Re: The non-learning organization?

[Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au>]

**Easy--just start drawing DFDs and all your problems will be solved!

But seriously...

I worked for a company with some of the same problems, though not as 
bad, from the sound of it. They had excellent technical staff, though 
not enough of them to cover all the technical work that needed doing 
(develop new features, fix bugs, handle support calls, support pre-sales 
and customer trials, work trade shows and conferences, support 
distributors, ...). The result was a lot of churn and delays.

They brought on someone to be a project manager. I don't know if that 
was her official title but that's what she did--managed the people so 
that the right things got done in the right order so that most projects 
got done mostly on schedule.

You might think that you'd need an experienced software development 
manager to make this work, but in fact she had no software development 
experience and not much technical background.Yes, we were a software 
company with technical products and technical challenges that needed 
technical solutions, but there were technical people to deal with those. 
This company's main problems weren't technical, and I expect that's true 
of most software development companies.

The problem was coordination. Fran just made sure there was a plan for 
each project, including what people and equipment were needed for each 
phase. She made sure that at any given time it still looked feasible for 
all the projects to be completed according to the plan. If it no longer 
looked feasible for some reason--
- let's add this cool feature!
- let's write our own browser! in Java!
- Bill needs the stacker for a demo in Sydney next week but Ben needs it 
in Perth for testing!
... then something would have to change--either what was promised, or 
when it was promised, or how the plan said we'd get there. She did this 
without cattle prods or 36-hour coding marathons.

This might sound like either basic project management or pie-in-the-sky, 
depending on where you work, but in my experience this basic stuff is 
often what's lacking in smaller software development orgs. Have plans 
that make sense, then each week check that they still make sense in 
light of what happened last week. In that company, we outsourced 
(insourced?) most of our project management to one person.

I think what made it work was that she didn't have any other axes to 
grind, wasn't interested in technical holy wars, wasn't pining to get 
back to 'real work', didn't have her own projects to compete with other 
projects. She just made sure that the company made promises it could 
keep and kept the promises that it made.

Is there any chance this would work in your place, Rebecca? You'd need 
the right person, management to be on side, and reasonable good will or 
pragmatism from the existing project leaders.

Regards

Stuart
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