A chain of direct and “dotted line” reporting that makes a worker accountable to many managers with no clear boss.
A near total separation of authority and responsibility. The worker is always at fault but overworked and excused. The communication overhead justifies creating more managers.
Related Anti-Pattern: Value Stream Backwash where analysts specify more projects than workers have capacity to deliver. Again, often solved with more analysts.
My 2nd grade daughter earned a place on her school’s FIRST LEGO League (FLL) Robotics team.
“You were chosen based on your ability to work well with your team during tryouts and how well you cooperated with others.
We also looked at your ability to problem solve, on your own and within the group, your endurance with the task, your ability to follow directions, and your handle and care for the pieces, as well as your overall interest and enthusiasm for robotics and the task at hand.”
What a great description of collaborative development! I’m so freakin’ proud.
FIRST is Dean Kamen’s foundation “to create a world where science and technology are celebrated… where young people dream of becoming science and technology heroes”
Traveling to and from a software dev conference my flights were delayed due to software failures. Both times techs repeatedly rebooted the plane hoping the machine would heal itself.
Also on this trip the crew made the following announcement:
Unfortunately we’ve just learned that our toilets aren’t flushing. We apologize for the inconvenience… We will now be starting our beverage service…
At the precipice of change, we are getting sentimental here at the Oh! Network.
As a developer joining Oxygen NY in 2001, I entered a code and fix culture under a facade of waterfall planning. I fought arbitrary dates, bloated specifications, and reality-challenged reporting. I acquired a survivalist’s skill for landing valuable projects and picking co-workers who helped carry them to completion.
As team lead, I made myself project manager. I used a risk-managed, iterative approach based on Steven McConnell’s Software Project Survival Guide and Earned Value Planning. We provided transparency, met dates and exceeding expectations.
Still, I had the awful, lonely feeling it was unsustainable. A tiny team, we were isolated from each other. We needed a collaborative practice. We needed to share knowledge, commit to a common way of working, and lift each other past our individual limitations.
I found the following e-mail thread capturing the moment we adopted Extreme Programming (XP). A bit of everyman’s history with a very small ‘h’…
From: Ken Judy
Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2004 2:40 PM
To: Luke Melia; Kristofor Selden
Cc: Steve Morgan
Subject: Agile Methodologies
Here are sites for different agile methodologies. Of the five of them, XP is the most exacting. The others are generally light frameworks for ways of developing or managing projects that support the agile manifesto http://agilemanifesto.org/.
XP: http://www.extremeprogramming.org/
Scrum: http://www.controlchaos.com/
Crystal: http://alistair.cockburn.us/crystal/crystal.html
Adaptive Software Development: http://www.jimhighsmith.com/
Feature Driven Dev: http://www.featuredrivendevelopment.com/
— Ken
From: Luke Melia
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 5:09 PM
To: Ken Judy; Kristofor Selden
Cc: Keith Frank
Subject: RE: teamwork
Hi Ken,
Kris and I spent some time today reviewing the agile process frameworks you sent around and met this afternoon to discuss our planning. We’re going to follow the XP rules and practices for the most part.
http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules.html
We will likely invest somewhat more effort in up-front detailed requirements in order to support your work-package tracking efforts. In addition, some practices are irrelevant for a team consisting of a single pair of developers. We’ll ignore those and pay close attention to the practice “Fix XP when it breaks” in order to arrive at a set of practices that is effective for us. I’ve read the criticisms of XP that argue it is “all or nothing” but I feel that this approach will work for us.
We’re going to be pair programming and plan to work together 11am – 1pm and 2:30 – 5pm. This will allow us time at the beginning, middle & end of the day to respond to email, etc.
This is all going to start this Friday. On Friday, we’ll do a code review, go over the task breakdown for the SES project and plan for our first milestone, as you suggested. I’m also going to rearrange my desk to make it work better for two people to sit at.
Luke
From: Ken Judy
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 5:31 PM
To: Luke Melia; Kristofor Selden
Cc: Steve Morgan
Subject: RE: teamwork
Sounds good. Our team is so small that a strong agile approach should work well as long as we manage risks. I’ll look into the “Tracker” role in the XP model to see how to adjust my tools to your approach.
— Ken
From: Ken Judy
Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2004 10:33 AM
To: Luke Melia; Kristofor Selden
Subject: RE: teamwork
Hi,
Please go ahead and block out 11:00am-1pm and 2:30-5pm in your calendars as “busy”. I’ll send out an e-mail to IS all so they know what’s up. Feel free to decline any meeting requests at your discretion and let me know of anything in your calendars you need me to cover for you on.
We will need to start the morning “standup” meetings so that we keep focus on the project and one of the things we’ll need to address is how to best use Michele as owner.
— Ken
My company begins planning its integration into a new parent organization.
As a participant in that process I have to obey:
I feel other ties:
These obligations may contend but should not fundamentally conflict as long as the integration plan we develop clearly communicates an achievable, rational outcome.
“Above all, to thine own self be true.” — Hamlet, I, iii
Inspiring and daunting advice but not to be taken at face value. For the character who delivers it has too high a regard for his own ingenuity, places himself at the center of events and meets a bad end. A creation as complex as life.
I will try to heed a fool’s words without becoming a fool. To be true to mine own self in this circumstance is not to delude myself that this situation is in any significant way about me. Options that don’t make business sense will not serve the long-term interest of anyone involved. My obligation is to work towards the best outcome for all parties given that reality.