Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Nobody reads this blog, of course, but for those who do there has been an unmistakable trend in which we favor individual decision-making over group-based decision-making. We haven’t been moderate about this at all; we’ve had very few good things to say about the group decision-making process, and there’s a reason for this.
Baseline Mag has an article up that happens to be about one of my career specialties; it’s called It Projects Done Right. It specifically deals with risk management in the application development process. This has to do with effective group-based decision-making. It requires a lot of tools and a lot of collaboration, which is certainly possible, but usually isn’t done. Much more typical is the kind of group-based decision-making you see in the prior article, IT Projects Done Wrong.
In that older article, you see a way of thinking that is much more in harmony with the decision-making process embraced by your average Obama/Biden supporter:
When I got back to my cubicle, I wrote up a memo detailing (as I recall) about a dozen major risks I saw with the KAID project and the proposed schedule. Here were some of the risks:
• We didn’t yet have a sufficiently complete set of specifications and requirements for the system that would allow us to even begin to estimate the work required.
• We didn’t have an architecture for the system yet, much less key design solutions.
• The system was to be developed using an obscure and specialized programming language.
• None of the team members had ever developed in that programming language; they had been to a two-week training course in it back in September, but had done no work in the language since then.
• Why? Because the development tools – integrated development environment (IDE), libraries, and so on – were not yet available commercially. Version 1.0 of the development suite was scheduled to be released at the start of December. (That alone should be enough to make any software engineers and team leads reading this shudder.)
• Also, no other vendor was providing development tools for that language, so there were no alternatives if any problems cropped up with the version 1.0 development suite.And so on, and so forth. For each risk, I assessed both the probability of the risk coming to pass and the likely impact on the project if it did. I distributed this memo to the entire project team, with cc’s to the division head and the technology manager just under him.
The response? While some of the engineers on the team sent me private e-mails thanking me for pushing back and for writing the memo, the client told me – in just about these exact words – to “shut up and architect.” The client wasn’t willing to risk the business with the customer by being honest about the risks, uncertainties, and unknowns surrounding the KAID project.
Recall what Tom Hagen told Jack Woltz during the dinner conversation, after Woltz had refused to offer the movie role to Johnny Fontaine: “If your driver will take me to the airport, Mr. Corleone is a man who insists on hearing bad news immediately.” Now here, group-think can be quite adequate, and compatible with the success of the project — it can even in some cases be superior. But in order for that to happen, you’ve got to have a supporting culture which addresses the selfish whims of the individual. It has to do that in such a way that people are told, and comprehend, bad news immediately.
Simply put, people have to be rewarded for finding risks. Not to the point where the project is paralyzed as people concentrate all their energies on collecting a virtual “bounty” on identified risks. But certainly, to the point where potentially damaging risks are identified early on, in such a way that the level of effort required to mitigate them is reduced, and the effects of their residual impact can be effectively compensated.
Information Technology is a tricky thing. It doesn’t weather the challenges offered by the stagnation of group-think very well. That’s because group-think has a distinct tendency to pressure each individual to do things the same way other individuals are already doing them; and technology, when you get down to brass tacks, is the exact opposite of that.
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Amen to this one…
People do not want to see the truth.
They prefer to only see the smily face details.
But then when the project reachs out and bites them, everybody is pointing their fingers saying we didnt know.
Virgil
- vbierschwale | 10/17/2008 @ 11:23http://www.KeepAmericaAtWork.com