Teasers

This preview contains a few teasers from the full book.

Be without past

“I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead” - The Bible, Philippians 3:13

“In the past, everything was better” - with this jaded view, we often reminiscent times long gone, times that will never come back.

And we forget the very reasons why things changed. Some things might have appeared better in the past, but they are merely components of a larger system that no longer exists. Just imagine putting a memory stick into a tape recorder and pressing “play” - it just doesn’t work. If you’re an older generation you might still remember how often tapes messed up and you had to discard them.

We apply inapplicable, outdated ways of working and never discover that they are broken until someone who has never done that before wonders what we are doing - maybe even longer! When I go into an organization that is sheltered from change, I see this very thing happening. I went to some places long ago and when I returned a decade later, the faces had changed - but not they way they do things! Companies get stuck in a weird kind of time warp.

The market is adapting rapidly, the needs of your customers change, capability potential evolves - if you desire to retain a former state, your organization becomes a fairytale land disconnected from the continuously evolving business world.

You can not rely on anything that “worked before”. Likewise, you can’t rely that things which “didn’t work before” still don’t work. Shape the future as if there were no past!

Eliminate the business side

“Who needs business, anyways? Let’s just do geek stuff. Life would be so much better without those nagging people from the business side.” Or so - many developers may think. Yes, the businss people do change their mind as they learn new things about the market - and yes, what they want is sometimes completely unreasonable from a technical perspective. But why do they make unrealistic promises to the customer - well: because the company needs to earn money, even if the people from the IT side are too slow with delivery. And that’s where the problem comes from: Because you have a business side. If you didn’t a business side, this issue would be non-existant.

Side always means that there is a dividing line, and depending on where people stand, their perspective - their opinion - their direction differs. As long as you have multiple “sides” within your organization, the clashes, the blaming, the conflict, the tension, the overload, the unmet expectations - they all will never end! You can not have a “business side” and a “technology side” and expect the problems to go away. The cure is simple: stop having “sides” at all!

Cross deadlines

Let’s face it: There is no deadline. Deadlines are just an arbitrary date that someone has put on the calendar in order to exercise pressure on someone. Are you even aware that a “deadline” is a military term meaning “If you cross this line, you will be shot dead”?

Let me explain how deadlines are used: A customer, client, manager or whoever just proclaims “You must do this by then, otherwise you will have a problem.” - usually without even asking you whether that is realistic.

Now, let’s get back to the military origin of the idiom: You have a pack mule carrying 500 pounds, and need to get the cargo to a different place. Now, if that mule doesn’t move as fast as you intend it, you shoot it. Smart move! Now, who’s going to carry that cargo? You. Congratulations.

Let me re-phrase what a deadline means: “You must do this by then, otherwise I will have a problem.” That’s more like it. If a deadline is being set for you, you can safely ignore it - because you’re not the one who has the biggest problem. Someone else has. And that person better learn to talk with you before making an unrealistic decision that affects others.

Deadlines are wishful thinking, and just like all other wishes, somewhere between optional and irrelevant. Cross them - and see what happens.

Metrics are worthless

“Metrics are not a device for restraining the mad” - James Fenton

There are certainly reasons to use certain metrics for forward-looking strategic planning, but metrics are a terrible way of detecting problems within the system. Metrics are set up everywhere in large organizations. It’s amazing that a central statistics department isn’t a core building block of organizational design. Every manager has their own metrics for tracking whatever matters to them. At frequent intervals, they look at these numbers, then put a smile on their face when the trend is positive and get a heart attack when the trend is negative. They think that they made an important discovery when their metric underwent a significant change.

Yet, that’s the most useless way of applying metrics that you can think of.

Metrics usually measure the status quo. Even interpolation techniques can only detect ongoing anomalies. By the time the needle on a gauge moves, some change has occurred. It is too late to do something - because something has been done already. Someone, somewhere in the organization should be able to tell a more comprehensive story than “The numbers changed.”. If you know who that someone and their story is - why don’t you listen to them instead of looking at a graph? If you don’t know who that someone is, then you have no clue where your numbers come from and your metrics provide nothing more than an illusion of control.

When a metric shows you a problem that nobody has noted before, you have a much bigger problem than the one you see on the metric: Your people aren’t thinking ahead or they aren’t communicating properly.

When a problem becomes visible on a metric, someone should already have done something about it or your organization has issues.