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Vasu's Musings on Business,Management and Leveraging Collective Wisdom |
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No Posts during July
There will be no more posts in the month of July. I would return back in August after a vacation.
16 hours per day doing what?  Since recognizing and managing the invisible is a hard and sophisticated task for which we have no ready-made tools to observe the invisible, employees instead spend a great deal of time,illuminating the visible and the tangible...to the powers that be.
This is one of the top reasons, why people spend lot of hours in the office.
...proudly proclaim that they wrote a 1000-page document,
...spend enormous amounts of time and effort in loudly expressing their opinion about the 'color of the bike shed' in meetings.
...answering mails at 2 AM during the weekend.
Unfortunately, none of these actions guarantee an absence of intellectual laziness in the part of the employee. Even if we were to rule out intellectual laziness, what the workplace accomplished collectively might be very different from the original intent.
Thus, the workplace is 'out of tune' from what the corporation seeks to achieve. The only certain way to fix this, is to tear down the workplace and come up with a fresh new design ... with the sole purpose of connecting the individual intelligence to the collective... To be able to observe value in both the visible as well the invisible.
Ah! The Connected Intelligence.
Art of Managing the Invisible  Michael Jordan earns the honor as one of the greatest basketball player,not merely for his individual excellence, but chiefly for his ability to connect to the collective, the team.
Over time, it is easy to observe individual excellence in sports, as the evidence is clearly visible to the observer.
However, in a reality show, where you are part of a team in Morocco, contesting with other teams to shop with a 40-dollar budget, it is not the michael jordans of the world who prevail, but the obnoxious loud jerks. It is not as if, such a task is trivial that it does not require talent at all. But, the real reason is that, the value of a key contribution is not visible, but invisible and available only in retrospect. .. and it is too late.
The 'Dilbert' enterprise thus resembles a reality show, where the jerks get away with their self-serving ways. Thus, ideas get crumpled, true value gets replaced by pretentious tasks. Managing the 21st Century Enterprise requires recognizing and managing the invisible. The Michael Jordans' of the enterprise are not readily conspicous, but could be only visible with the help of a microscope, which is capable of observing the invisible.
With an Evidence-Based Management mindset which could be instrumented by Technology, the fakes could be easily displaced by the silent worker, who could transform the business with their passion and super-engagement. Celebrate Talent
Software Development Process Governance
You don't go about designing a society from scratch. It exists. You deploy structures and mechanisms to 'govern' it. A society is governed, not managed.
By governance, you not only limit/prohibit undesirable behavior and actions, but also guide, regulate and harness actions towards a purpose.
Applying this notion to Software Development Processes, Quality needs to be managed. You need to design, measure, improve, analyze and Control Quality. Sure.
Similarly, Requirements need to managed as well.
But, the overall software development process, I think, needs to be governed and not managed.
If you did not get what is in the image, try squinting your eye a bit and you would be able to read it easily. Similarly, I think you might have to do some 'mental squinting' to get this notion of governance.
Beyond the process mindset  It is a lost case, alright. "Whenever you try to fool-proof a system. A better fool emerges out."
Processes seem mostly about insulating the organization from human follies.To a certain degree, this is true.
But, if we always blame the people or the process or both, for mistakes that happen, then we have not solved anything or learned anything. We probably added another check to fool-proof the process further.
Instead, if we shift our perception from this binary mode to the complexity of the business domain, that it is solving, new constructive possibilities emerge.
Still, Organizations are about people and processes play a crucial role in managing the complexity. But, change happens at a time and pace, independent of our perfect intent and design.
Fortifying the process would be too late at that point. Instead, we need a system to govern the complexity strategically, which lays out codes of invariance, on which talents and processes operate...
...which connects the intelligence.
Entries: 1 - 5 of 176
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