You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2006.
As for every service providers, IT departments are often considered as a cost to cut. Here is the ‘myth of total efficiency’ coming out (Slack – Tom Demarco).
But like Ron Jeffries says in a recent post (eXtreme Programming group): We are designing here, not laying bricks (I really love this quote!)
So no matter if you are writing new software features, looking for a bug, installing a DB cluster, designing a new high performance computing architecture, answering to an help desk call: running too much is always a bad habit and lead to many (expensive) errors.
Why? Next post!
PierG
I was reading a post on the eXtreme Programming User Group of a real guru: Kent Beck. He was talking about a concept very common in Lean Manufacturing called: Values Stream Mapping. The basic, and apparently easy, idea is to split the process, assign a cost to every part and have a look those parts that ADD VALUE. Let’s have a look at standard HW purchasing requests in a typical company: So what, the value that we add to this process, that’s (part of) the installation and deploy (3 hours), is around 1% of the entire process (weeks …). It’s wonderful, almost easy to do (may be not in a perfect way but you can get the big picture), and I guess that often it will point to something that are not under our control. Anyway .. it’s good to know it.
PierG
Here is a “PierG personal selection” of quotes that I found in Tom Peters web log (GREAT weblog!).
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” —Charles Darwin
“Ninety percent of what we call ‘management’ consists of making it difficult for people to get things done.” – Peter Drucker
“A good plan executed right now is far preferable to a ‘perfect’ plan executed next week.” —Patton
“The secret of fast progress is inefficiency, fast and furious and numerous failures.” —Kevin Kelly
“If things seem under control, you’re just not going fast enough.” —Mario Andretti
“If it works, it’s obsolete.” —Marshall McLuhan
PierG
As every manager knows, we have to deal with 3 scarce resources: time, people, money. Reading around the Web2.0 chats, I kept in touch with the concept (and the site) of Attention. From the site: <<When you pay attention to something (and when you ignore something), data is created. This “attention data” is a valuable resource>>. This is true everytime you click on a website or, in general, get a service from a site. As the amount of Attention that users can ‘give’ is limited … Attention becomes a new ’scarce resource’ that we have to deal with. PierG
I was reading this interesting article about ‘Agile outside Software Development’ and I went in touch with the concept of ‘broken windows’ theory. As you can read on wikipedia, there is a Book and a theory by George Kelling and Catherine Coles based on this concept: This theory says something about why leaving debt (I’ll fix it later, I’ll do better in second release, I’ll add tests tomorrow, I’ll refactor in next iteration …) while writing code is, for me, badly wrong: it creates a negative loop and after a while your code is fragile and hard to modify. PierG
In this post, Mishkin add a ninth barrier to effective listening. Exhausted, sleepy, tired, spent, wasted, enervated, asleep The concept is that if you are too tired .. you’ll never be able to have an effective listening. Have a look at the original post and at the Agile Adive blog: it rocks! PierG
As I often write on this blog, giving a service (IT or not) is often (always ?) a matter of communication: no matter how good you are, how skilled you are, how complicated the system is, how fast you are. Users will always remember you in 2 occasions (and this is true no matter the service you are providing: IT, water, power supply, mobile phone services…): So what: (among many other things) you have to spend time in communicating… taking care of your users. And now the paradox, at least in the IT scenario: where do we hire better, more skilled, more educated people?? In back end operations!!! Where do we outsource, look for cost saving, hire less educated and more ‘changeable’ people?? In the front end… that is: next to our user… that is WHERE YOU SHOULD FOCUS MORE! Wonderful PierG
Communication is for sure a matter of WHO sends and WHAT is the content of the message but it’s by far more important WHAT THE RECEIVER GETS. To be sure to maximize this process and be effective in communicating, it’s of great help understanding some of the characteristics of our counterpart. In this way we’ll help him to be more receptive. I’d like to make a couple of examples. Basic human behavior: the key is to understand why people are doing what they do. 2 categories: seeking pleasure or avoiding pain. You may want to buy a car because you’ve always loved sport cars (seeking pleasure) or because you’re looking for city car to limit traffic and parking mess (avoiding pain). Of course we have both but, if you look into your behavior, you’ll probably see that you are more part of one of these 2 very basic categories. The DISC model: this model is based on 4 categories: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientious. High “D” individuals like to be direct, focused on results. High “I” like to be more open, friendly, focused on people more then on tasks. High “S” is very collaborative, calm and steady. High “C” individuals are more concentrated on tasks then people, they are logic and precise. Again we have many of these characteristics and we tend to be more on one of these categories. For more details about the DISC model, please check the Manager Tools pocast : that’s where I learnt it. PierG
I was reading somewhere that the most frequent searches on Google are: job, God, sex. This is a sort of demostration on what I posted few days ago in ‘How Do You Balance Work and Family’. I wrote: ‘Our life is like a house with three rooms: yourself, your family, your job. If these three rooms are not roughly of the same size, you are in trouble.’ It seems like we are looking for these 3 things also on the internet: God (yourself), sex (your family .. more or less PierG ), job.
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