Monday, June 13, 2022

Microsoft Practices the Agile it Preaches.


A successful business leader should spend time reading and understanding the news.  Sadly, the information over the last six years has featured a dour parade of narcissism, neglect, and missed opportunities for progress.  The language coined a term for this phenomenon and it is called "doomscrolling." It is upsetting and discouraging.  The terrible news is endless, and we can not help but gaze into the nihilist sinkhole via our phones and televisions.  It affects me more than I care to admit.  Confronted with the choice of wallowing in despair or attempting to be a positive force for change, I dug up a positive example of people using agile to improve the world.  Today, I want to highlight some good news from the technology world. 

According to the Microsoft support site, three features are being removed from its spreadsheet program excel.  I had never heard of these features until I read the following article from Simon Batt.  It seems like they were equally obscure to other Microsoft users.  The change to our favorite spreadsheet program highlight how much Microsoft has changed over the last twelve years.  When this blog began Microsoft, under CEO Steve Ballmer, had a reputation for being the evil empire of the technology world.  

The Microsoft organization mocked ideas like open-source software, object-oriented development, and cloud services.  Developers who used the company's product felt alienated because our technologies were stuffy and limited compared to other software development tools.  

When Ballmer left Microsoft and Satya Nadella took over, there was a notable shift in the organization.  One of these first duties was to have everyone in the organization use Microsoft Team Foundation server as its source control system.  In a keynote speech, I remember him saying, "I am not going to sell a product to a corporate client that we are unwilling to use ourselves."  Engineers call this "dogfooding" because you are metaphorically consuming the dog food you sell to others.  The quality of the Team Foundation Server software shot through the roof and soon integrated tools like git into its system because it was what developers requested.  The software transformed into a cloud-based system known as Azure DevOps.  Anything like this would have been impossible if Ballmer was still in charge.  

Nadella's leadership engineering style embraces the principles of agile and Lean-SAFe, so Microsoft removing the feature from Excel makes perfect sense.  According to the agile manifesto principles, "Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential."  An engineering team and organization understand that creating tools with endless features is wasteful and prone to defects.  The product team for Excel looked at the software and decided to drop three components.  Thus, the software can concentrate on things desk workers worldwide need.  In lean-agile, they say, "Organize around value." Since these features did not drive value to customers or Microsoft dropped them. 

It is refreshing to read news about business decisions based on agile principles.  As software continues to eat the world, it is nice to see that software companies are practicing what they preach.  The improvement process requires subtraction and simplicity, so it is nice to see companies using it for everyone's advantage.  It is a small sample of good news in a world dominated by doomscrolling.  

Until next time. 


1 comment:

  1. I was in a meeting one time when a security flaw in our software was being discussed. In that same meeting, the person running it asked the group, "Does anyone here use our product personally?" The room fell silent.

    I spoke up and listed many of the problems I saw in the company with how we treat our data, and security. Why would should I trust them? The response I got was, "It could be worse." And yes, other companies have their issues too, but there was no effort being spent on improving these holes in our company.

    I look at it as disrespect for our clients when security is neglected, so no- I didn't use our products.

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