“In my experience, most engineers with more than five years of experience are actually fairly good estimators, they just can’t estimate the amount of weekly bureaucracy they have to deal with.”

“[They] are using the tablet-style computer for tasks as varied as accessing work e-mail, approving shipping orders, and calling up on-the-spot auto-finance options.”

It takes time to change things, but now that Apple is bigger than Microsoft, one has to wonder how long corporate will continue to cling to the underdog.

Here are some of mine. Which do you disagree with? Why?

Workarounds are never a good thing. Short term workarounds are never short-term. They should be avoided. Do it right the first time, and if you can’t due to time or budget, delay the project. I hate technical debt.

Plan as you go is more appropriate to life and to projects, and returns better results, than planning everything up front (ie agile vs. waterfall). What we are talking about is predicting the future. Sure, you can be somewhat accurate, some of the time. But it’s just a guess. You’ll be more accurate if you don’t predict too far out. If you’re more accurate, you’ll be happier.

The problems of new are less than the problems of the old. On occasion you will run into a bug by upgrading software to the latest version. But I’ve found that on balance, I have far fewer compatibility & stability problems if I keep up to date. And as a bonus, new features!

Buy the well-built item once instead of the cheap thing multiple times. It’s eco-friendly, and you get to have the quality item to use every day. My wife and I had been wearing out a $10 garlic press once every 12 months or so with basic wear and tear — till we bought the Rösle Garlic Press for (at the time) $30. Five years later, it still looks good as new and works brilliantly.

Price is not correlated to the value. Just because it’s expensive doesn’t mean it’s worth a lot. Conversely, just because it’s cheap doesn’t mean it has no value. Open-Source Software, Wikipedia, a walk with your kids – these all have a lot of value, and they don’t cost you a dime.

Deals are rarely worth it. Everything is “on sale”. Everything is discounted. Of course, there are good deals to be had. It’s just that the effort to find and take advantage of the deal is more costly than any savings I might obtain. There is a reason why rebate forms are difficult to complete: it is in the company’s best interest that you never fill them out.

I believe in Scaling Software over Scaling People. See my blip on Techies and The Business, or the whole article here.

The most important attribute to any employee is their willingness and ability to learn. I’ve written about this one a lot. I think learning is the key to innovation, that through mistakes you get better, that Adapting is the Most Crucial Skill You’ll Ever Learn, and that progress (and who doesn’t want progress?) is an act of discovery.

So!  What are some of your beliefs?

“Let’s face it. Our industry has had some challenges when it comes to setting expectations around estimates on software projects. It’s not that our estimates are necessarily wrong (though they almost always are). It’s more that too often people have looked to estimates for something they can never give—an accurate prediction of the future. [...] The simple fact is that accurate upfront estimates aren’t possible and we need to stop pretending that they are.“

[emphasis added]

“Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward.”

The same can be seen with fighting fires: They don’t want to try something and fail, and they don’t want to be at fault if they do fail … so hire consultants!

Seth Godin asks some good questions in his post SFW.

“Analysis paralysis is a phrase that describes a situation where the opportunity cost of decision analysis exceeds the benefits that could be gained by enacting some decision, or an informal or non-deterministic situation where the sheer quantity of analysis overwhelms the decision making process itself, thus preventing a decision. The phrase applies to any situation where analysis may be applied to help make a decision and may be a dysfunctional element of organizational behavior.”

I like how the see-also section refers you to Wicked problems:

“a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems.”

<sigh>

“[...] What people really mean when they say “I don’t have time” is this thing is not important enough to earn my time. It’s a polite way to tell people they’re not worth your time.

This means people who are always busy are time poor. They have a time shortage. They have time debt. They are either trying to do too much, or they aren’t doing what they’re doing very well. They are failing to either a) be effective with their time b) don’t know what they’re trying to effect, so they scramble away at trying to optimize for  everything, which leads to optimizing nothing.”

“For some reason we believe that sweeping in and fixing a problem has more drama, and gains more attention, than doing the work to predict and avoid problems.”

I think the problem is also a blame game. If we acknowledged that there were ways we could avoid the fire, then we would implicitly own the problem and more so, be responsible for avoiding the next occurrence. But when the next fire comes, implicitly we’ve now failed. The goal was to avoid the fire, not react quickly. This requires strategic thinking.

So if we never acknowledge there is a change that could make things better, then when the fire comes, we just block and tackle — it is happening to us, not caused by us. No one is to blame for the fire, and thus our only measure of success is our reaction speed.

Blocking and tackling is easy. Strategic thinking is hard.

If I had to sum up in a word what makes a good manager, I’d say decisiveness. You can use the fanciest computers to gather the numbers, but in the end you have to set a timetable and act.

—Lido Anthony (Lee) Iacocca

A lot of companies seek to control employees. They have handbooks and policies. They monitor emails. They make rules about what’s allowed and what’s forbidden. [...]

Imagine an employee handbook that just said: “We trust you. Be mischievous.”

This makes a lot of sense to me. If the company trusts you with corporate secrets, company property, and access to production servers … maybe the policies on appropriate use of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are misplaced.

• Start an email newsletter using Mad Mimi or Mail Chimp. Give the responsibility for the newsletter’s creation and performance to one person and offer them a bonus if they exceed metrics in sign ups and in reducing churn.
• Offer a small bonus to anyone in the company who starts and runs a blog on any topic. Have them link to your company site, with an explanation that while they work there, they don’t speak for you.
• Have the president post her (real) email address in every invoice and other communication the company sends out, asking people to write to her with comments or questions.
• Do not approve any project that isn’t run on Basecamp.

Just like software, in the end it isn’t a lack of access to tools or high startup costs. It’s just plain courage to do it.

He says the first step, is to stop using the word, and instead use a phrase that better represents what you mean. He typically finds that people mean one of these three when talking about “innovation”:

• Having new ideas
• Taking more risks
• Making things radically better

Other advise: “[Scott] tells us you have to be opportunistic and start small. High-priority challenges may be a temping place to start, but he suggested looking first at low-hanging fruit. You can build momentum for positive change by racking up a number of small wins that together move the project in the right direction. Having these small successes under your belt gives you more influence when attempting larger changes later on.”

“As one of the few people who has read the CMMI book from cover to cover, here’s what I think: In process-speak, the notion of maturity is backwards. [...] A mature person is one who is highly conscious of when it’s appropriate to follow rules and when to break them. A mature person is largely self-guided. Only in exceptional circumstances does a mature person need to refer to or appeal to a rulebook at all. In such cases, the issue is that someone believes that the rulebook isn’t working, and in such cases, consensus between mature individuals and organizations—not the rulebook itself—makes the determination as to what should happen next. Mature people know that rulebooks need to be interpreted.”

He sums it up by noting that:

“A mature process should encourage risk-taking and mistakes while taking steps to limit the severity and consequence of the mistakes, because without making mistakes, learning isn’t possible.”

This seems to me to be good advise, and one that I’m going to work on. Apparently he has a whole book written about this type of thing.

Rewarding Firefighters not Fire Inspectors.

In other words, the people spotting the problems and fixing them before the “fire” do not get rewards. The “firefighters” who rush and put out fires in progress do get reward.

But which is better for the company?

Once the fire starts, damage is already being done. “Fires” are stressful and distracting – but never seen a company yet that actively makes sure that fires don’t happen. But seen lots of companies that reward the firefighters ( even when they were the “pyromaniacs” )

“Sure, people matter a lot, but as my colleague Jeff Pfeffer puts it, some systems are so badly designed that when smart people with a great track record join them, it seems as if a “brain vacuum” is applied, and they turn incompetent.”

I tend to be a person that believes that the quality of the talent you hire is a pretty good indicator of future success, however he does have a point. Good people can do only so much in a bad situation. At some point, the situation (system, software, or what have you) needs to be addressed head on.

[via Future Tense]

“Two out of three Net Geners [Generation Y] said they would rather work for one or two companies than a variety of companies, our research shows. But they’re not loyal to an employer; they’re loyal to their career path. They’ll stay at a company that offers them structure and internal mobility. If a company refuses to invest in them they’ll leave.”

The Company is People

I didn’t live through the 50’s, but my impression is that in those years, a company saw their employees as the “bottom line”.  Profit, cash, and sustainability came in as secondary goal. Not to say that a company would go bankrupt to keep their employees, but that they would do everything possible before laying someone off. Employees were loyal to their company, and in return, a company was loyal to its employees.

The Company is Profit

These days, profitability is clearly the number one “bottom line” and there seems to be nothing that competes closely with that at all. If you look at the way companies invest in off-shore development, the way they hire contractors instead of developing internal talent, they way they “right-size” (the politically correct term for layoffs) … it is pretty clear that employees are considered fungible resources. Even the term, “resource” (for a living, breathing, human being) furthers this ideal. I’m a person, not a resource.

It’s Your Career

I think the Net Geners are simply acting on what the rest of us have failed to recognize. Dedication to a single company is admirable, but it is best for long-term individual interests to spread that experience over many companies.

“The Net Gener arrives at work, eager to use his social networking tools to collaborate and create and contribute to the company. For starters, he’s shocked to find that the company’s technology tools are more primitive than the ones he used in high school. The company he works for still thinks the Net is about web sites presenting information, rather than a Web 2.0 collaboration platform. And they are surprised, perhaps naively, to learn that corporations have antiquated ways of working. Then the company bans Facebook at the office because it suspects Net Geners are wasting time chatting with friends and throwing digital snowballs when they should be working – thus depriving Net Geners of their link to friends, to fun, to coworkers. Pretty soon, the talent heads for the exit.”

There are a lot of things that have changed in the last few decades of corporate life.

While the corporate environment used to be the place for innovation and advanced technology, the fear mongering on security and productivity have all but driven innovation into the consumer market. Take for example, my 2-year-old laptop which is faster and much more feature rich than my work laptop. At home I’ve got a webcam, powerful video editing software, enterprise-class server software, extensive software development tools, and a plethora of other modern applications that keep me productive and able to collaborate with distributed teams. And that’s just what came included with my computer – no extra purchase necessary. When I want to make a good impression at work, I use my personal laptop to create presentations, not my work one.

The tool set on my work computer is very minimal (essentially Microsoft Office, and Internet Explorer), after which they take the restrictions up a notch by blocking free tools like YouTube (allegedly for bandwidth reasons) and Google Image Search (no naughty pictures!) Even when I was expecting all of this, I was still shocked to discover they actively block tabbed browsing – an ancient browser feature for anyone not stuck with IE. Perhaps “tabbed browsing” is an esoteric complaint from a computer geek, but I can not make any sense of the policy. In my mind, I would rather have tabs in my browser than a phone on my desk. Along the same lines, my work laptop could have a webcam, but to keep things secure, it was replaced with a ridiculous-looking pop-out keyboard light.

As for Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites? They certainly have value from a marketing-department perspective, but even beyond that, these are simply the equivalent to a digital smoke break. It’s just a quick way to get away from work to refocus thinking. “Thought breaks” are vital for those of us in the knowledge worker business, and blocking them just makes people bitter and (ironically) unproductive.

The way I see it, the internet is just like the telephone and photocopier. It’s a resource that is provided for employees to be productive. They can be used for good or for bad, and if you can’t trust your employees to make the right choice and be productive at work, then you had no business hiring them in the first place. Mullenweg, the cofounder of wordpress.com says:

“If you have bad people, you need a lot of process and structure. If you have good people, you need way less process and bureaucracy.”

It is no wonder Net Geners don’t stick around for long. The corporate way, which was once innovative and cutting edge, has languished. The real innovation today is happening with small, globally distributed, teams. In exchange for byzantine corporate policies, the Net Geners favor simple employee trust. Which it turns out, is a pretty solid business plan.

“Unlike in the corporate world, no one thinks twice if you IM with your friends in the middle of the day or go out to play volleyball at two. The culture is designed to help employees relax into productivity, not stress into it. . . . To me this seems, well, logical.”

What a simple, brilliant idea. We’re so busy stressing about goals, metrics, deadlines, and doing things the corporate way, that we forget: people are most productive when they can relax at work.