Quality Avenger
How much does poor software quality cost? Try $60 Billion
The BPM forum announced last week the formation of a new Software Economics Council. With exciting news like that, it's a wonder we can all sleep at night. I won't bore you with the details, read the press release if you want the whole shebang. But they estimate poor software quality is costing the industry $60 Billion per year. That number seems a little low to me, I would imagine because they're only counting downtime due to application bugs. Let's look at this honestly and see just how much money is sitting on the table, shall we?
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Evolutionary vs. Revolutionary
Creating and testing products and services always happens in context. A lot
of times, customers view your effort differently depending on whether it is
evolutionary or revolutionary. Evolutionary developments, like this bionic arm
with six times the strength of the old model, fit into a pre-conceived
concept by the user for what it's supposed to do. While revolutionary products,
like this
hardware device (the SlingBox) for taking your TV signal and streaming it
over the internet to you wherever you are, is something that's new enough not to
have context associated with it.
And when people evaluate your product or
service, they make a call on how revolutionary it is. If it's just an
improvement on an old idea, they are going to bring their preconceived notions
about the older idea with them when they take a look at your effort
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Easy For You to Say
I remember the first time I was working in assembler, I had a question to a
friend.
"You must remember that you are working with Big Indian now," he
said.
Big Indian? Like Tonto? I looked around. There wasn't a big Indian that
I could see.
Later on I realized my friend was talking about Big
Endian which is a
way to order bytes inside a computer system.
IT has a lot of jargon --
there's a lot of technical stuff in there -- and sometimes the words we use have
real connotations. Talk about enough to make your head spin!
The MAT
Tickle Me Softly
The biggest question we ask on the MAT is the one that I've never seen a company ask its employees -- What do we need to do better? What are we doing okay? Because you gotta scratch where it itches, tickle where it's sensitive, and improve what's broken.
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Are Your Deviants Standard?
We all work with some people who, well, just aren't normal. They say about half the people are below average, and "strange" is in the eye of the beholder. When we first started using the MAT to measure process quality, I was excited to find out that there was a new measure we could use on our results -- finding deviants at your job site.
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Deployment as the Biggest Problem
Recently we gave an assessment to an overseas software consulting firm. While they scored highly on commitment to perform Project Management, CM, and Business Modeling, an poor area was Deployment. Ironic that you could do so well in setting up the project and have difficulties at the end, isn't it? Let's dig down a bit.
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MAT -- The Theory Can Be Used For Hurricanes Too
Okay. Okay. So I invented the MAT. Looks like the theory behind the MAT, that large numbers of people can make better decisions than small numbers of experts, is going to be used to predict hurricanes.
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Synchronicity: It's Never There
One of the things that amaze me the most about giving the MAT to a large organization is that there is always a huge difference between how process quality is perceived by different groups. Producers most often think process quality is much better than consumers. Management usually thinks it's better than workers. You would think that if there's one thing that people could agree on, it's "how well are we following our own recipe?" but that's not the way it works.
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Everybody's Talking, but Nobody's Saying Much
There's a picture on the blog of three men from West Virginia holding a giant rattlesnake. It's been all over the web and the news. It turns out the snake isn't giant, the men aren't from West Virginia, and the story is bogus. WTF? How about separating anecdotal evidence from reality?
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Version 3.0 Prototype Started
I started working on version 3.0 of the MAT yesterday, and the design goals I have are completely unrealistic. The nice thing about being your own customer? You know exactly what the requirements are. The bad thing about being your own customer? You know exactly what the requirements are.
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If You Read One Website Today
This is the link to read -- a book review on how management consultants are stealing you blind. Here's the sentence that should pound home to you guys why I made the MAT --
Buying consulting projects continues, according to Glass, because managers feel they need backup for tough decisions--consultants are a crutch.So let's review. When you need vital input to back up major changes at the organization, do you ask the people doing the work? Or pay ten grand and over a week for somebody just out of college to make decisions for you?
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Is it the Tools? or the People?
One of the things I get the most as a process consultant is "Do we need better processes, or better tools?" Usually it shows up in cases where tools were bought to fix process issues (after all, buying a tool is simply writing a check. Fixing a process means getting consensus among dozens, if not hundreds of people -- which do you think is easier?) But there are cases where infrastructure is needed. How do you find out where this is the situation?
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Knowing What You Know
What you don't know is easy: go find it out. But I've found that what you do know can cause all sorts of problems. Here's a good example: recently we had a member of a real-estate consulting firm come by and try out the MAT. I set him up with a PMBOK assessment (That's an assessment based on the Project Management Body Of Knowledge -- one of the big players in the PM world) What came back was frankly confounding.
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Predictive Analytics: Wave of The Future
Here's a buzz phrase I like: predictive analytics. People like to have opinions and make choices. Computers like to churn data. Put the two together, add some salt, and sometimes you get systems that can predict human behavior. But that's not the coolest part.
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More Project Post-Mortems Needed
Here's an article from ComputerWorld (link to come later) that says that project post-mortems are desperately needed by many technology shops. Speaking from experience -- just a little honesty wouldn't hurt all that much, would it?
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Double-Take: ITIL
A lot of time we talk about process in relation to software development. Because software development is such a hard nut to crack, most of the "big" process work has been done around that. But the entire IT organization can be looked at as a large machine as well, and a British standard that is gaining some momentum seeks to do just that.
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Tell Me What, or Tell Me How
One of the things you learn when you deal with the CMM or the CMMI is while they are great at telling you how mature your processes are, they really aren't so good at telling you how to do your job better, or even if you're doing the right thing. Gosh -- how much money has been spent by how many people who didn't understand that last sentence?
WTF - What To Fix
Killer Bot Support Line
I had so much fun with my "Guns for Bots" blog the other day that I thought I had to follow-up. The premise? Suppose you are the first company to produce a fully autonomous armed robot. What would your development and support system look like? It's one thing to let your users take IE7 beta out for a test spin, but quite another to hand out free copies of "Assault Commander Mark VII" to whoever signs up.
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RUP UP! What Part Of Software Development is Outsourcable?
With word that major bank Wachovia is outsourcing most of its support work and SAP doubling its staff in India, the question many people are asking, just what is the best policy for outsourcing software development and maintenance? What to farm out or farm in? Now that you've got your boatload of cheap foreign labor parked just outside L.A. in international waters, how do you use them? Let's take a look at the RUP shine a little light on the issue.
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Can Chickens Swim?
I had a manager once, when complemented over his performance, would say, "That's nothing. I can even teach baby chickens to swim."
That was 25 years ago, and to this day I still wonder "Do chickens swim? And if they do, does somebody have to teach them?"
It's a question that I know you've asked yourself many a time. And a question that I'm going to go into here, in the interest of science.
Modern Program Management
Intel Finds Huge Savings In MetaData
Word from Intel that they are saving six dollars for each dollar spent in managing metadata. Aside from just software artifacts, I'd like to see them do a similar thing with process control metadata. Probably a lot more money to be saved there.
BPM Key Factor in Modern Program Management
More and more, companies are turning to Business Process Modeling (BPM) as a means to gain control over software development and deployment. Kevin McKean from InfoWorld has an article today about how BPM is being used to smooth out a lot of the friction between IT and Business. It's a good article, but I think it mixes up a lot of ideas -- tools, technology, and practice -- into one big glob called BPM.
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List-Man Versus The Forces Of Chaos
A few years ago, I worked at a very large company doing a very big program. Suffice it to say that I had 30 developers working under me, and I was a part of a team of about a dozen managers working together. Our director, let's call him Sam, was a nice enough guy, only he liked lists. Lists of everything. And if you've ever sat in a meeting that was so boring that you though about chewing off your arms to escape, you've met this guy.
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Saving Money: One Key to Program Management
A big part of program management is understanding where you can get freebies. To know this, however, you have to understand the intricacies of how programs are run and what can be cut and what can't. For instance, Federal prison officials at several prisons are putting up lethal fences around the complexes. Prisoners can be shot for escaping anyway, and the high-voltage wire saves the costs of paying all those guards. But what are some good targets for cost reduction in software development?
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Reasons Off-Shore Deals Go Bust
Helen Huntley of Gartner Inc. released a study recently that had the top five reasons off-shore deals go bust. While Ms. Huntley seems like a great person for this analysis, her reasoning that "poor planning" is the cause of all this failure seems a little too trite. It's like saying the World Trade Center fell because it wasn't built to stand the impact of a airliner. It's a true statement, for certain, but doesn't illuminate the real issues, in my opinion.
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Portfolio Management For Government Agencies
One of the hottest topics today in the IT world is portfolio management. There are a lot of definitions, but for us, let's look at all of the activity of an IT department like an investment portfolio. After all, that's really what it is. So the logical questions are: what's the dollars associated with each activity, and how do I decide whether to keep something in my portfolio or get rid of it?
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Software Valuation: Tidbits
Here are a couple tidbits about software valuation in the news recently. First, somebody with knowledge of arbitrage and derivatives took a look at software valuation. His results? somewhere around 85% of the price of software is in maintenance, upgrades, etc. Frankly, I find his analysis a little lacking, in that he did not mention integration costs at all, which as we all know rise exponentially with the number of systems deployed. Plus, it sounds like a shill for open source -- not that I think there isn't a great argument FOR open source, this just wasn't it.
+3 Staffing
Gates Says Companies Should Not Outsource Core Functions
"If you rely too much on people in other companies and countries ... you are outsourcing your brains where you are making all the innovation," Gates said to a group of Japan's top businessmen. We've hit this before, but if you don't understand and valuate your business processes you won't know what to outsource and what not.
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Brains Anyone?
How much of what we do actually changes the way our brain is wired? Aside from this man who suddenly learned how to play the piano, scientists are telling us now that years of practice at anything changes the way our brains work. This means that if you've been doing your job for a long time, it's probably changed the way your brain works.
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More Smoke than Fire: The Real Story of CEOs
There's a great article in Computerworld today about how CEOs are faking it a lot more than most people expect. If you think about how large and complex some of today's businesses are, isn't that kind of obvious?
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The Good Guys
Probably the hardest thing I have to do as a consultant is deal with hard-working, well-meaning people who just don't take the time to keep their skills updated. We've all been there -- too much workload, the boss always emphasizing cutting the trees and never enough time to sharpen the saw. In the world of black-and-white either they trust you enough to do your job or not. But in the real world, things aren't so clean cut.
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Microsoft Taken To Task On Hiring Practices
Turns out Microsoft is taking some heat on arrogant and slow hiring practices. I've been approached by headhunters looking for Microsoft jobs a few times, and it was nothing to write home about, I can tell you that.
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Switching to Blogs
As you may have noticed, we're switching to blogs! After reading up on all the technology, it seems better to blog everyday about changing conditions and the workforce. In the newsletters, we'll point you to the blog entries. If you're interested, you can read more there. That should help make better use of your time. If you have any additional ideas of how we can save your time, or if you want to be off the newsletter list, just use our contact email to let us know.
When you visit our blog site, there are several topics on the right-hand side of the screen. One of those is the MAT. By using the topics and the search functions, there are hundreds of short articles -- some of which might be of use. We hope this is a good resource for you in your work.
The MAT is not associated with any methodology or quality system, including CMM, CMMI, XP, SPICE, ITIL, IBM RUP, or others. Information from these systems is presented for your commentary on the application of these tools at your organization. The MAT does not endorse any work or quality system. "Measuring Process Quality By Means Of A Technical Opinion Survey" is patent pending at the United States patent office. Copyright 2005 Bedford Technology Group, Inc., All Rights Reserved.