Are you Afraid?

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It seems to me that too many project decisions are shaped by fear of uncertainty.

Why do we make up deadlines, knowing full well we don’t really understand if we’re able to keep them? In fact, more often than not, we know that it’s quite likely we’ll miss them.

Why do we create “watermelon-colour” test reports (you know the kind: green on the outside, red on the inside)?

Metrics in Isolation are doomed to Fail

You know how it is: all metrics can, and will, be gamed.

So using metrics is always a balancing act: how much can you learn from a single metric, how resistant is it to being gamed, and does it have a counterbalance that avoids pushing the organisation too far in one direction?

The trick is to not use a single metric, but a system of metrics. That way, by improving any single one through gaming, you inevitably create a counter-signal in the other metric.

Resiliency

Are you familiar with the term resiliency?

Not the one used in psychology, the one used in technology.

Resiliency (as I discuss it here) is the quality of systems to not merely withstand assaults (defects, attacks, etc) – that would be robustness. A very desirable trait of course.

But perhaps it would be even more desirable to create systems which are more than robust: they might be designed such that they will actually grow more robust when exposed to disturbances or attacks: they learn, and grow to be more robust.

Technology is about Humans

Did you know: tech work isn’t about tech

🚀…it’s about humans.

No, really.

Katherine Porfilio refreshed this thought in my mind this morning with her latest post.

You know, I’m a mechanical engineer by training. I love technology. I find the smell of machine grease pleasant. Imagine my surprise when I realised that engineering isn’t actually about technology, it merely seems to be. I was actually retroactively a bit disappointed with my professors at university, who went to great lengths to make me good at maths – but spent pretty much not time making me good at working with humans.

Do you think deploying is expensive? Try not deploying!

🐙 You think deploying software is painful and expensive? Try not deploying it!

To tie it back to theory quickly: those who have come in contact with Lean manufacturing will recognise “inventory” as one of the nine wastes Lean defines (the -> I in TIMWOODS :-) )

But how can a feature, how can software code be a waste? I mean, it doesn’t take up space (not meaningfully, anyway, in the age of terabyte-sized hard drives). It just sits there, all nice and passive and harmless, right? So why not hold on to it for a little while longer before shipping it?

Playing

💭 I have a favourite trick question in my trainings: “what do you call people whose job it is to conduct experiments all day?” The obvious answer might be “scientists”, but I’m going for… did you guess it … children.

You know, what we call playing is nothing but a continuous stream of experiments they conduct. They build a model of the world as they understand it, and then they run that model and observe.