I.T., Leadership and Creativity

I am not sure if I should help with this...

This study (excerpted here in the press release) shows that bullying and abusive leaders are often tolerated if they are perceived to be successful.
This is is no surprise to me. I once had the misfortune (in 1999) of working for a Vice President at Sabre who had no discernible interpersonal skills (I did not think this was possible, but the daily evidence backed up that unlikely reality). He was a classic tyrannical, bullying, obnoxious leader, yet his leadership style was quite clearly tolerated by Sabre right up to the point that he left the corporation.
In that particular case, the VP waited until I went on vacation, then took away all of my responsibilities (while neglecting to inform me until I went to see him on my return, after discovering that everybody in the team was treating me like I was radioactive) and told me to go find another job within Sabre. While classless in the extreme, the move was fortuitous in that I was able to find another role in Sabre and quit working for what is definitely the most interpersonally defective leader I have ever encountered.
The conclusion of this study is somewhat depressing, but quite understandable. A lot of corporate leaders, even when confronted with clear evidence of bad behaviour by leaders, will attempt to rationalize away the evidence, using a variety of tactics ranging from cynical, lazy and tired cliches (a classic one being "to make an omelette you have to break a few eggs") through to ad hominem fallacies, usually based on some variant of allegations that the evidence for bad behaviour is coming from "poor performers", "whiners" etc. etc. None of the rationalizations is at all plausible, but they are remarkably resilient when people wish to live in denial.
UPDATE - I found an interesting doctoral thesis that suggests that if you find yourself faced with a bullying leader, that collective action is a more likely route to effecting positive change.

Now why didn't the other airlines think of this one first...?

With Carly Fiorina re-appearing recently as a public figure to try and gain the Republican nomination for a Senate seat in California (after a lengthy period out of the public eye battling breast cancer), I found this interesting article about her tenure at HP, which ended with her dismissal in 2005.
As is often the case, the demonization of Fiorina after she left HP tended to focus on and personalize her own perceived failings, and overlook the contribution of other actors in the debacle. As this article makes clear, there was plenty of blame to go around, starting with the HP board of directors, who, worried about the decline in the HP stock price, felt that they needed an outside to "save" the corporation. Once they had hired Fiorina, they failed to exert proper stewardship and ignored numerous warning signs up till and after her dismissal. As a result, HP came under scrutiny for ethics violations even after Fiorina left, and Carly Fiorina's successor as CEO, Mark Hurd, had to apologize to the outside world for the ethical lapses.
The situation that unfolded at HP was very similar to what occurred inside EDS during the period of time when Dick Brown was the CEO. Like Fiorina, Dick Brown was a sales-driven deal-maker with little interest in operational processes. As a result, he focussed on splashy sales deals (which drove the stock price up) and then ignored execution issues (which in turn drove the stock down and eroded his credibility to the point where he was forced to resign in 2003). Once again, he was enabled in this by a weak and largely compliant board, his own position as CEO and Chairman, which is still one of the colossal conflicts of interest for a corporation, and his own employment contract, which rewarded him handsomely for inflating the EDS stock price. Dick was merely doing what his contract incented him to to, which in the short term made the marketplace happy, but it stored up medium-term trouble as solutions were oversold and execution was neglected.
Both Carly Fiorina and Dick Brown were examples of what the article terms "rock star" CEOs; sales-focussed ethically neutral leaders who came to be seen by their employees as self-centered, uncaring and inauthentic. Sadly, the pendulum in large corporations has not yet swung all the way back from those excesses.

Good posting about some of the traps that you can fall into if you are a smart person...

The 6 principles look useful...thanks for the tweet from Guy Kawasaki.

Courtesy of Bud Caddell of WhatConsumesMe, here is an excellent Venn Diagram that sums up some of the dilemnas that we all face in our work lives...

I spent my travel time en route from Dallas to Sacramento reading "Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity" by Hugh MacLeod. Hugh MacLeod is the guy who gradually backed into a new career drawing and selling cartoons drawn on the back of business cards.
As I have come to expect from book titles, the book does not contain any single piece of advice "ignore everybody"...it is a lot more subtle than that.
The book is an easy-to-read primer by a grounded creative. I especially liked his constant refrain of "don't give up the day job just yet". As he explains, he gradually moved from working in advertizing to being a full-time creative person, but even now he does work that is not intrinsically exciting because "it pays the bills". The book validated my long-term plan to slowly move to a work life more focussed on creative endeavours. It also made me more energized to work at putting this plan into effect in 2010 and beyond.

Now I am beginning to understand what it was...

One of the continuing annoyances of boarding or leaving planes is the number of passengers who appear to believe that they can pull or push wheeled baggage down the aisle of a commercial jet plane.
The reality is that you cannot, at least not for any distance.
Wheeled baggage has small castoring wheels designed to allow the baggage to be pulled behind you. The wheels are self-steering in that they rely on the forward motion of the baggage to keep them in trail and pointing in the right direction. The small size of the wheels and their lack of ground contact results in poor longitudinal stability. The baggage will wander if the pull motion or diection is inconsistent, and it does not take much wander for the baggage to foul the seats. In addition, the clearances between the sides of the baggage and the seats are small - of the order of 1-4 inches. The growth in the size of baggage as a result of the TSA checks has made carry-ons larger and longer also.
I have yet to see a single passenger succeed in pulling a piece of wheeled baggage more than 4-5 rows on a plane before the baggage fouls the seats, which results in the passenger having to pull the baggage back, straighten it up and then try to continue. The fouling is usually a shock to the passenger since the baggage is behind them and they cannot see it wandering until it strikes a seat and usually stops, sometimes this results in the passenger tripping up also.
If you try to push baggage, which some people try to do, the results are far worse. Unless you push exactly straight and the wheel direction is exactly parallel to the direction of motion, the wheels will rapily deviate from the direction of travel, and very quickly your baggage will dive to the right or left. Given the limited baggage-to-seat clearances, this means that anybody trying to push wheeled baggage down an aisle is going to hit the seats within a matter of feet. However, it would appear that many passengers are unable to work through these realities.
I would like to see a rule that passengers should not push wheeled baggage, but instead carry it down the plane. This will be unpopular, especially now that many passengers are avoiding checking any baggage and instead using carry-ons for all of their luggage. However, if it could be enforced, it would speed up entry and exit from planes.

This article from BNet outlines eight ways in which your Social Media strategy can fail. Watching from within my current employer, I can see a number of these mistakes unfolding on a daily basis...

I had an experience with Avis today at Sacramento Airport that has caused me to decide that I will not rent from them ever again unless I have no alternative. They are fired, period.
I am on a 3 month consulting engagement in Sacramento, Monday through Fridays. Last week (the first week of the engagement) I arrived in Sacramento and went to the Avis Preferred counter. When I presented my credit card and driver's license, I was asked for my Wizard number. I have had a Wizard number in the past, but it is not written in my PDA, so I told them. The lady at the Preferred counter hunted in the system, and finally said that my current credit card was not linked to a Wizard number, which is required. She gave me to understand that she had changed the linkage, and I got a car via the Preferred Desk with no delay.
Today, I walked into the Preferred desk and presented my credit card and drivers license once more. This time, the reaction was very different. The guy who I was dealing with curtly demanded if I had a Wizard ID. I said Yes. He looked it up online, was unable to find it, and asked if I knew what it was. When I said No, he handed me back my cards and said curtly "go to the main desk". No expression of regret, no empathy, just a brush-off. Not impressive.
I then had to wait in line for 25 minutes at the main counter, since Avis had only 2 agents trying to manage a queue. They clearly were having trouble keeping up with demand, because they kept calling around other rental companies asking about cars. When I finally got to the front of the queue, I mentioned my experience to the agent. Instead of an empathetic response, she replied in an offhand and irritated fashion "you can only get an ID by calling the Avis support desk". She then further irritated me by demanding that I produce my business card in order to get the EDS corporate rate for the rental. I pointed out that I booked the rental through the EDS Travel Portal, with a corporate discount code. This made no impact on her, she said "we have to see your business card". I produced a business card and the rental was processed.
I finally left the rental lot 30 minutes later than when I arrived.
This is simply not good enough. From the time I arrived this morning at the rental location, Avis treated me in a flip, rude and dismissive fashion. They just lost all future business from me. They are fractionally cheaper for corporate rentals, but that is meaningless if I have to wait 30 minutes and be treated like a lower form of life. I lost 30 minutes of office work time because they behaved like a collection of surly and unresponsive idiots.
Good riddance, Avis.

UPDATE - I received this response from Avis today:

Dear Mr. Shelvlin,

Thank you for contacting us through the Avis Website. Please accept my sincere apology for the delay in responding to your inquiry.

We are actively interested in and committed to providing the best all-around service for our customers. It is distressing to receive a report of this nature and to learn that you have found some aspect of your rental experience to be less than satisfactory.

Constructive criticism is appreciated and you may be assured that this matter is not being dismissed with my reply to you. A copy of your report has been forwarded to the responsible manager, with instructions to bring the location into compliance with our standards.

Avis is committed to excellence in providing our customers the best all-around service available in the car rental industry. Our customers?
satisfaction with our service is most important.

We view with extreme gravity any report of discourteous treatment of a customer, as there is never an excuse for bad manners. Under all circumstances, Mr. Shevlin our customers should be treated with respect and professionalism. We regret any breach of this standard made by the Avis agent with whom you spoke. Please be assured that corrective measures have been taken to prevent any recurrence.

Sincerely,

Tara King
Avis Customer Service Representative
custserv@avis.com
FAX: 918-270-2920

Having decided that this is a form letter, which does not contain any specific actions, or promises of action to rectify the appallingly dismissive way in which I was treated, my decision stands and Avis is fired.

This is an interesting summary of a talk given by IBM/Rational and Agile delivery leader Scott Ambler. Some of his comments read as rather contentious, but there is more than a grain of truth to most of them...

This article by John Kay in the Financial Times starts with a discussion on the disappearance of Woolworths from the UK, but then broadens into a much more interesting and valuable discussion of how to sell (or not) capitalism in the current economic downturn. Some key points he makes:

But those who defend the market system are often the system's worst enemies. I recently listened to a group of businessmen deploring the anti-capitalist tone of much of what is taught in schools. They had a point. But they spoiled it by promoting a description of capitalism that was at once repulsive and false...
...They explained that in addition to the considerable salaries senior managers receive, large financial incentives were needed to persuade them to perform the duties that were attached to their jobs. In contrast, people who worked in the public sector mostly did so because they were too lazy or ineffective to get jobs in large corporations. They professed surprise that teachers did not relay these opinions to their charges. I understood why, and was relieved they did not.

Kay's summary is succinct and compelling:

Young people looking towards the world of work should understand that the greatest reward from a job is the satisfaction of doing it well. The people who are most successful in business in the long run are people who are passionate about business - whose aspirations are to bring new products and services to market, to serve customers better, to motivate their staff to greater efforts.

I am familiar with the stereotypical thinking patterns quoted by Kay in this article. They almost exactly match the thinking that I suffered from when interacting with my peers and their dumb-ass condescending parents, as the child of parents living in public housing. The stereotype of public housing occupants when I was growing up in the UK was a wearily familiar one; we were all feckless welfare-claiming layabouts who could easily buy our own house, but couldn't be bothered to, and we would rather spend the money on booze, fast cars etc. The reality of my parents working manual jobs and eking out the money was one that they did not even want to process. After all, why engage in critical thinking and comprehension when you can get out the stereotypical broad brush and write off whole groups of people as somehow less deserving?
One of the less attractive features of many business leaders in the last 18 months has been the extent to which they have been in denial about the massive gaps in opportunity and wealth that exist between them and people nearer the bottom of the ladder in society, and the extent to which those massive gaps are seen by many people as an indictment of capitalism, not a benefit. This has resulted in some classic "own goals" by leaders who have developed an entitlement mindset. The egregious stupidity exhibited by the Big Three automaker CEOs when they took private jets to Washington DC to ask for government money is but one example of this kind of mindset and the consequent dumb-ass behaviour. However, there are plenty of other examples on display.
One thing that I have tried to explain to friends and acquaintances here in the USA is that if captitalism is seen to be over-exploitative by electors, eventually those electors will vote for significant structural and governance changes. A classic example that I always cite is what happened in the UK immediately after the end of World War II, when the electors dumped Winston Churchill (by common consent one of the great wartime leaders) and the Conservative Party, and opted for socialism implemented by the Labour Party. One of the motives behind this voting change was a determination that business owners and land owners had been exploiting workers and the country, and the balance needed to be redressed. (Later, in the 1960's, the theme would be continued when Labour Party leaders derided the Conservative Party as "the party of tweed jackets and grouse moors").
The results of the UK's socialist period were mixed; one upside was the creation of the National Health Service in 1948, but one of the downsides was the introduction of confiscatory tax policies on businesses and wealthy people, which led to an era of tax avoidance and the decision by many creative and artistic people to live outside the UK. Many of the policies had long-term downsides and contributed to the gradual decay of the UK in the 1950's through the 1970's. Most people I explain this story to usually respond with a scoff to the effect that "this won't happen in the USA". My response is that it may well happen, if enough people see evidence of what they regard as gross exploitation, and they get angry enough about it.

This afternoon at DFW airport, American Airlines apparently lost our plane. I was booked on the 4.30 pm flight from DFW to Sacramento, terminal A gate 19. I arrived at the gate, to find what looked like a fine example of an aicraft parked at the gate. I thought this would be an on-time departure. No such luck. Before long the plane was pulled back from the gate, and the tannoy crackled to life with the news that our flight was delayed. The announcement might have said something about mechanical issues, but then again it could have said that the plane was being stolen for another flight...I was too far from the gate to hear the full story. Then the usual run-around commenced. At 4.15 pm we were shifted to gate 21, so we all trooped along the concourse and settled down for a wait. The gate agent at gate 21 claimed that the flight was delayed until 4.50 pm, but since we reached 4.50 pm with no sign of a plane at gate 21, it soon became apparent that we were now in Bullshit News territory.
The next announcement was that a plane was being rushed over from a hangar. Then came an announcement that the plane was trapped behind another plane in the hangar...this now had me convinced that somebody somewhere was making up BS excuses and passing them down. The gate agents apparently seemed to think so. After the last explanation, she paused and said "Sorry, I know it's not very good as an excuse but that's what we have got".
Eventually a plane showed up. Despite the gate agent request for people to get out of the way at the gate to let passengers on in group order, people kept hanging around getting in the way. What is it with some people that when they enter an airport they have to behave like total oorons? It is almost as if they leave their brains kerbside.
We eventually took off 1 hour and 15 minutes late. I was shoehorned into row 31, behind a lady who instantly deployed her seat recliner, but in front of a seat blocked by a baby carrier. So I could not use my laptop. Grrr. I contented myself with paper writing and listening to which tunes on the iPod are currently corrupted.

I found this article today about the feasibility and viability of offshoring Business Analysis. The discussion begins with this sobering paragraph:

Professor Albert Mehrabian’s communication model for verbal interaction states that for describing feelings and attitudes to something (taken, with apologies, from original LinkedIn discussion from Paul Anderson’s comment):

* 7% of meaning is in the words that are spoken.

* 38% of meaning is paralinguistic (the way that the words are said).

* 55% of meaning is in facial expression.

The immediate (possible) cost saving can be outweighed by costs that will emerge arising from poor analysis which will significantly outweigh the original cost savings.

The key conclusions of the article is that cost savings alone are a poor reason for offshoring this type of activity, and a number of other conditions need to be met for offshoring business analysis to succeed in the medium-term. I think that the article is not really that comprehensive, and there is scope for a more detailed study of how offshoring could be made to work for business analysis. I remain skeptical of the effectiveness of offshoring these types of solution delivery functions, because you run into all sorts of complications, ranging through time zones to differences in verbal language, body language etc. Having just come off a spell on an account dominated by offshore (Indian) resources, I have a very real understanding of how (for example) the word Yes has a very different meaning in different parts of the world.

I got around to doing some reading one lunchtime this week about the differences between the active generations as defined by sociologists. The ones we all hear about are:

Silents              1930-1945
Baby Boomers         1945-1964
Generation X         1965-1980
Generation Y         1981-2000
Millenials           2000-present

I don't think we are about to see any Millenials in the workplace, except possibly on "Bring Your Child To Work" days...however, the other generations are out there. There are not many Silents, but they are still to be found, working away. Generation Y is making its way into the workplace.
Officially, according to this classification, I am a Baby Boomer, since I was born in 1955. However, when I read the defining characteristics of Baby Boomers and compare them to the other generational characteristics, it is not that simple...for example, although I still have trouble seeing the employer-employee relationship in purely transactional terms (a classic Baby Boomer characteristic), I have the love of music of a Generation X person, and the tech-savviness of a Generation Y person.
I guess this is a powerful personal illustration of the danger of "broad-brush" stereotypes. An alternative view is that, as a natural contrarian, I am like Groucho Marx, who famously said "I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member"...

This book and an associated collection of essays at 37 Signals has some very interesting thoughts about how to build software.

Remember; one person's cynicism is another person's realism...

There is also this one...

Most of us by now have been struggling with the tendency of corporations to replace front-end telephone answering people with Voice Response systems.
On the surface, this makes a lot of sense. Why pay humans to perform the task of routing calls to the appropriate internal support function when you can automate the process using software?
Unfortunately...voice recognition solutions seem to not be advancing in sophistication. Here in the USA, because I have a British accent, I seem to have more trouble than some people in even getting correctly routed inside a VR solution. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard the soft female voice saying something like "we did not understand your response. Please repeat or say "agent". This is not counting the VR solutions that have unresolved branches, where an attempt to return to the beginning of a dialogue is impossible, and you have to disconnect and re-dial. This is an elementary failure in both design and testing of the solution.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, some enterprising individuals set up a web site where you can find out how to crash through VR front-ends and get to talk to a real live human being. This is GetHuman. I have yet to spend any time using it, since I do not have an immediate requirement to enter VR Hell again, but I intend to consult when that time (inevitably) arrives.

One of the big challenges right now in the USA is the sheer speed and scale in which large corporations are responding to the economic downturn by laying off workers. AT&T was the latest large employer to announce over 14,000 layoffs yesterday, but that is just one example.
For a publicly-quoted corporation, it is a sad fact of life that markets generally approve of firings more than hirings. You can be sure that if AT&T leadership, instead of announcing 14,400 layoffs, had instead issued a statement along the lines of "we're not laying off any employees because they are our most valuable asset" the stock price would have dropped like a stone as the marketplace concluded that they were "not serious" about cutting costs.
Underlying AT&T's decision is a conventional wisdom that has the potential to drag the USA into a spiral of deflation. Laid-off employees stop spending, and if they have debts, some of their debt-financed assets may be repossessed, which will further depress asset values...you can see where this is headed. The inflationary pressure of the Federal Reserve expanding the money supply may be swamped by the deflationary pressure of nobody spending any money on anything except essentials.
Exploring that issue is for another time, another place. The whole cascade of bad news about job losses was thrown into sharp relief for me by this Fast Company article about Cisco, which has bucked the marketplace trend by announcing that it does not intend to lay off employees. The article makes it clear that the "no layoffs" pledge is an integral consequence of a leadership strategy which is about 180 degrees removed from the "command and control" strategy that some corporations still operate under (and which many corporations revert to in times of stress).
This begs the wider question of how many corporations operate like Cisco. The consultancy WordBlu, which helps corporations to transition to a more democratic leadership style, is beginning to compile a list of corporations that have embraced stewardship as a model instead of some form of benevolent dictatorship, which is the model that I see returning right now in the USA, as corporations react to adversity by firing their "most important assets" by the thousand. (NOTE to corporate leaders - if employers regard employees as expendable when there is a downturn, do not be surprised if your employees regard their employers as expendable in an upturn. Paybacks can be hell...).
UPDATE - Commenter mook makes the point that corporations usually announce layoffs with a fanfare, while most hiring is relatively stealthy. This may be true some of the time, but it is not true all of the time. Many US corporations (including my employer) have for a long time been laying off employees in small numbers at frequent intervals, in order to not have to conform to the requirements of the WARN Act. At least as many employees have been let go stealthily by that approach as have been laid off in publicly announced layoffs. The other thing I would note is that the very act of not announcing hirings tends to support my basic point - corporations get more brownie points from the marketplace by being seen to be cutting costs via firing than they gain by announcing that they are hiring. It is almost like hiring is a source of shame, but firing is a source of pride. If true, this really tells you a lot about a fundamental dysfunctionality of modern corporate America.

Tyner Bain has a large pile of articles covering the vexed issue of Requirements Management. He is also a Scrum Master, which is a delivery approach that I have tried in the past with some success.

...are very common in most businesses. We are all wearily familiar with the change initiative launched in a blaze of glory by the CEO that rapidly becomes a joke within the corporation, fizzles out and leaves everybody connected with it frustrated or burned.
One challenge is that changing fundamental ways of doing things in a corporation requires a lot of people to put aside existing ways not only of working, but viewing the world. This often collides with the deep values of the people. They suffer from irresolvable cognitive dissonances trying to do so, and back off, especially if they suspect that the initiaitive is merely "CEO Hot Button Of The Year" (which it often is). This mindset is bolstered by the fact that in many corporations, the tenure of front-line workers greatly exceeds that of leaders, who often move onto new roles within 3-4 years. Workers who do not want to embrace the change can simply wait out the change until the promoting leader moves on, then continue in old behaviours.
When chellenged overtly to change, many people respond with dysfunctional behaviours running the whole spectrum from over resistance to covert resistance, bluster, bullying and other unpleasant outbursts. Many times, these behaviours are tolerated because as humans, we tend to shy away from confrontation. For every guy who wants to wade into a fight, there are 20 or so who want to ignore it.
This website deals with some of the issues surrounding dysfunctional behaviour and resistance to change in corporations. I may try to attend some of their webinars. I am going to expand this posting as I find other useful resources.

...is rearing its ugly head in my world, as I work on a sales pursuit in the Pacific North-West. The prospective client has a (self-admitted) poor track record in defining and managing requirements. Ever since I started work in I.T. 30 years (!) ago, requirements have been a consistent theme in my work life. I started out as a maintenance programmer, and rapidly discovered the phenomenon of the dissatisfied customer. Conversation goes something like this:
Customer: This does not meet my requirement
I.T: We coded it according to the specification
Customer: Yes, but what you delivered is not what I wanted
I.T: How can this be?
(both parties stare at each other in bafflement and puzzlement)

9 times out of 10, such conversations occur because of ambiguities or omissions in the requirements. Which brings us to the great underlying challenge of requirements; instead of being written in a language that is suitable for specifying software, requirements are (mostly) written in natural languages, which are highly suitable for conveying nuance and ambiguity...which makes them a poor natural fit for any communication process that requires as little ambiguity as possible. This blog posting neatly explains the underlying issue, using a well-known nursery rhyme as an example...

This article at Social Media Today shows how bad decisions in customer service, which previously would most likely have not become newsworthy, can rapidly spread all over the world thanks to the Internet and social media. The article concludes:

Brands can no longer wait until an issue hits mainstream media to react, nor can they rely on their positive relations with editors at a few media outlets to help protect their brand. Social media is changing the way brands must manage and monitor their brands.

Now that I am studying for the PMP certification, I am working on understanding the difference between the Version 2 of the PMBOK and the Study Guide, which I used in 2003, and Version 3, which was adopted in 2007. In the process of examining this issue, I have found a number of web sites that look to be useful sources of information.

I.T. Toolbox Blogs - Project Management.
Herding Cats - a general project management blog.

...with a score of 85%. I can now use the letters ISTQB after my name. When I was growing up, it looked like a good idea to go into one of the following three areas of endeavour; the military, civil engineering or medicine, since in all of those areas it seemed to me that you got to collect a large number of impressive-sounding letters after your name.
For the time being, I'll take ISTQB. Now I am gong to return to the completion of the PMP study that I never completed back in 2003.

Here are some links about software testing that I have been looking at in the last 2 weeks:

1. STAR East and STAR West
Here is a blog entry from a Microsoft attendee of STAR West 2007, with a summary of the events.

2. General Software Testing
This site has interesting articles about a variety of testing topics.

3. Testing Consultancy and Tester web sites

Compendium Development
Coley Consulting
Exampler. The consulting company of veteran test leader Brian Marick. He also has a weblog here.
Sticky Minds. A testing consultancy.

4. Testing Standards

BS7925 Part 2

5. ISTQB sample exams
I found a sample exam and links to other exam samples here.
This is a sample exam book and testing package (expensive).

6. Other articles
Testing Non-testable programs - a discussion of the Oracle Assumption and how it can be shown to be invalid

This paper, originally written in 2000, but updated several times since, attempts to discuss the role of design in sofware solution delivery. As is the norm from anything written by Martin Fowler, it contains a number of insights and forces you to think...

I have now moved to the Global Testing Practice for my employer. This creates a whole new set of learning challenges for me, but it also returns me "to my roots" in a way, since I entered the I.T. industry in the Summer of 1978 as a maintenance programmer and tester. I cut my teeth on testing and debugging other people's code. I still carry in my head a small list of names of people who I would like to encounter one day in a stuck elevator so that I can indulge in what diplomats call "a full and frank exchange of views" concerning their grossly defective coding practices. But I digress...
I am currently researching the state of the art in software testing. The Extreme Programming paradigm has led to a number of thought leaders trying to advance the art of software testing. Kent Beck himself popularized the concept of Test-Driven Development, and I am currently working through his book on the subject.
Ward Cunningham, who was one of the founders and popularizers of Wiki, and who at various times in the past few years has worked for Microsoft (as an Architect in the Patterns and Practices group) and the Eclipse Foundation (heading up the Committer group process), and who is now the CTO for AboutUs, has also done work on testing automation in the past. Some of the testing automation work is visible here.
I have also been looking into other possible testing approaches, as defined here and here. I also found what approximates to a manifesto for the concept of context-driven testing. Some of this is fairly and basically obvious (like the observation that the sort of testing that one does for the control software for the Space Shuttle might be different than the testing for a spreadsheet application), but it never hurts to remind oneself that sometimes there is no "one size fits all" solution approach to a wide variety of problems.

I flew to the UK for the annual gathering of the clans (pictures of the trip can be viewed here).
When trying to decide what seats to select, I now use SeatGuru, which has excellent diagrams of all of the major airlines' planes, showing which seats are good, which seats are bad, which have laptop power etc. Since I have a 35 inch inside leg, I avoid some seats like the plague, especially those with limited recline capability.
On the way back from the UK, I checked in at Gatwick for the return AA flight. When you check in at the AA counter in Gatwick, there are no kiosks available (unlike at DFW or other US domestic locations). Instead, you are first interviewed by a person asking the full collection of baggage questions ("is this your bag?" "did you pack it?" "did anybody give you something to put in it?" etc. etc. ) and a collection of journey questions ("did your journey originate here?" "is Dallas your final destination?"). The screeners appeared to be using a laptop computer to provide the questions and record the answers. All of this was accompanied by the usual examination of passports, green cards etc.
The challenge with this process was that the number of screeners was insufficient to balance the number of checkin counter personnel. There were 3 AA checkin agents with around 1.5 persons' worth of work, and a very long checkin queue in front of the screeners. There were 3 screeners, but there were 5 screening stations. They should have upped the number of screen questioners.
I felt rather sorry for the guy standing next to me at the adjacent screening station. He was a US military contractor. The Q&A started off as follows:

Screener: Did your journey originate here?
Guy: No. Dubai
Screener: Was that the start point of your journey?
Guy: No.
Screener: What was the start point of your journey?
Guy: Baghdad.
Screener: OK...sir...now...

Needless to say, the guy was detained far longer than I was...he was 1 ahead of me in the queue, but when I went through the security screening, he was a long way behind me...
I made an interesting discovery during the screening question process. I was checking a bag, and intending to take my "office in a bag" and my travel guitar as carry-ons. The screener initially told me that I would have to check one of the bags. When I pointed out that AA had let me march them onto the plane in DFW a week or so earlier, he responded "unfortunately the UK is one of the countries that still strictly enforces carry-on limits". He also warned me that my "office in a bag" might fall foul of the carry-on size limit, to which I responded that I would simply scrunch it up to make it fit. Then he said..."is that a musical insrument?", referring to the travel guitar. When I confirmed that it was, he told me that musical instruments are exempted from the carry-on limit. So, I breezed through check-in, inspection and the departure gate with 2 bags.
I must remember to pack the cello next time...

While researching I.T. solution delivery productivity (a topic which has denuded entire forests, but which seems to still suffer from a lack of up-to-date data), I found this paper from an Australian consulting company. It provides an amusing (but all too true) overview of various dysfunctional estimating techniques, and makes the point that estimating failures often have little to do with poor mathematics and bad data, and usually are influenced more heavily by political and management dysfunctionalities.

Since I am currently knee-deep in Microsoft technologies, I also have been looking at the history of Microsoft code names. Robert Scoble started an interesting discussion a few months back about wider industry use of code names, which included a response from a Microsoft leader.

Since mid-January I have been working on a project in Seattle. This has resulted in my becoming a road warrior again. I have not worked "on the road" to any significant degree since my consulting days in the 1990's with JMA, Texas Instruments and Sterling Software. Following that phase of my life, I moved to Dallas and started a more "rooted" job. Since 1997 a lot of things have changed, supposedly for the better. Or so I thought...
Here are some subjective personal observations about travel between Dallas and Seattle.

1. Airports
===========
Airports in the USA are still mostly structured as unfriendly, dislocatory conrete jungles. Most of the seating is hideously uncomfortable, and the cynic in me wonders if this is deliberate, so that people will feel obliged to walk around and, well, buy or eat stuff...
Road Warrior Issue #1 - the lack of power points for laptops. There are next to no power sockets in gate waiting areas in most airports, other than the power sockets used by the airlines' gate equipment (and most of those sockets are fully used). This results in a few road warriors all clustered around a single small collection of power points. Further adding to distress is the fact that a significant number of the power points do not work - at D/FW one day I found that 2 out of the 6 points at one gate area were dead.
Road Warrior Tip #1 - pack a multi-point adaptor. This will allow multiple people to use a power socket instead of 1, and you will be instantly popular with your fellow road warriors.
At Cincinnati airport this past weekend, I was pleased to see that Delta has recognized the issue and set up power point clusters near some of their gates. Other than that however, I have seen no evidence that airports or airlines are addressing the power point issue.
Road Warrior Issue #2 - variations in wi-fi coverage. Some airports have free wi-fi, some have charged wi-fi, some have no wi-fi at all. This is a further aggravation.

2. Security checks
==================
Despite the fact that they have had over 3 years to get used to it, a number of folk are still huffing, puffing and having mini hissy-fits over the security and baggage checks. There is only one phrase: Get Over It. Coming from Europe, where nobody is ever allowed to walk up to the gate area without a boarding pass, I do not find the security checks to be that awful. A minor nuisance perhaps, but the TSA folks are as nice and friendly as they can be. However, some passengers are not helping themselves by Doing Dumb Stuff. Like trying to carry their toiletries as carry-ons. That results in most of the bottled substances being left behind due to the new stringent liquid carry-on rules.

3. Airlines
===========
I have flown on a number of airlines since January. Here is my current league table, with comments:

#1 Frontier Airlines
I already posted about Frontier understands that flying should be fun. They have fun planes (the animals on the tail and winglets) and fun flight crews. The seating is good on the planes.

#2 Delta
Delta has well-fitted out planes with adequate legroom in coach, and they have good time-keeping. This past Sunday I arrived in Seattle 45 minutes early from Cincinnati. Delta also is addressing the road warrior power supply issue.
The only minus is that the flight crews mostly look like they would rather be undergoing a root canal than helping the passengers.

#3 American
American has no great points, but no really bad points either. Legroom in standard coach is not good, but the seats are reasonably supportive. The crews tend towards the Delta Airlines "I would rather have a root canal than do this job" approach, but perhaps this is the inevitable result of an industry with appalling labor relations based on mutual antipathy between leadership and front-line staff, where the leadership have been forcing the front-line folks to swallow job and salary cuts for years.

Last United
Where to start? Here are some of the issues:
legroom - unless you pay extra for Economy Plus, the legroom in coach is disgracefully non-existent. After 90 minutes you are moving around constantly to prevent cramping. This is also true on their Embraer executive jets, which have superficially nice leather seats, but those seats have no support whatsoever, which results in you sliding down in the seat very quickly. The cynic in me wonders whether the economy seating is configured to force all passengers to buy the upgrades, thus eliminating coach as we know it.
boarding - the gates are under-manned and the gate agents look harrassed and disorganized.
time-keeping - all of the flights I have travelled on were delayed, for reasons that were not immediately apparent. Bad weather delays I can understand, but not good weather delays.

4. Traveller Etiquette
======================
Many airline travellers would benefit from some sort of course in how to avoid becoming a human chicane during thir travel. Here are some of the egregious dumb-ass things that drive us road warriors nuts:

- Blocking aisles while getting seated
If you are in row 24 of a 33 row aircraft, you often do not need to stand in the aisle while unpacking the stuff you will be using on the flight. It is perfectly possible to stand in front of your seat and unpack, thus letting people past to the back of the plane. This simple action, if consistently done, could reduce boarding times by a massive amount.
- Fidgetting in your seat
Moving around constantly in a coach seat while in flight usually impinges on your next-seat neighbors and the person in front.
- Occupying no-mans land in the aisle after arrival
Once a plane arrives at the gate, many travllers will stand up to remove their overhead luggage. This would be ok, except that they then stand in front of their aisle east in a way that prevents the other passengers outside of them in the row from getting to the overhead bins. I recently tried to get past a woman who was doing this, only to be severely admonished for being rude. WTF? She was being obstructionist by standing in front of her seat, pointedly failing to notice that she was preventing me from getting to my hand baggage. (I did apologize to her, after swallowing hard, but she still failed to move and appeared to be determined to be a horse's ass).

..from Gaping Void. They have some great designs. I especially like the one with the guy saying to the girl "how was it for you" and she replies "read my blog"...(NOTE to any current and future girlfriend - I promise not to ask that question if you promise never to respond with that answer...)

An interesting list of many of the Microsoft project code names of the last 10-15 years.

...working on a leading-edge project for EDS. I will be on this project until the beginning of April. If you were to speculate that the project may involve a certain software company headquartered in Redmond, you might be right...but for me to confirm that speculation will also require me to shoot you.
I hope that the project will facilitate a major change in some of the ways in which we deliver solutions to our clients within EDS.
Beyond that, I can reveal little. I am going to blog about this project once I am allowed to, but that time is not now.
I am living in an apartment in Bellevue. This week I am in training, and next week I start the "real" work. I will be working 6 day weeks for most of the time, so my ability to get out to see the sights will be limited. However, this is likely to be a career-changing project, so I am not complaining.

Al Bernstein is one of my favorite authors. I have many of his books, including "Dinosaur Brains", "Neanderthals at Work", "Sacred Bull", "How To Deal With Emotionally Explosive People", and (my favorite)"Emotional Vampires".
Here is one of his columns, oriented towards pithy, no-nonsense practical advice.

The province of Sealand is up for sale...the owner has finally decided to dispose of his own country. Anybody want a prime piece of ocean-front real estate?

While looking something up on Wikipedia the other day, I found an interesting website called 99 Bottles of Beer. On this website are a large number of implementations of a program/subroutine/etc. to write out the lyrics to this song, in just about every known computing language. Some of the implementations are compact, some not-so-compact. Some are serious, some are less serious (as in the case of C#, where the submitter creates a Class named Binge...). However, reviewing the various implementations does give you a way to compare some of the fundamental features of various different languages.

I have not been posting to this blog for some time. The main reason for that is that I have been going through a divorce, so I have been taking care of a lot of personal business.
I will be working in Seattle in Q1 2007, and I plan to restart postings in December, since the assignment in Seattle will be very interesting for me personally.

Another excellent post on Guy's blog...with the usual home truths.

...this looks different, and by golly it is different...

I just found out about this book, which is published for free (no less) by Raytheon. It is a compendium of wisdom from the Raytheon CEO. Many of the rules are applicable to just about any life situation.
UPDATE - It has been pointed out to me that Mr. Swanson did not originate these rules...in fact it seems that he has been guilty of plagiarism, in that many of them were lifted from other people's work. What is it with these people in corporations who inflate their resumes or steal other people's work?
UPDATE 2 - Richard Veryard responded in his typically thoughtful way in the Comments section, also pointing to an article by Vannevar Bush. I located the article online here for anybody who wants to study it.

Since I worked for my current employers, I have completed numerous Employee surveys. However, my patience with such surveys has become strained by the dysfunctional way in which the results have been processed, and how certain information cannot be revealed by such surveys.

1. Processing and play-back of results
As an employee, I expect leaders in my corporation to be honest with me, honest with themselves, and honest about the corporation.
I therefore become rather bothered (to say the least) when the results of employee surveys are selectively used to attempt to persuade employees that aspects of corporate life are improving. This is more usually referred to as "spin" by most employees.
Those of us who have been in commerce long enough have pretty accurate bullshit detectors. When a corporation publishes selectively chosen results from an employee survey, and does not publish all of the data, this raises suspicions that there is a spin machine at work somewhere. This suspicion will be converted pretty quickly to a strongly-held opinion if the corporation has previously selectively quoted data from surveys and ignored other contrary data.

2. Failure to address causes of employee departures
Another frustrating aspect of corporate governance is how many corporations react to the impact caused by significant numbers of people leaving. The normal course of events is for highly capable people (the "franchise players") to depart first. To use an old English expression, the people with the get-up-and-go will be the first to get up and go.
Once it becomes apparent that people are discontented and are leaving, many corporations, in an attempt to stop the outflow, start tinkering with compensation, benefits etc., commissioning employee surveys, or (maybe) they actually start listening to the results of employee surveys instead of politely ignoring them or spinning them.
However, employee surveys in this context are not going to reveal enough information. If a corporation wants to accurately understand why people are leaving, it needs to be contacting ex-employees to ask them, not talking to current employees. Bluntly, a number of current employees may not ever leave, since they lack the capabilities or motivation to do so. A corporation needs to be asking gifted ex-employees why they left in order to address its problems. You never know, if you start an honest dialogue with an ex-employee, you might be able to persuade that person to re-join...

For many years, I have wondered at how useful an Exit Interview truly is when it comes to allowing corporations to find out why people are leaving, and address those issues. The Exit Interview is mostly an HR administrative closure process.
Several observable facts have convinced me that exit interviews are fundamentally limiting in what they can achieve:

1. Departing employees rarely tell the full story about why they are leaving during an exit interview. They usually do not want to burn any bridges in case they want to come back at some point in the future.
2. The Exit Interview takes place on the last day of employment. This is too late (for example) to address any issues that may have caused the employee to want to leave in the first place. The interview can only be a post-mortem, not a remedial exercise.
3. Senior leaders are rarely involved in Exit Interviews. The interview is usually conducted by a middle-ranking person filling a full-time or part-time HR role. Any messages that the departing employee might want to provide about fundamental corporate dysfunctionalities are going to be filtered (and possibly distorted or lost), which reduces the chance that senior leaders will need what they need to hear.

My conclusion is that Exit Interviews are not fulfilling their potential for addressing issues that cause employees to decide to leave. I would recommend the following changes:

1. A remediation interview should be arranged with any employee who has resigned within 24 hours of that resignation being tendered (assuming that the corporation does want the employee to stay, which may not always be true...). The purpose of this interview is to understand why the employee wants to leave, and to assess what actions (if any) are possible to persuade the employee to stay. The employee's normal management chain must not be involved in this interview, since that may prevent the employee from speaking freely.

2. Any departing employee should be offered a chance to speak to a senior leader during the period before his/her departure, in order to explain to that senior leader why they decided to leave. It should be made clear to that employee that this interview will not have any influence on whether the corporation would want to re-hire the employee.

3. The last-day Exit Interview should be a purely administrative departure management process.

...some interesting insights here.

The headline on this story was the discovery that the CEO of Radio Shack had inflated his resume. However, this is merely the tip of a very large cultural phenomenon that is discussed in more detail here.
One thing I fail to understand is how so many people let themselves be suckered by "creative resume writing" exponents. When my ex-wife joined Texas Instruments many years ago, they did validate that her college degree existed. Clearly Radio Shack could not be bothered to execute that simple process. One wonders what other simple processes many corporations have not been taking care of recently...