for the unexpected rather than the mismanaged.
• A willingness to throw away and start again while treating the deadline as sacrosanct.
• A distributed operation with staff all over the globe, yet a production process that focuses very heavily on facetime and collocation.
• A consistent ratio of fixed and predictable to volatile and unpredictable.
• A number of tasks that can be done in advance, a number of tasks that must be done in advance, and a number of tasks that cannot be done in advance.
• Creative activities underpinned by processes steeped in regularity and standardisation.

I think we need to keep looking at Agile business practices that have nothing to do with software, in order to learn more about how we educate our business partners.

Business agility is no longer a nice-to-have, it is an imperative. It can only be arrived at by implementing Agile processes from cradle to grave, from soup to nuts, across the board. Agile is not about IT per se, but about business outcomes. So we need to educate educate educate.

Comments welcome.

Hugh pointed me at William Hurley’s post Seven Reasons Microsoft Loves Open Source. I don’t agree with many of the reasons, but that is not the point of this post. Maybe some other day.

I agree vehemently with one thing William says. In reason 6, he makes the point

Microsoft doesn’t fear open source; it fears what the competition can do with it.

This is true for all companies, and for all Because Effect infrastructure. By itself not to be feared (the With); yet feared for what your competitors can do with with (the Because Of).

The moral of the story is: As infrastructure moves from the With state to the Because Of state, make sure you move with it. Because if you don’t and your competitors do, you’re on the road to Toast.