Management Thoughts

Agile may just be for some

I was reading an article about Agile programming the other day when a thought struck me. When I first look at a programming problem, even if it's a significant effort that will take a team 6 - 12 months of effort, I get a picture in my head of the basic design pretty quickly.

And that basic design tends to match the final product. It may match because I keep pushing in the direction of what is in my head or it may be that I just come up with the "best" approach - but the final product does match.

So when the agile approach says to just design for the module you are working on - basically I can't. I design that module in the context of a complete architecture. And this is a good thing - designing each piece in the context of the full architecture.

But this raises an interesting question. I think most programmers cannot picture the entire architecture up front. But a minority of them can. What if the proponents of agile programming tend to be in this minority that can picture the entire architecture in their head - and the architecture they picture is correct. (Read the book Blink for more on this.)

Agile is a great method for programmers that can do this. But at the same time, it arguably is a terrible approach for programmers who do not have this ability. It seems to me that maybe we should look at who should use agile methodologies and who should not.

Facts are inconvenient things

Ok, at one company morale was in the toilet so they brought in a communication expert to talk to everyone. The root problem, which was reiterated by employee after employee, was some major issues with senior management.

So what was the summation of the study? That the problem was too much complaining. And the company then fired the middle management (the people who had the thankless job of trying to keep things moving forward in spite of senior management) and told everyone that they needed to stop complaining.

Well... That definitely will stop the complaining for awhile. On the flip side, when things get so bad that senior management can't hide from it anymore, it will probably be so bad that it will mean the end of the company.

You can shoot the messengers and hide from facts for awhile. But when you do, you pretty much guarantee that you will be totally screwed when the problems become so bad that you can no longer stick your head in the sand. And yet… management will be shocked when it happens.

Of course, maybe senior management is right - the problem is that all the employees are negative and complaining all of the time. But if that is the problem - who's responsibility is it that the entire company operates that way?

(note: subject is a quote from Winston Churchill.)