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IT transparency is good. But how transparent should you be?

A few years back, I had an extremely surprising and unpleasant experience as CTO. The director of my Program Management Office ran a weekly status meeting for project stakeholders, where we’d all methodically go through the current project portfolio, in order to communicate on issues, gather necessary feedback, and align everyone’s expectations. I typically attended in order to provide input and executive-level decision participation, but left it to the director to actually run the meeting and present the topics.

Unfortunately, immediately before one of these weekly meetings, that director was given bad news (in a brief hallway conversation, no less) about a major bug that had just been discovered in the software for our highest profile project, which was currently in testing and due to launch in just a couple of weeks.  This project, with its strategic and revenue-enhancing potential, was foremost in the minds of everyone in the company.  Stakes were high, in other words.

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Filed Under: Anecdotes, Communication, General, Pillars of Purview, Process, Projects, Stakeholders, Top 25 posts
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On Twitter, if you follow back reflexively, the spammers win

Are you among those who believe that if you don’t follow someone back on Twitter, you’re being snobby and arrogant?  Then this post is meant for you. My purpose here, quite candidly, is to persuade you that reflexively following someone back is not only a habit which encourages spam, but is in fact a major contributor to making Twitter a thriving spam platform.

For those who reflexively follow, in other words, I ask you to consider the ramifications of your behavior to the greater community, especially when multiplied by the thousands or millions of Twitterers who may behave likewise. Basically, you’re helping the spammers win.

First, let’s think about this: why does anyone follow anyone else on Twitter?  Three main reasons come to mind:

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Filed Under: General, Industry trends, Personal
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Get multiple arrows for that quiver: selective and competitive outsourcing

As I’ve written before (“Offshore development: target the destination, even if you never go there“), the reality of the CTO/CIO’s life is to be constantly challenged to produce more. Most technology executives, given that challenge, focus on squeezing out greater efficiency from existing processes, which is of course a necessary and constant push. What many don’t do is recognize the importance of crisp, formal handoffs of software from stage to stage, and how those can greatly enhance productivity.

Software engineering lessons over the past decades have taught us that software architectural techniques such as encapsulation, data hiding, and well-defined module interfaces are essential practices as systems scale ever larger. Equally, the human side of software delivery needs those sorts of crisp interfaces and neutral handoffs: loose coupling, in other words.  Loose coupling entails “minimal assumptions between the sending and receiving parties.”  And an increased focus on internal efficiencies (plus deadlines and pressure) can sometimes lead a shop away from that, and into tightly coupled handoffs, because those seem faster and easier.  You don’t have the time to do it right, so you end up using a lot of time doing it over.  My argument is that (just as it is with object-oriented architectures) it’s worth slightly less efficiency-in-the-small, if certain sacrifices in the hand-off arena can help you attain efficiency-in-the-large.

As I wrote in my previous post, referring to the constant business-driven pressure to “put eight pounds of manure into a five pound bag” when it comes to delivering technology projects,

The main insight here is that finding a viable way to outsource some projects is your ticket to expanding the bag.  I’m not even talking about offshoring here, simply about being able to take a chunk of your project load and hand it to an outside entity to get done.  If everything could be done that way, then you’d be constrained in your project load only by available money.  Sadly, in many shops, almost nothing can be done that way, due to too much interdependency of systems, too much background lore required, and no processes in place to allow for external entities delivering changes into current production environments.  My position here is that it’s a key part of your job to change that situation: to work actively on decoupling the interdependencies so that you at least have the option to leverage outside help more effectively.

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Filed Under: General, Projects, Vendor management
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Canaries in the coal mine: Why your IT department may be in worse shape than you think

Think about it: you can’t really tell the difference, on a day-to-day basis, between a car that has had its oil changed every 3,000 miles and one that has had its oil changed every year or two.  Only eventually.

Similarly, the stability of most IT departments proves very difficult to discern from outside.  Even insiders within IT can have myopia.  And non-technical senior management (CEO, COO, CFO)?  They usually can’t really tell either; they often don’t even know the right questions to ask, and their gut instincts on IT matters can actually run dizzyingly counter to best practices.  In short: to many or most people, it can look like things in IT are going pretty well, but in fact it’s all getting shakier and riskier every day.  Truth is, if a company is passionate about excellence, IT has to function well both on the surface and to the careful trained observer. IT is a service organization, and getting a few key things wrong means that the entire company suffers as a result.  Eventually.

My claim here sounds like an admittedly rather pessimistic one: that your IT department may be in much worse shape than appears to the eye. Yet, industry statistics indicate that’s probably the case. Having worked for and/or consulted to a lot of companies in the past decade, I’ve walked into a lot of “opportunities”, places where there was a lot of unchanged oil, so to speak. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that most companies have at least one, if not several, of the situations I’m going to describe in this post.

On the optimistic side, though, there are identifiable common root causes, all of which can be addressed, over time, by the appropriate focus and leadership.  As people always say, the first (and often hardest) step is simply recognizing that there is a problem. Let’s dive into the specifics, at a high level.

Here’s a reverse top-10, David Letterman-style, loosely ranked list of IT “anti-patterns“. I’ve actually seen companies where all of these situations existed. How many hold true where you work?  These gaps represent failures at meeting important best practices; like canaries in the coal mine, you should consider them to be potent indicators of looming instability in one or many of the dimensions where IT needs to serve the company.  Each of these deserves a separate post, or more, to treat fully; in some cases, I’ve already written posts on the item, so for those I provide a link below.
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Filed Under: General, Overview
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Mantra for IT: “Participate in the process rather than confront results”

Let’s sail into a stretch of a metaphor this time. You probably know by now how much I embrace metaphors as a way to impart, often via a concrete example, ideas and concepts that are hard to grasp. So let’s go way back and talk about a metaphorical influence from long ago.

When I was in early high school, we would occasionally spend English class watching and then discussing a variety of short subject films, many of them from the fertile minds at the National Film Board of Canada.  Some of these films, described by the NFB as “socially engaged documentary”, bordered on (or transcended) the bizarre; they thus spurred all sorts of avid arguments among teenagers, easily as much as Ethan Frome or Wang Lung, the more literary staples of the curriculum that I can remember from that year.  There was one such film in particular, in fact, that has stuck with me for decades.  After some digging, I’ve finally been able to identify it by name and origin.  The researchers at the NFB have now kindly confirmed for me that the film is titled “I.B.M.”, and that it was directed by Jacques Languirand. When I reflect on it, the film’s staying power with me makes sense, since it not only features IT elements, but also serves admirably and in multiple ways as a metaphor for IT issues.

As I recall the five-minute film, it features an unchanging close-up view of an automated keypunch machine, punching out a series of IBM computer punchcards with a mysterious and incomplete common message. The film shows the cards sliding into place and getting punched, one at a time, then rolling off into the output hopper. Only parts of the full message can be read at first, since some of the letters of each word are omitted or obscured. Little by little, though, over the course of the film’s duration, each successive card that is punched contains more and more of the message, until it becomes clear at the end of the film that the text reads, “Participate in the process rather than confront results.”

Think about the wisdom and depth of that line: “Participate in the process rather than confront results.” Three ways come to mind of relating this metaphor to IT, to its role across the enterprise, and even to effective IT management of staff. They share a common aspect: the duty (and the reward) of emphasizing participation over passive observation.
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Filed Under: General, Personal, Pillars of Purview, Process, Stakeholders
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“Hot stove” lessons, part II: development and operations

I noted last time, once again, that “IT is hard. In fact, it’s so hard that it seems most people have to learn certain core lessons by themselves.  It seems like everyone needs to burn his or her own hand on the hot stove.”  I went through some examples of this sort of “hot stove” lessons particular to management; this time, let’s talk about similar “hot stove” lessons/myths I’ve observed in other IT areas, most notably development and operations.

  • Source code control and release management. One of the traits of a superlative programmer is his or her ability to maintain a complete logical model of the system/program in their head.  The really good ones are in fact really good at this.  Unfortunately, their consummate skill ironically leads to them sometimes resisting tools that help out with some of the logistical pitfalls that arise as system complexity increases.  Source code control is the most important such tool.  Programmers have even told me, “I can just keep track of what I’ve changed and what’s where.”  In a way, I suppose this is a species of the (typically male) trait of refusing to ask for directions—it’s a reluctance to embrace appropriate tools that are designed to avoid common screw-ups and to facilitate overall team success.  Suddenly, though, complexity mushrooms: releases overlap and patches are made in the heat of the moment, and without impeccable source code control and release management, bugs reappear, QA takes longer, and so on.  Typically, I’ve seen this “hot stove” lesson not really get learned by an organization until the source code control failure causes a notable customer-facing issue with a major release.

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Filed Under: Anecdotes, General
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“Hot stove” lessons in IT, part I

Regular readers here have certainly noticed the recurring nature of many of my posts: “things about IT that should be obvious, but clearly aren’t.”  Each week, as I set about writing on my chosen topic, it often strikes me that what I have to say is anything but new or radical; rather, it seems to embody fundamental, well-known practices and underpinnings that should be, if not incredibly obvious, at least quite familiar to anyone who’s spent much time in or around IT.  Yet, as I reflect on my actual experiences, I realize anew that I’ve spent much of my career working up and down the executive and worker chain to absorb and impart these basic principles again and again.

So here comes more of the same.  In fact, this dual post encapsulates a lot of what I’ve written about on this blog for the last year: lessons learned and lessons still learnable about IT for the people who work in it and the people who have to deal with it.  In other words, I should hasten to say, these are not only IT management lessons, but lessons related to development, operations, QA, and project management: in other words, the whole spectrum. 

As I’ve observed before, IT is hard. In fact, it’s so hard that it seems most people have to learn certain core lessons by themselves.  It seems like everyone needs to burn his or her own hand on the hot stove.  So here are some of the glowing redhot stove elements that I’ve watched make fingers (including mine, for I’m not immune either from learning some things the hard way) sizzle over the years.  I’ll start here in part I with lessons particular to management, and next time will cover similar lessons/myths relating to other IT areas.

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Filed Under: Anecdotes, General
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Speed vs. bureaucracy: management issues confronted by companies in transition

I was at a relatively young company once where a senior executive suddenly sent out a message to the entire employee base, asking for general input on the cause and treatment of the following concerns:

  • “There is a feeling that the company is not able to move fast enough or nimbly enough — we’re not delivering products fast enough or turning projects around fast enough
  • “People feel that it’s very difficult to get things done
  • “There is a feeling that we’re getting too bureaucratic in everything
  • “People aren’t working collaboratively; there appears to be a ‘contract’ mentality in dealing with people”

Aside from the unfortunately vague, passive-voice constructions in this message (“there is a feeling”: meaning one person? everyone? just senior management?), this message didn’t surprise me much.  In fact, it wasn’t (at all) the first time I’d seen this kind of sentiment arise in a young company.

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Filed Under: Communication, General, Top 25 posts
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