Amit Chawla DotNet: All and Sundry

In my years doing software development for companies, I have seldom come across a place that wasn’t mad.

Wether you are a bunch of rookies, have a flavour of ISO 900x or SEI CMM 1…5 or you eat documentation for breakfast, nothing seems to be able to bring method to madness.

Smaller companies ride on flexibility. They are supposedly ‘agile’. All that means is that Software Developers, Business Analysts, Project and Program managers are allowed, or in some cases, expected to be ‘cowboys’.

Agility: It is an ability to introduce random quirks for unknown reasons and be able to half fix them equally randomly.

Larger companies on the other hand tend rely on well-defined processes. A “well-defined process” is an oxymoron. Something that does not quite exist… An urban-myth… Large companies go the whole hog and employ consulting firms to help them define, redefine and reverse engineer processes, device operational and development strategies, and help them do business as usual at a ‘reduced’ cost and create better shareholder value. These consulting companies obviously make a lot of money in the process.

Before you know it, you have to fill up a poo-request-form to be able to successfully perform a full bowel function.

Working at such a place is like living in a cosmopolitan apartment block. All your neighbours are wealthy, uptight, and unfriendly. They only talk to you when they need something. They do not like you to turn up uninformed. They never turn up uninformed. Nobody needs to know anything about anyone else.

These professionals live in boxes. Sadly, they fall in love their boxes. They seldom look out of their boxes to see why other boxes need them. Why does their box even exist? These boxes sit next to each other, but, cannot plug into to each other.

Every once in a while, when someone sticks their head out of the box, their box-mates quickly rescue them back to the box. Often reasoning: “You don’t need to know that. That’s not your job”. There is enough mess in your own box to worry about.

These organisations are often ‘disable’. In a way that is not obvious to the naked eye.

Disability: Anything that puts one at a disadvantage.

I have been in meeting rooms full of twenty plus highly paid professionals waiting for the workshop to begin. While the chair spends a good twenty minutes trying to locate a ‘power cord extension’ so that the projector lamp can shine. Everyone is busy attending to urgent problems.

The balance is somewhere in the middle. The idea is to get people out of their boxes, get the boxes to plug-and-play and the organisations to be able and breathing entities.

Will things change by my watch?

Filed under: All in Day's Work, Humor