9 ms·

Let me tell you why you don't see this happening more often. I did this on a project a few years back. I replaced a paper workflow process that was taking up t

by roc 15y ago

Let me tell you why you don't see this happening more often. I did this on a project a few years back. I replaced a paper workflow process that was taking up two people each in three departments with a web-based workflow that increased visibility, dropped turn-around time from days to minutes, increased accountability and accuracy and trimmed those 16 person hours of processing down to 1-2 per department. Everyone who directly interacted with the new system loved it. Numerous edge cases that would have been lost in high-level review were caught and integrated from day 1 due to my actually watching people do the job for a day or two per department. The solution has been rock solid (minor maintenance only) for five years. And I almost lost the job. The people who sign the checks were furious. The balance of political power between departments were thrown for a loop. One head in particular treated the thing as a near-existential threat. His entire concept of his job revolved around being the authoritative interface for retrieving and maintaining pieces of data that were no longer exclusively under his control. Another flipped out because middle management saw the results as cause to reduce his headcount and budget, and thus importance. These two departments fought for months, refusing to contribute their shares of budget that were pledged toward modernizing this system. On a technical and practical level, it was the single best experience I've ever had as a consultant. On a personal and economic level, is was one of the worst. It was some of the hardest money I've ever tried to collect. It was some of the most time and energy I've put into the political and 'sales' side of a job (the part I treat as a necessary evil, but very much evil). The corporation has made out like a bandit in the long run. But I paid the price. It's simply too easy and financially rewarding to allow a client's political nonsense to screw up every stage of a project. I have less stress, the people who pay me are happier and I bill far more hours. As with most software, internally developed software included, you don't see better projects more often because the incentives are horribly perverted and stacked against it.

blader 15y ago
Wow. Thanks for sharing that. This paints a really clear picture of why so much enterprise software are pieces of crap.
- angelbob 15y ago
  Now don't overgeneralize... There are lots of other reasons why enterprise software is crap.
twerth 15y ago
Well said, and the exact reason I moved away from consulting after a decade of doing it. The developers often get blamed for "not understanding how real people use the system". Most features are requested by C level people who have never actually used the system. While consulting, I've actually been told NOT to talk to the users who will be using the system. In a large enterprise it is often about power and politics, it is rarely about building value and increasing productivity. Vote with your labor, work for a small company.
- ansgri 15y ago
  For a small consulting company? </sarcasm>
metaskills 15y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGS2tKQhdhY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGS2tKQhdhY
namank 15y ago
There is process called Contextual Design. Part of it talks about treating the tacit knowledge of a workplace like a very necessary requirement for your software. So that means including the culture of the workplace in your reqs. It sounds dumb at first but it makes perfect sense. What you did at that place was to apply a bandaid to a fracture where it really should have been a cast. But you didn't know it was a fracture because you didn't look past the swelling to the root cause of the pain. This is nothing new, consultants have been loathed for this very reason for a long time now. That was me telling you how to do your job. If you wanna know more, google it. If ya got offended, have a nice day!
- roc 15y ago
  Personally, I see a very clear line between culture and politics. The people of the various departments didn't have any conflicts. It was strictly between department-heads. And, for what it's worth, the C-level types loved the project too. What I did was replace a wooden peg with a modern prosthetic and upset the guy who was selling wood oil for conditioning the peg and the guy who sold the leather straps [1]. edit: That said, sure, it'd have been less stressful if I worked in the politics up-front. I said as much. But I've done it that way enough to know it would inevitably have compromised the system. And my post was a response to "why aren't the systems better?". [1] and him, only because he couldn't see past the loss of the peg-strap business to see the gain of business making, maintaining and adjusting straps for the modern prosthetic.
  - namank 15y ago
    You are right, there IS a line between culture and politics. But thats the thing. You should count politics as part of your requirements too, or thats what the theory states anyway. For example, lets say you digitized an inventory form for a sales dept of a plastic company. By doing this, you effectively removed use of a pen from the 'system'. Now what politics could you possibly be affecting by eliminating use of a pen? Well, you could cause an uproar between the finance dept and the sales dept. Finance says that the organization's major stock holder is a pen company and the sales department must use pens (for whatever reason...lets pick advertising and promotion). Now your system made the world efficient but it failed to account the current work practices of your client. You, sir, just screwed up.
sleight42 15y ago
Having consulted with various branches of the US Govt for about 13 years, I can safely say that this is almost exactly how most govt projects work. They are far more often about satisfying political objectives for bureaucrats than helping the user. This is why I'm far happier now consulting to startups than to large corporations or the govt.
Craiggybear 15y ago
Oh God. I sympathise I really do. I have been in that particular situation twice and never again. I am very wary about internal politics in certain types of organisation and like to have a full overview of it way before commiting myself. If that's not possible I don't take the work. I admit to liking waterfall myself (it suits the kind of work I do) and if well done by competent people and for certain types of project its the way to go ...
cleaver 15y ago
From my experience in consulting (over a decade), I have to agree. It's extremely difficult to convince people to do things right. It's sooo much easier to give a friendly grin, a firm handshake, maybe dinner or a round of golf and state emphatically that "you need an ERP or CRM or other three-letter acronym". Ultimately, it comes to corporate Darwinism... the companies that evolve reasonable processes prevail. Others will only leave a fossil record. Unfortunately, we have governments as well as corporations.
- sleight42 15y ago
  And yet some of us keep charging at windmills, trying to do what they allegedly engaged us for. With about as much success.
nlawalker 15y ago
>> It's simply too easy and financially rewarding to allow a client's political nonsense to screw up every stage of a project. I have less stress, the people who pay me are happier and I bill far more hours. This is now one of my favorite comments from this site. Very well put!
- sleight42 15y ago
  I have less stress. But have I done my client a service? No! I've helped enable the flawed behavior that led them to engage me in the first place! Are you a consultant because you want to earn a big paycheck without much stress or because you want to make teams better? For me, the latter comes first. I even go so far as to tell the client when I believe that I can no longer add value equivalent to my cost: when they no longer need me. My job is, ultimately, to become superfluous: to make them better then get out of the way. Now if I was engaged because of that delusional thinking, that's another problem...
theorique 15y ago
Great anecdote that illustrates this principle observed by Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." (from I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked)
- sleight42 15y ago
  Speaks well to why money won't ever get out of politics: it's not in the interest of the politicians.
Duff 15y ago
My favorite thing like this for a purely technical topic was a project where there was a mandatory requirement to NOT support ethernet auto-negotiation. Why? The company had a long-standing policy of manually setting speed and duplex to ensure that there were no duplex mismatches. The was a team of 6-7 people who would audit servers and check switchports, and they produced a report was issued every week, and reviewed by the CIO and other luminaries. People would be shamed for errant configurations, as only the auto-negotiation team could configure NICs. The director who controlled the auto-negotiate squad was politically powerful, and got all sorts of power out of it -- including banning GigE. As late as 2010, this org was deploying dozens of 100MB NICs to ESX hosts to get sufficient bandwidth. They also purchased 100MB NICs for desktops.
- rhizome 15y ago
  I don't know if you were around 10 years ago, but there used to be real problems between certain network cards and switches that prevented autoneg from being 100% reliable. For any company of a certain age I would not be surprised to see a policy like the one you describe.
  - phuff 15y ago
    For a long time that was my first question anytime there was a network problem that wasn't a simple solve on the client. Step 1: Disable/Enable interface Step 2: Call NOC: "Can you tell me what this port is autonegotiated to?"
  - quanticle 15y ago
    The surprising thing isn't the policy. The surprising thing is the persistence of the policy even after it's no longer beneficial in any way. It's been more than a decade since Ethernet auto-negotiation became reliable. During that decade, that company has paid for a team to go around and do manually what could have been done by an automated process for a trillionth of the cost. That's a staggering amount of waste.
    - rhizome 15y ago
recusancy 15y ago
This needs to be a post in itself!
PakG1 15y ago
For these political reasons, it's important to have executive-level support, or else it would never fly. My first job out of school was doing exactly as the gp suggests at a national telecom. Job-shadowing people in their day-to-day work, understanding their problems, and turning around web/desktop apps within days or weeks to solve their problems. We had huge success. We won an international award for what it's worth (Stevie Awards for Best Support Team). We saved our company millions, and were one of the keys for the company to survive a big labour dispute. Can you believe that previously, for a national telecom, all orders for corporate telecom solutions had to be gateway-checked by a single person? We democratized stuff like that so that processes could be much more flat. No need for requirements documents, no change control, complete freedom of creativity, complete freedom to decide what work to accept, etc. I know how that's sometimes necessary for big projects, but for small high-ROI stuff, it was beautiful. The other side of the story is that we ran into huge political problems. Every day, someone was trying to kill our team because we were making the traditional IT groups look bad with our turnaround time and solutions that worked. On the other side, we were automating things that people didn't want automated. If we didn't have support from the CEO down through a specific chain of command, we would have been killed within months, if not weeks. We didn't even call ourselves developers. Our official position title was business analyst because then IT would bug us less. We weren't even part of the official IT department because those guys couldn't get outside the box. So we were just a small group of business analysts who tried to hide until we were too successful to hide anymore. That's when the attacks really started coming. And then we continued to be successful, and then they started trying to copy us instead. Last I heard, that team's unfortunately been swallowed up by the bureaucracy now, and is a shadow of what it once was. Fascinating experience. edit: added end of the story

by roc 15y ago

blader 15y ago

Wow. Thanks for sharing that. This paints a really clear picture of why so much enterprise software are pieces of crap.

angelbob 15y ago
Now don't overgeneralize... There are lots of other reasons why enterprise software is crap.

twerth 15y ago

Well said, and the exact reason I moved away from consulting after a decade of doing it. The developers often get blamed for "not understanding how real people use the system". Most features are requested by C level people who have never actually used the system. While consulting, I've actually been told NOT to talk to the users who will be using the system. In a large enterprise it is often about power and politics, it is rarely about building value and increasing productivity. Vote with your labor, work for a small company.

ansgri 15y ago
For a small consulting company? </sarcasm>

metaskills 15y ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGS2tKQhdhY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGS2tKQhdhY

namank 15y ago

There is process called Contextual Design. Part of it talks about treating the tacit knowledge of a workplace like a very necessary requirement for your software. So that means including the culture of the workplace in your reqs. It sounds dumb at first but it makes perfect sense. What you did at that place was to apply a bandaid to a fracture where it really should have been a cast. But you didn't know it was a fracture because you didn't look past the swelling to the root cause of the pain. This is nothing new, consultants have been loathed for this very reason for a long time now. That was me telling you how to do your job. If you wanna know more, google it. If ya got offended, have a nice day!

roc 15y ago
Personally, I see a very clear line between culture and politics. The people of the various departments didn't have any conflicts. It was strictly between department-heads. And, for what it's worth, the C-level types loved the project too. What I did was replace a wooden peg with a modern prosthetic and upset the guy who was selling wood oil for conditioning the peg and the guy who sold the leather straps [1]. edit: That said, sure, it'd have been less stressful if I worked in the politics up-front. I said as much. But I've done it that way enough to know it would inevitably have compromised the system. And my post was a response to "why aren't the systems better?". [1] and him, only because he couldn't see past the loss of the peg-strap business to see the gain of business making, maintaining and adjusting straps for the modern prosthetic.
- namank 15y ago
  You are right, there IS a line between culture and politics. But thats the thing. You should count politics as part of your requirements too, or thats what the theory states anyway. For example, lets say you digitized an inventory form for a sales dept of a plastic company. By doing this, you effectively removed use of a pen from the 'system'. Now what politics could you possibly be affecting by eliminating use of a pen? Well, you could cause an uproar between the finance dept and the sales dept. Finance says that the organization's major stock holder is a pen company and the sales department must use pens (for whatever reason...lets pick advertising and promotion). Now your system made the world efficient but it failed to account the current work practices of your client. You, sir, just screwed up.

sleight42 15y ago

Having consulted with various branches of the US Govt for about 13 years, I can safely say that this is almost exactly how most govt projects work. They are far more often about satisfying political objectives for bureaucrats than helping the user. This is why I'm far happier now consulting to startups than to large corporations or the govt.

Craiggybear 15y ago

Oh God. I sympathise I really do. I have been in that particular situation twice and never again. I am very wary about internal politics in certain types of organisation and like to have a full overview of it way before commiting myself. If that's not possible I don't take the work. I admit to liking waterfall myself (it suits the kind of work I do) and if well done by competent people and for certain types of project its the way to go ...

cleaver 15y ago

From my experience in consulting (over a decade), I have to agree. It's extremely difficult to convince people to do things right. It's sooo much easier to give a friendly grin, a firm handshake, maybe dinner or a round of golf and state emphatically that "you need an ERP or CRM or other three-letter acronym". Ultimately, it comes to corporate Darwinism... the companies that evolve reasonable processes prevail. Others will only leave a fossil record. Unfortunately, we have governments as well as corporations.

sleight42 15y ago
And yet some of us keep charging at windmills, trying to do what they allegedly engaged us for. With about as much success.

nlawalker 15y ago

>> It's simply too easy and financially rewarding to allow a client's political nonsense to screw up every stage of a project. I have less stress, the people who pay me are happier and I bill far more hours. This is now one of my favorite comments from this site. Very well put!

sleight42 15y ago
I have less stress. But have I done my client a service? No! I've helped enable the flawed behavior that led them to engage me in the first place! Are you a consultant because you want to earn a big paycheck without much stress or because you want to make teams better? For me, the latter comes first. I even go so far as to tell the client when I believe that I can no longer add value equivalent to my cost: when they no longer need me. My job is, ultimately, to become superfluous: to make them better then get out of the way. Now if I was engaged because of that delusional thinking, that's another problem...

theorique 15y ago

Great anecdote that illustrates this principle observed by Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." (from I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked)

sleight42 15y ago
Speaks well to why money won't ever get out of politics: it's not in the interest of the politicians.

Duff 15y ago

My favorite thing like this for a purely technical topic was a project where there was a mandatory requirement to NOT support ethernet auto-negotiation. Why? The company had a long-standing policy of manually setting speed and duplex to ensure that there were no duplex mismatches. The was a team of 6-7 people who would audit servers and check switchports, and they produced a report was issued every week, and reviewed by the CIO and other luminaries. People would be shamed for errant configurations, as only the auto-negotiation team could configure NICs. The director who controlled the auto-negotiate squad was politically powerful, and got all sorts of power out of it -- including banning GigE. As late as 2010, this org was deploying dozens of 100MB NICs to ESX hosts to get sufficient bandwidth. They also purchased 100MB NICs for desktops.

rhizome 15y ago
I don't know if you were around 10 years ago, but there used to be real problems between certain network cards and switches that prevented autoneg from being 100% reliable. For any company of a certain age I would not be surprised to see a policy like the one you describe.
- phuff 15y ago
  For a long time that was my first question anytime there was a network problem that wasn't a simple solve on the client. Step 1: Disable/Enable interface Step 2: Call NOC: "Can you tell me what this port is autonegotiated to?"
- quanticle 15y ago
  The surprising thing isn't the policy. The surprising thing is the persistence of the policy even after it's no longer beneficial in any way. It's been more than a decade since Ethernet auto-negotiation became reliable. During that decade, that company has paid for a team to go around and do manually what could have been done by an automated process for a trillionth of the cost. That's a staggering amount of waste.
  - rhizome 15y ago

recusancy 15y ago

This needs to be a post in itself!

PakG1 15y ago

For these political reasons, it's important to have executive-level support, or else it would never fly. My first job out of school was doing exactly as the gp suggests at a national telecom. Job-shadowing people in their day-to-day work, understanding their problems, and turning around web/desktop apps within days or weeks to solve their problems. We had huge success. We won an international award for what it's worth (Stevie Awards for Best Support Team). We saved our company millions, and were one of the keys for the company to survive a big labour dispute. Can you believe that previously, for a national telecom, all orders for corporate telecom solutions had to be gateway-checked by a single person? We democratized stuff like that so that processes could be much more flat. No need for requirements documents, no change control, complete freedom of creativity, complete freedom to decide what work to accept, etc. I know how that's sometimes necessary for big projects, but for small high-ROI stuff, it was beautiful. The other side of the story is that we ran into huge political problems. Every day, someone was trying to kill our team because we were making the traditional IT groups look bad with our turnaround time and solutions that worked. On the other side, we were automating things that people didn't want automated. If we didn't have support from the CEO down through a specific chain of command, we would have been killed within months, if not weeks. We didn't even call ourselves developers. Our official position title was business analyst because then IT would bug us less. We weren't even part of the official IT department because those guys couldn't get outside the box. So we were just a small group of business analysts who tried to hide until we were too successful to hide anymore. That's when the attacks really started coming. And then we continued to be successful, and then they started trying to copy us instead. Last I heard, that team's unfortunately been swallowed up by the bureaucracy now, and is a shadow of what it once was. Fascinating experience. edit: added end of the story