Thursday, January 25, 2007

Lengthening the Feedback Loop

Google’s blog search capability has really improved! Technorati would never have found this reference to my work from Julia Evans, Lengthening the Feedback Loop:A History of Feedback Within the Context of Systems Theory. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Julia+Evans, Feedback+Loop

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Thoughts from Central Europe #1: Outsourcing Options

I’m in Munich this week at the OOP 2007 conference. I’ve been stalking the exhibition and chatting with vendors. I’m amazed at the number who are outsourcing or offering outsourced services and the range of options. In the USA, we’re used to having two main options - China or India. Here in Europe there are a lot more options. One vendor offered to undercut my Indian test vendor on price by doing my testing in Israel. He claimed that he wasn’t as cheap as the Chinese but he’d easily beat any price from India. It seems that the Indians are already having to differentiate themselves on quality!

Other options I heard were Lithuania, Estonia and Bulgaria. Interesting that Poland, Czech and Hungary already seem to be off the outsourcing radar.

There are some clear advantages for the Europeans with these outsourcing options - the main one I can see is time zone compatibility and its close neighbor geographic proximity that facilitates cheap travel between vendor and customer. In some cases a mere train ride away. It seems to me that Europe is better placed to build a software development value chain than America. And that as a result, technologies that facilitate value chain development such as software factories, ALM tools like VSTS, and analysis and modeling techniques that enable cleanly partitioned, well encapsulated, loosely coupled, highly cohesive architecture are more likely to gain traction first in Europe than in America. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, OOP+2007

Are You Ready to Go Agile?

Sometimes I find I do my best work when I’m not thinking too hard about it. Today after my presentation at OOP 2007 in Munich, I was in a long conversation about enterprise scale agile development, listening to an explanation of how to assess whether an organization is ready to adopt agile processes across the entire software development organization. I found myself reply and saying,

“I think there are only two questions you need to ask, only two criteria: how much trust is there in the organization? and how failure tolerant is the management and the culture?”

In a culture that embraces a high level of trust, a low level of audit and bureaucracy, and the consequent highly delegated and empowered decision making framework, then going agile will be possible.

With a management that takes risks and tolerates failure as a positive learning experience then going agile will be possible.

Where there is a lack of trust or a lack of risk taking or an intolerance to negative results from risk taking then going agile will be painful, problematic and subject to failure. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, OOP+2007

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Why Red Status is my Friend

In the past month or two, I’ve had a couple of emails from project managers that opened something like this… “David, I’m planning on reporting project [insert name] as red status this week for the following reasons [...] I just wanted to let you know and check that it is OK with you?” My reply in both cases was “Go for it!”

This came as quite a shock. It seems that it isn’t culturally acceptable to report bad news and experienced PM’s have made a career out of not doing so. Hence, the politically astute invitation for me to do something about it before the red status gets reported. So my response was unusual. What the PM’s fail to realize is that I see red status as my friend.

In a world where everything is green and all projects are on schedule there is no appetite for change. In fact change is risky. Change creates a J-curve effect - things get worse before they get better. Change puts schedules at risk. Change turns green projects red. However, in a world where projects are already red, there is appetite for change. People expect managers to intervene and do something to fix the problems. Managers can take several directions but the two main intervention strategies are tactical/symptomatic fix, or strategic/root cause fix.

When urged by a PM to do something about red status, many function managers may be pushed in to reacting with a tactical/symptomatic fix that pulls the project out of red status quickly but leaves it in danger perhaps bouncing in and out of red status throughout its lifecycle. A strategic/root cause fix involves a change in methodology, a new process implementation, or significant cultural change. In order to have enough space to make such fundamental change and fix things for long term success, it may be necessary to have a portfolio dashboard that it lit up in red first. Tactical/symptomatic fixes may seem attractive - they are often easy to do and they keep everyone happy. However, they ultimately lead to much more effort and they don’t represent the behavior of a truly high impact middle manager. True high impact performance comes from taking the time to make the strategic changes necessary so that further and continuous management intervention will not be necessary.

So the next time one of your projects turns red, don’t panic! Red status can be your friend. Use its power as an enabler for true high impact sustainable process changes. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Software+Engineering, Project+Management

Thoughts from Asia #3 - Will your next job be in Asia?

It’s taken me a while to publish the last of my thoughts from my trip to Asia last August. Better late than never.

Will your next job be in Asia? (particularly if you are a manager)

What is clear is that the future of the software industry lies in Asia. China, India and many other Asian countries are producing a lot of computer science and related field graduates. They have demographics in their favor - lots of young talent. They have work ethic in their favor. They have a liking for process and holistic system thinking approach embedded in their culture. They value quality and the pursuit of perfection. And most of all they have low costs (at least for the time being). What they don’t have much of is experienced software industry management talent!

Recently, I’ve known several people working for Motorola or Microsoft who have gone to China to manage teams. Indeed had I not joined Microsoft in 2004, I may well have ended up in Beijing leading a team for Motorola. The Director of Microsoft in Taipei who invited me to his city told me with a wink and a smile, “If you wanted I could find you a job in Taipei starting next week.” It seems to me very likely that my next job may well be in Asia. [Just to clarify - I have a big job to do at Corbis and I imagine being there for several years. Don’t panic! (particularly Corbis employees reading this) I’m not looking for a new job.]

Are you prepared to up root your family and relocate to Asia even for a few years? If you are a manager then chances are you already have a family, and a spouse with a career. Moving to a whole different culture is disruptive. Would you pull your kids out of school? Would your spouse suspend his or her career? and is it worth it?

Well, think about this! If you are 40 years old now, you probably have 30 years of useful and viable career left ahead of you - don’t kid yourself about retirement at 65 or earlier. [However, a “3rd life” option of semi-retirement and work as a consultant may be an option at an earlier age but it doesn’t affect what I’m going to say.] During those 30 years most of your industry is going to move to Asia in the way that manufacturing abandoned Western shores in the latter half of the 20th Century. Do you want to be unemployed IT manager in your early 50’s with kids to put through college and a mortgage with 15 years left to run? or do you want to have a viable career that will last in to your late 60’s? Will getting some Asian experience now assist you with that? Will Asian management experience enable you to have a healthy 3rd life career as a consultant, perhaps living in America but traveling to Asia regularly? Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Software+Engineering, Management, Asia+Technology