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A High-Contact, Low-Touch World November 10, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership, Networking.
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All these social networking tools are supposed to increase our interaction and communication with other people. For long-distance relationships, this is certainly true: I am sharing thoughts and ideas with people that I otherwise would never interact with on a regular basis.  From that perspective, social tools are improving those relationships and bringing depth and detail that would otherwise escape me.

For those folks that I see every day, tools like Twitter and Yammer can paradoxically create distance where it didn’t previously exist.  A coworker recently complained about this, pointing out that Yammer offers yet another way for people to hide in their office and text to each other, avoiding real, live conversations.  She’s absolutely right, and I don’t quite know how to solve the problem.

On the one hand, the message stream that is captured and shared by Yammer and Twitter is really useful, and allows many people to experience a single train of thought as it occurs.  On the other hand, people really need to look at each other and engage in actual interaction, as messy as it might be.

Sadly, the introverted world of IT makes this worse.  I am in the distinct, tiny minority of IT professionals that are extroverted.  Sometimes, I think the “I” in IT stands for “introverted.”  The synthetic, predictable world of computers provides a safe haven for those who are shy and allows those folks to succeed without ever developing some really important communication skills. Don’t misunderstand: many talented introverts achieve great success in IT, and that’s a good thing.  Were they to be thrust into sales or marketing, it would be painful and counter-productive.  The wardrobe errors alone would be overwhelming.

Nonetheless,  providing tools to these introverts that allow them to further withdraw and still be successful may be a mistake.  Teams succeed by communicating.  Good communication involves more than 140 characters of text and should include body language, voice tone, and facial expressions.  The elimination of direct engagement first began when people began hiding behind email and later learned how to use voice mail and call screening to their advantage.  The latest tools make it even easier to avoid other people and still get work done.

As leaders, and extroverted ones at that, we need to recognize that this is happening and force people to engage.  I will sometimes intervene when I see an email chain go on for too long and insist that the communicants actually gather and meet.  I also have a stock question when someone comes to me to complain about someone else: “Have you discussed this with this person?”  The first step to solving problems is to talk about them, and we need to gently encourage people to do this, in spite of the cool tools that tempt us otherwise.

Software and… Elvis? November 5, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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I once learned that some paintings are mass produced on assembly lines, with each person applying a single color in a single spot.  At the end of the line, a complete painting has been “assembled.”  Much of the art in hotel rooms is produced this way.  The epitome of the genre is, perhaps, the Velvet Elvis: the perfect blend of kitsch, style, and subject that anyone would be proud to hang in their home.  It may not be art, but it sure is a painting!

A lot of software is written in the same way.  There is a common belief that you can completely control the development of software, planning each step of the process, deciding when the builds will be ready and the final product will roll off the line.  We all work to such tight project deadlines that there is little choice but to manage the development process this way.

Unfortunately, writing software is not a process.  Writing software is an art.  Just like singing, dancing, painting, or sculpting, certain people are born to write beautiful pieces of code that other, lesser mortals simply cannot produce.  For those who can dig in and appreciate a piece of code, there is true beauty inside the very best software.

Like any other art, beautiful software does not happen in predictable, scheduled ways.  It happens in fits and starts, when the muse strikes.  I can remember many times when the solution to some problem, the perfect algorithm or data structure, would suddenly pop into my head in the middle of the night.  You can beat your head against a problem all day, but the elegant solution only arrives when it is ready to be revealed.  Regrettably, it’s tough to put milestones like “Muse Strikes” into your project plans.

Now that I am on the management side of this process, I have true sympathy for the developers that struggle to deliver results when they know that the muse has not yet struck.  Lesser programmers are content to produce a Velvet Elvis, a pedestrian piece of code that gets the job done in a brute force way.  Programming artists seek to deliver art, something they and their peers will consider and appreciate.

As managers, we have to decide when we need art and when we need Elvis.  All great artists can produce a Velvet Elvis with little effort, but their spirit will be sapped if they are not allowed to create true art every so often.  Keep that in mind as you plan your projects and determine your schedules.  Know who your true artists are, and make sure they get to produce that occasional masterpiece.  And when you do, they will certainly come to you and say, “Thank you.  Thank you very much!”

Slices Of Apple, Part 4 August 7, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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This is the last in a series of posts dissecting Apple’s recent misfortunes during the rollout of the iPhone 3G and related technologies.  You’ll find the first post here.

Avoid Denial

It appears that Steve Jobs has been reading these blog postings and taking my advice to heart.  Although he has not contacted me directly, he clearly agrees with my assessment of his recent misfortunes.  And, visionary that he is, he has actually started to act upon the advice I’m about to share, even before I posted it to this blog.

That guidance is simple: when you are having some sort of systems or project meltdown, own up to it.  The sooner you step up and take responsibility for the problem, the sooner you can move forward with fixing things.  The existence of the problem is not up for debate; if your users think you have a problem, you have a problem.  As I learned from my first boss in computer operations, the customer’s perception is your reality.  Accept that reality and deal with it.

In Apple’s case, their initial reluctance to admit that they were fallible only damaged their credibility even further.  They then began to split hairs: the MobileMe meltdown only affected 1, or 2, or 4 percent of the user base.  If you are among those 80,000 people, your perception is that it is affecting 100 percent of the users that matter. Offering statistical analysis of a problem is not a useful approach.  Apple is in a hole, and the rule of holes is simple: when you are in one, stop digging.

Given the lightning speed with which this all gets transmitted by the internet, Apple’s repeated refusal to acknowledge their customer’s reality only compounded things that much quicker.  Perhaps a general extension of the “avoid denial” rule would be “especially when your users are well-organized and digitally connected.”

Even with Steve’s “leaked” email, Apple is still in a bit of denial.  His email was sent to employees, not customers.  While there is no doubt that employees are getting hammered from within and without, the only people that really matter are the customers.  These people paid $99 for a service that doesn’t work.  To bring closure to the bad rollout and to move on to actually fixing it, Steve Jobs needs to apologize to his customers, publicly and sincerely.  Only then can he hope to rebuild the fractures that have resulted from his poor planning and execution.

I hope he’s still reading.

Slices Of Apple, Part 3 July 30, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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This is the third in a series of posts dissecting Apple’s recent misfortunes during the rollout of the iPhone 3G and related technologies.  You’ll find the first post here.

Time, Quality, or Money: Choose Two

I am always surprised when I meet IT folks who don’t know this old canard.  Simply put, in any project something will be sacrificed.  If you want a high-quality result on time, you’ll spend a lot of money to get it.  Want to hit your budget and deliver high quality?  You’ll take longer with fewer people to get things finished. And if you want to hit your date and hit your budget, you’ll never meet your quality goal.

Apparently, this is the choice that Apple made for MobileMe, the new shared email service launched along with the iPhone 3G earlier this month.  After making the bad decision to release four big things all at once, Apple seems to have stuck with that decision without regard to the quality of the MobileMe product.  The fallout has been terrible and Apple has lost face with a huge swath of its customer base.  The problems still aren’t fixed, and users are still (rightfully) upset, as witnessed by the FailMe parody web site.

The key to successful project management is to realize that this rule is inviolate.  When a project goes awry (and they all do, to some extent), you will be choosing two of these three goals.  How to decide?

If possible, choose Time. Money may be limited, and quality is crucial, so delaying a project and slipping a date is your least distasteful choice.  If you are managing a project whose date cannot slip (end of year reporting or tax filing, for example), recognize that constraint right away and budget lots of money to ensure that you will wind up with good quality.  A good product delivered late is still a good product; a bad product delivered on time will never be forgotten.  Apple will be hearing about MobileMe for a long time; slipping it would have been no big deal.

If you can’t choose Time, choose Money. Money buys labor in the form of developers, testers, tools, and anything else you might need to hit that date.  The goal is to ensure that you avoid having to choose quality.  Be careful, though: money only goes so far.  At some point, you cannot buy your way to hit a date.  (There is a closely correlated rule for this: Nine Women Cannot Have A Baby In One Month).

Never choose Quality. If you really have to choose Quality, argue strenuously to cancel, defer, or redefine the project.  Like eating bad food, memories of bad quality linger for a long, long time.  Slipped dates are soon forgotten as people move on to other things, and even blown budgets fade after time.  Bad quality never diminishes and can come back to haunt you over and over again.

In short, make rational decisions on Money and Time, but never give in on Quality.  If you cave in on Quality, you’ll soon find yourself living through Musciano’s Extension to this rule:

Time, Quality, Money, or Your Job: Choose Three

In these cases, you usually aren’t the one making the final choice.

Slices Of Apple, Part 2 July 28, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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This is the second in a series of posts dissecting Apple’s recent misfortunes during the rollout of the iPhone 3G and related technologies.  You’ll find the first post here.

Turn One Knob At A Time

Divide and conquer.  Divide and conquer.  Divide and conquer.  This mantra, more than any other, must be burned into the brain of anyone hoping to make a career of IT.  Break big jobs into small jobs, deliver on the small jobs, and the big jobs will solve themselves.  Very few projects cannot be divided into sequences of interdependent smaller projects that, in turn, are easier to understand and complete.

Although Apple committed many errors in the iPhone deployment, they can all be traced to breaking this fundamental rule.  In one day, Apple launched the new iPhone 3G, a new matching version of iTunes with the new Apps store, a corresponding firmware update for the iPod Touch, and a replacement for the .Mac service called MobileMe.  Any one of these launches is a big event, bringing significant value to new and existing customers.  Each is fraught with peril if things don’t go well.  Tackling one or two would be a big deal; tackling all four was a mistake.  Apple’s hubris, I suspect, made them think they could pull this off.  They were wrong.

From the comfort of my Monday Morning Quarterback Chair, here’s how I would have scheduled this rollout:

  • Launch with the iPhone 3G, along with the new version of iTunes, but without the App store going live.  Instead, put a teaser link in iTunes to get people salivating over all the wonderful new apps that are just a few days away.  People will be so excited over the new iPhone that they won’t care that the apps aren’t yet available.  Apple servers cannot keep up with all that phone provisioning anyway; why burden them with additional traffic as people look for new apps for their phone?
  • Allow the phone rollout to stabilize over a period of two weeks.  Apologize for the provisioning problems with some comment that emphasizes how hard it is to predict demand with such an insanely popular phone.  Let the press write glowing reviews on the virtues of 3G speed and the business connectivity in the phone.
  • After two weeks, announce the fabulous new App Store.  People that have just gotten a bit bored with their fast 3G access on their phone will now go crazy all over again, downloading and trying out apps.  This is the lowest-risk step of the bunch, since most of the app problems are related back to the authors, not Apple.
  • If the iPhone is stable at this point, release the firmware upgrade for the iPod Touch.  If not, wait for the bugs to get fixed and slip the release for a future date.  If things are going smoothly, you’ll be quieting the revolt among Touch owners who desperately want those new apps and features.  If the firmware is buggy, you’ve saved yourself calls from another class of irate users.
  • Finally, hold off on MobileMe for however long it takes to fix it.  This product, among all these releases, is clearly not ready for primetime and is a real black eye for Apple.

In the end, you must understand and slightly exceed your users’ expectations.  No one in the user community was demanding a new phone, and new firmware, and new apps, and new iTunes, and MobileMe all on the same day.  Why try?  Any experienced IT professional could tell you this plan was bound to fail. In every rollout, something goes wrong.  And when one thing falls over, it’s bound to tip over lots of other dominoes behind it, resulting in an avalanche of problems.  If you set up fewer dominoes to begin with, you increase your odds of success.  If you have to turn a bunch of knobs on something, turn just one knob at a time!