Drawing on Success Modes


The surprising thing about human success modes is how nebulous and improbable they seem. They include

  • Being good at looking around

  • Being able to learn

  • Being malleable

  • Taking pride in work

  • Taking pride in contributing

  • Being good citizens

  • Taking initiative

Are these the mechanisms that consistently pull projects through to safety?

In my interview notes, I find that one answer showed up repeatedly when I asked what caused a project to succeed in the end:

"A few good people stepped in at key moments and did whatever was needed to get the job done."

For the first eight years of my interviews, I assumed that the speakers meant that they had messed up, and only personal heroics had saved the project.

Slowly, though, as I kept hearing it, I realized that I could not explain why people did that or the overall role of this sort of action on the project. It was by investigating this sentence that I started to see the powerful effects of the human success factors just mentioned, effects that are relevant no matter whether a tight or loose process is being used.

Let's look at these success factors.

Good at Looking Around

That people are good at looking around is reflected in the ways they organize the paper in their lives: books, reports, addresses, and so on. A common, human way of sorting is to use the "shell sort" algorithm: We build piles ordered according to the sorting criterion (for example, alphabetically, or by date) but leave things unsorted within any pile. We then break each pile into smaller piles and repeat until each pile is small enough to sort by eye and by hand. Except . . . we often don't do that final sort. When the pile is small enough to sort by eye and by hand, we often just leave it like that and find any item of interest just by scanning the contents of the pile.

The standard address book is a perfect example of this. An address book is sorted into sections by starting letter, but the entries within a section are not sorted. They are just written in any order, and we scan the section to find the entry of interest.

A more extreme example is the way many people sort papers in their offices. They have stacks of papers in general piles and locate reports by looking through the relevant stacks.

The important thing to notice is that this lack of final sorting is not bothersome. Most people do not even notice it but work on the assumption that they can locate things fast enough through scanning and by memory associations.

Trygve Reenskaug gave the following example of being good at looking around on a project:

Offshore Oil Platform Design

Trygve tried to get a designer of offshore oil platforms interested in a computer-aided design system. Trygve suggested that the system could add value to the project by tracking all the design update activity touching any part of the platform.

The engineer replied, "Just have it store the phone numbers of the people working on each part. I'll call them and find out."


A second example of people using their ability to look around is the way code maintenance is done.

Keeping traceability and design documents up to date is very expensive and unreliable (particularly given the weakness of humans with regard to consistency). In most projects, it is not long before the documentation doesn't match the code.

If keeping the two in sync were essential, project teams would not be able to continue through the maintenance phase. However, code maintainers expect this mismatch, and so they use the faulty documentation simply as a means of getting "close" to the area that will need changing.

As soon as they are close, their eyes and intelligence take care of the rest. They plan on just looking around until they find the section of code to change.

Inside the theory of the cooperative game, we can use this human ability and plan on making the documentation "good enough to get close," close enough to use the native human ability to look around and find the right place to make a change.

A third place where we count on people being good at looking around is the role of technical lead.

The title "Technical Lead" contains the assumption that this person has done something similar enough before, that he has a sense of when the project is all right and when it is off track. The Technical Lead is not given any instructions about to how to do this. He is simply supposed to "look around and notice" when something is not right and somehow invent a way to get back into the safety zone.

"Looking around and noticing when something is not right" is something that everyone on the project does. I have found people in every possible job description who have detected something amiss with some aspect of the projectvery often not their ownand have reported it to the person who should deal with it. Or, they have just dealt with it themselves, specifically stepping outside their own job descriptions to take care of it.

People Learn

Novices don't stay novices forever. People who are novices on one project become experienced by the end of the same project and often are senior designers a few projects later.

This ability to learn along the way helps many projects. Within a single project's time frame, the people learn new technology, new problem domain, new process, and how to work with new colleagues.

Often, a team struggles through the first two increments, becoming stronger and stronger until successful results at the end are almost a given. In long-running projects and in situations where there is a steady flow of small initiatives, senior people leave and junior peoplewho have become seniortake their places.

We take advantage of people's ability to learn within a project by splitting it into subprojects (incremental development again). This provides not only the small wins and feedback discussed earlier but also the opportunity for people to learn how the process works. "Oh!" they might say, "that's why we had to write the input validation fields in the data structures table." They use their ability to look around to detect what needs improvement, and then they invent new ways of working to try out in the next increment.

Malleable

People are remarkably able to act differently given new motives and new information. This is the mechanism in the two stories at the start of the "Overcoming Failure Modes" section: the small-goods shop and the C3 project.

In the story of the small-goods shop, we don't have enough information to know why the girls changed their work habits.

In the story of the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation (C3) project, Kent Beck needed to shift the team's cultural values away from creating clever code to creating simple solutions, a notoriously difficult task.

One technique he used was the peer-pressure ritual. In one such ritual, the group formed a procession, placed a propeller beanie on the head of someone with an overly clever solution, and then spun the propeller on the beanie, commenting on the "cleverness" of the solution. The negative attention from peers caused people to move away from clever solutions; appreciation for simple designs drew them to simple solutions.

True to people being different, not everyone on the team was "malleable" enough to adopt XP. One person did not enjoy the new working style with its requirements for conformity and close cooperation and eventually left the project.

Contributing and Taking Initiative

In the previous section I discussed pride-in-contribution and pride-in-work as strong intrinsic motivators. Now I suggest that they are also core contributors to project success.

People who have pride in their work do a better job than those who do not, and they are also more likely to step outside of their own job descriptions to repair or report some other problem that they notice. Even though their only reward may be that they have done a good deed, I continually encounter people for whom this is sufficient.

Notice that we are back to the spontaneous behavior I mentioned at the start of the chapter. At that time, I described spontaneity as a difficulty in building a predictive model of humans working in a system. Now I include it as one of the human success modes.

Start with some pride-in-work and a sense of citizenship. Add being good at looking around and acting spontaneously. With these, we see people taking initiative to get the job done every day, an ongoing activity that keeps the project operating at peak form.

This is not an indication of process failure. Even the best process won't be able to account for every surprise that occurs on the project. Therefore, it becomes important that people notice, mention, and resolve problems that they see. The good thing to notice is that as the team gets better at pride-in-work, communication, citizenship, and initiative, the process can become less formal, based more on noticing what needs doing.

Combining Success Modes

Is it possible to construct a development methodology just around pride-in-work, citizenship, community, people being good at looking around, and taking initiative?

It is. The following excerpt (Hock 1999, pp. 205207) is a description of how the first VISA clearing program was developed in 60 days. Note Dee Hock's use of the phrase "self-organization," synonymous with people taking initiative in a community.

Dee Hock's VISA Story

"We decided to become our own prime contractor, farming out selected tasks to a variety of software developers and then coordinating and implementing results. Conventional wisdom held it to be one of the worst possible ways to build computerized communications systems.

"We rented cheap space in a suburban building and dispensed with leasehold improvements in favor of medical curtains on rolling frames for the limited spacial separation required. . . .

"Swiftly, self-organization emerged. An entire wall became a pinboard with every remaining day calendared across the top. Someone grabbed an unwashed coffee cup and suspended it on a long piece of string pinned to the current date. Every element of work to be done was listed on a scrap of paper with the required completion date and name of the person who had accepted the work. Anyone could revise the elements, adding tasks or revising dates, provided that they coordinated with others affected. Everyone, at any time, could see the picture emerge and evolve. They could see how the whole depended on their work and how their work was connected to every other part of the effort. Groups constantly assembled in front of the board as need and inclination arose, discussing and deciding in continuous flow and then dissolving as needs were met. As each task was completed, its scrap of paper would be removed. Each day, the cup and string moved inexorably ahead.

"Every day, every scrap of paper that fell behind the grimy string would find an eager group of volunteers to undertake the work required to remove it. To be able to get one's own work done and help another became a sought-after privilege. Nor did anyone feel beggared by accepting help. Such Herculean effort meant that at any time, anyone's task could fall behind and emerge on the wrong side of the string.

"Leaders spontaneously emerged and reemerged, none in control, but all in order. Ingenuity exploded. Individuality and diversity flourished. People astonished themselves at what they could accomplish and were amazed at the suppressed talents that emerged in others.

"Position became meaningless. Power over others became meaningless. Time became meaningless. Excitement about doing the impossible increased, and a community based on purpose, principle, and people arose. Individuality, self-worth, ingenuity, and creativity flourished; and as they did, so did the sense of belonging to something larger than self, something beyond immediate gain and monetary gratification.

"No one ever forgot the joy of bringing to work the wholeness of mind, body, and spirit, discovering in the process that such wholeness is impossible without inseparable connection with the others in the larger purpose of community effort. Money was a small part of what happened. The effort was fueled by a spontaneous expansion of the nonmonetary exchange of value. . . .

"No one ever replaced the dirty string and no one washed the cup. . . . The BASE-1 system came up on time, under budget, and exceeded all operating objectives."


According to traditional software engineering methods, this project should have been a shambles. According to the cooperative game theory, it is clear why it works.

Is it a repeatable process? The answer depends on how well the group manages to keep those key factors alive.

Heroes as Ordinary People

One point I wish to make is that in well-run projects, people in any job description can notice when something is out of kilter and act to correct it or notify someone who can.

Although heroes who work overtime may be needed to save poorly run projects, there is a much more interesting phenomenon to observe: ordinary people doing their work with a sense of pride and community and in doing that work noticing something wrong, passing information to someone who can fix the problem, or stepping out of their job descriptions to handle it themselves. This is an indicator of a community in action, not an indicator of a poor development process. Note the strength of this community effect in the VISA story above.

Pride-in-work, citizenship, and communication even have an effect in strongly "engineering" cultures. Here is an example from computer hardware design:

Finding Errors in PC Boards

When designing computer hardware, one person has the job of examining with a magnifying glass the photographic negatives used to produce the printed circuit boards. The person is to any find hairline cracks that may be in the negatives and to paint over them with black ink.

One day, the woman who was doing this work noticed a strange looping pattern in the line she was following. Deciding that it couldn't be correct, she notified the department head.

He first dismissed the idea that she could have found anything substantive but at her insistence took the time to investigate further.

As it turned out, a circuit drawing error had resulted in two signals being tied together. The error showed up in the original circuit design. It had somehow slipped past all the design, drawing, and board layout reviews.


I wish to draw two morals from this story. The first is that everyone on a project is in a position to detect a mistake, regardless of the type of system being designed.

The second is a lead-in to a key topic in the next chapter: After a person detects a mistake, the cost of getting that information to the right person starts to drive the cost of the project.

I close this section with this summary from NASA's "Deorbit flight software lessons learned" (NASA 1998; my italics added for emphasis).

"Perhaps most important for the long term, during the course of the project, a capable core team for rapid development of GN&C systems evolved. This included finding talented team members; training in and gaining experience with the tools, processes and methodology; and integrating into a cohesive team.

"After working together in the RDL for a year, team members have acquired expertise in methods, tools and domain. A helpful and cooperative atmosphere has encouraged and enabled cross training. A willingness on the part of team members to address any and all project issues has proven invaluable on many occasions . . . this team can be a long-term asset to the division and to the agency."



Agile Software Development. The Cooperative Game
Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0321482751
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 126

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