I suspect that my boss has helped focus this thought for me.� I began wondering about why people wait until finishing something before seeking feedback.� Underlying assumptions behind checking something at the end might be -
- that you’re going to get it right first time.
- that nobody knows better than you do.
- that it is going to be faster if you do it all at once (tightly coupled to the first point).
Another possibility might be that you’re afraid of negative feedback, which, in the context of working on a software team, is delaying the inevitable.
I’m sure there are more possibilities.
Problems with our assumptions
That you’re going to get it right first time
How might we behave if we assume that we are not going to get it right?
That nobody knows better than you do
How might we behave if we assume that everyone might know something we don’t?
That it is going to be faster if you do it all at once
How do we know that ‘faster for me’ is necessarily faster for the project overall?
Jon Eaves was blogging about problems related to development goals not aligning with business objectives and it resounded with some thoughts I had been having on company values.
In addition to goal alignment, I’m thinking at the moment that alignment of values is equally important, or at the very least it helps when the true values of the company are clearly stated. Goals tell us where we want to go. Values help us make decisions along the way.
While individual values may vary from the company’s, by being conscious of our own goals and that of our employer’s, we can discuss the differences, or at least see just how wide the gap is between one’s own values and one’s employer. I think this is a good starting point.
I overheard the following sentence from a project manager, accompanied by shock and outrage:
“Two *resources* didn’t turn up this morning!”
I believe the word they were looking for is “people”.
…tools for thinking workers which don’t work the way they think, and don’t help support thinking?
Which tools have you used that don’t leave you with this feeling?
Which tools make you feel this way?
My list-
- Mercury products I’ve used
- Rational Robot (for performance testing)
- Lots of programming languages. Korean makes sense to me. C# doesn’t. Or rather, it does, but I don’t understand why you would choose to build a new language that way. Not very poka-yoke.
It’s time for new tools.
