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| Tuesday, April 11, 2006 |
| Evolution I. vii v |
Prologue: Days before I posted this blog, me and Karthik had a discussion. (We usually have weekly discussions to make sure neither of us is doing anything useful and to share our 'vayatherichal' for those who did anything useful.) Both of us had a hidden agenda behind blogging: To secretly rate ourselves in "communication skills" (:D). And oh, I should not have done that. The "what is said" to "what is heard" ratio is just a little above "embarassing" mark, for the previous posting.
Lesson 1: Don't try to 'peter' when it doesn't come to you :)
Back to the process and confusions. I have few questions that keeps nibbling my mind:
(Try to answer this with Often/Sometimes/None)
1. We are programmers end of the day. How many times you get a feeling that your code can be refined and better architected?
2. How many times you get a feeling that you could have written your code more efficiently if time had permitted?
3. How many times people in IT industry end up slogging at the time of release?
4. How many times you have faced this scenario: You know your program / project which was released has some problems. But if you want to make a fix however small it may be, need to go through all the process which makes you decide to keep shut and wish the testing team will never find out.
5. How many times you find your code architecture as documented, is broken at several places?
6. How many times you hate bugs, not because of the problem in your code, but because of the process headaches it generates?
7. How many times you have felt the appraisal and performance tracking system is faulty?
8. How many times you felt that your project is running into chaos and false projections are the face savers in your status meetings?
9. How many times have you lied / found it difficult to fill in your status reports?
10. How many times you felt the system recognizes those good in corporate language than in computer language?
My answer is "often" for all the 10. If there are lucky ones who got more "None"s than "Often"s probably they can help us find out what worked for them. I believe that all this process and all the ideas came down to help us, but in contrast it is deteriorating our performance. I mean more "often"s to the above questionaire, which covers just a sample of our job means, everybody is cheating everybody else and somehow the ball is rolling on. Even if you don't like this, as Pradeep said, the system will take us. Process should not be a plant of slow growth. Few years down the line your project, your technology everything will go to scrap. So who will enjoy, if at all, it has some fruits? :D.
As you told Ram, process is made a virtue. It is a false projection given to upper management and auditors that the company is following that process. If I'm right, it should have started this way. When Japan grew exponentially, the Americans dug out what had caused their growth while the American industry had almost stagnatted at that period. That is when this process and things should have born. And it became a buzzword and fashion with everybody having their own interpretation of that. The "what was said" to "what was heard" ratio was too low again :).
Epilogue : My attempt to start all this discussion is to see if we can reform and filter all this to help us. Something like "If we start a company and work for its progress, should we encourage having these processes?" ;D |
posted by Sunil @ 10:06 PM   |
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| 2 Comments: |
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The answer to the questions lie very much in you I would say. As for me - I’ve made it pretty clear to my manager that I would never lie for the status reports, when it comes to amount of progress made in a project. At times we need to project what I did as someone else's and likewise. These are things I cannot control - but what I did goes in exactly on the weekly/monthly status report. So I always say "never" for that question. I should also accept that not many are allowed this freedom.
You seem to have hit the wrong side of process :) you seem to have developed a kind of hatred towards it. That happens to a lot of ppl - especially in our industry.
But in my view - process is an important thing. I fit into the example prad put forth - last week I had to work on a code written by the great Mr.Kernighan :) The fact that his code was formatted the same way as i write my code today made it easy for me to understand the code, written ages before, in quick time!!! Coding style is one of the process things u need to work with. And it helps. There are so many such good things with process - but why do we see so many ppl who hate process!??!
In my view - this is because the companies we had seen do not allow the process to evolve over time. In an environment like today, we might have to change process rules more frequently than the older days. The fact that the whole process thing started with other types of industries is something which gets overlooked by our corporate.
Many companies, even those in the industry line, have proved that unconventional process and styles will yield better results. If you take a closer look, you'll see that this is not because the CEO of the company wanted to be unconventional. He would have begun just as every other company, with conventional rules and processes. But what differentiated him is the way he reacted to his companies needs, in various situations. That evolved into a better suiting process setup for these companies and it worked - obviously!!!
Read "Maverick" by Ricardo Semler and you'll understand what I’m saying. Presently I’m reading "McDonalds - behind the arches" and the same thing comes across there too. This is kind of different from SemCo (the company being spoken abt in Maverick) but I cud figure out few parallels.
If you wanna ask me something like "what shud I do when I start my own company" - start with a standard set of rules and be open to evolve. As far as I have seen, in the world of process, there is no universal success formula.
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1. sometimes
2. none
3. often
4. often
5. sometimes
6. none
7. sometimes
8. often
9. often
10. often
i have answered what i have felt. don't consider this as our usual psychometric test and say i am contradicting at many places.
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The answer to the questions lie very much in you I would say. As for me - I’ve made it pretty clear to my manager that I would never lie for the status reports, when it comes to amount of progress made in a project. At times we need to project what I did as someone else's and likewise. These are things I cannot control - but what I did goes in exactly on the weekly/monthly status report. So I always say "never" for that question. I should also accept that not many are allowed this freedom.
You seem to have hit the wrong side of process :) you seem to have developed a kind of hatred towards it. That happens to a lot of ppl - especially in our industry.
But in my view - process is an important thing. I fit into the example prad put forth - last week I had to work on a code written by the great Mr.Kernighan :) The fact that his code was formatted the same way as i write my code today made it easy for me to understand the code, written ages before, in quick time!!! Coding style is one of the process things u need to work with. And it helps. There are so many such good things with process - but why do we see so many ppl who hate process!??!
In my view - this is because the companies we had seen do not allow the process to evolve over time. In an environment like today, we might have to change process rules more frequently than the older days. The fact that the whole process thing started with other types of industries is something which gets overlooked by our corporate.
Many companies, even those in the industry line, have proved that unconventional process and styles will yield better results. If you take a closer look, you'll see that this is not because the CEO of the company wanted to be unconventional. He would have begun just as every other company, with conventional rules and processes. But what differentiated him is the way he reacted to his companies needs, in various situations. That evolved into a better suiting process setup for these companies and it worked - obviously!!!
Read "Maverick" by Ricardo Semler and you'll understand what I’m saying. Presently I’m reading "McDonalds - behind the arches" and the same thing comes across there too. This is kind of different from SemCo (the company being spoken abt in Maverick) but I cud figure out few parallels.
If you wanna ask me something like "what shud I do when I start my own company" - start with a standard set of rules and be open to evolve. As far as I have seen, in the world of process, there is no universal success formula.