Seven Weeks of Silence
Tuesday, October 13, 2009 at 5:37AM Yes, Mr Bernstein, I stand guilty: I admit to transgressing Bernstein’s law number 2—as enshrined in Writing on the Living Web—I have maintained blog-silence during the period I devoted my total focus to my new role at Geekdom. Here’s why.
I’m responsible for three areas of business:
- software development
- internet service management
- office information productivity
Software Development
Geekdom's vision for software development is expansive. Our talented teams are aggressively tackling tough new areas of technology to enable businesses and consumers to monetize their internet businesses.
My goal has been to harness and focus this dynamic energy by applying three metaphors:
1. Software as process. I've applied process management principles to identify the leverage points within the software development process. This approach makes it clear as to where to apply new resources in order to produce more-high-quality-software-faster.
2. Software as communication. Software change requests and defect reports must be clear, crisp and concrete. Change requests must be evaluated against strategic product vision and against each persona served by the product. This enables the enunciation of clear, crisp and concrete designs and specifications. Clear, crisp and concrete communication is essential for producing more-high-quality-software-faster in a fast-paced team environment.
3. Software as investment. As Joel Spolsky once wrote, software development is about turning cash into code in order to turn code back into cash: it is an investment process. In an environment like Geekdom’s, where there are oodles of fantastic ideas waiting for implementation, it becomes absolutely essential to evaluate investment priorities. Managers need to know potential magnitudes of returns in current and future financial years, and to balance that against cost and likely timeline. While the revenue estimate is provided by the marketing and sales teams, the software development team have to produce the cost and timeline. To do this, developers have began estimating the length of time it will take them to implement software. When combined with probabilistic scheduling, this provides management with the best possible information for making investment decisions.
Internet Services
Reliability, scalability, efficiency, redundancy, risk management. Monitoring, alerting, fault logging, root cause analysis, load testing. The basic blocking and tackling of offering always-available internet services.
Yesterday I was pleased to show the management team a service operations chart demonstrating significant growth in mean time between failures.
Office Information Productivity
Aside from the basic provision of desktop computers, LAN, local servers and internet access, I’ve found a need to focus on placing effort behind two types of applications:
1. Group productivity. Applications to enable groups of people to coordinate their work. At the moment, this is primarily Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and collaborative document sharing.
2. Management monitoring. To enable management to monitor both activity and outcomes, key activities, process stages and success measures needed to be defined. Then instrumented and conveniently placed on managers' desktops.
During these weeks of blog-silence, I've been delighted to see significant progress along each of these dimensions.
A management consulting friend with significant IT experience recently asked me how I was approaching things. I sketched the above outline for him. His response? ”Ah, so you're focused on the basics, eh?”
Yep.
Quietly focusing on the basics.
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