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The Other End of the Telescope
Ran across a very insightful quote the other day that I'm going to mangle and paraphrase:
The main goal for a technology team isn't the product, it's the recipe for the product.
Many times we act like the way technology is put together is known: all we have to do is come up with a list of things that need doing -- creating this list is where we add value. How we work together, how large groups create a dynamic, productive environment is simply a matter of learning something and repeating it.
The opposite is true. Creating technology to meet some random list of things is a trivial exercise -- sometimes a painful, never-ending, death-march, but a trivial exercise. There isn't a lot of creativity going on. Heck, most of the time there isn't a lot of computer science going on either, just connecting up the wires. The part that we add creativity to is putting together all of the different people we have in this particular situation and with this particular problem in such a way that the solution happens quickly and people are pleased with the result.
We have shortcuts that sometimes work -- a lot of agile is about creating and sharing those shortcuts -- but sometimes they don't work. I'm seeing a lot of Kanban being used in certain situations because sometimes it beats Scrum. Sometimes not.
The technical part of technology development turns out to be a no-brainer: any decent programmer can do a heck of a lot of things. The people and process part of technology -- the part they teach you in various classes, seminars, and business schools -- turns out to be so brutally non-trivial that huge organizations fail for lack of mastering it. I believe the reason why is that once we take the class or get the certification we believe we understand it when in fact we do not.
It occurs to me in technology development that most times we don't even know what the important problems are that we are solving, focusing on the technical, easy-to-grasp instead of the social, difficult-to-work.
hacker
Daniel Markham
