Your Developers Are More Than Resources

These are more than resources

It is the Labor Day weekend in the United States.  I marks a turning point in the year as summer winds down and all attention turns to the fourth quarter and generating as much profit as possible before the end of the fiscal year.  As a scrum master, I spend so much time jumping from sprint to sprint that I find it hard to see the big picture of the how my projects are going.  It is a constant balancing act between tactical choices and strategic goals.   This week I want to talk about the most important part of the scrum process – the people who do the work.

I have worked in the technology business for over 18 years.  I have experienced the giddy and stupid times of the dot.com boom and the fear and uncertainty of the great recession.  The common thread through all of these periods was that work needed to get done.  In order to get that work completed many companies relied on consulting companies to augment their staff.  These “contract workers” were often treated poorly and given tremendous responsibility for the success of the project with none of the financial and career benefits if it did.  Add to this situation that many of these contract workers were working under H1-11 visas and you had a situation which resembled indentured servitude.  I remember working for one company and being in a staff meeting where everyone was afraid to speak because if they did they would be rolled off the project and they risked being deported.

I blame most of this misconduct on how technology work is funded in a corporate environment.  For instance, much of the technology work is considered an overhead expense.  Thus, to keep expenses down many business people only hire the bare minimum of technology staff.  There are a few help desk people.  Network engineers dot the organization chart and you see a manager keeping everything running on time.  Software developers and User Experience professionals are not considered “necessary” for the operation of the business until new software needs to be written.  Thus, when they are needed they are brought in like mercenaries to try and build software they have little professional or personal investment to build with any sense of craft.  They get paid for showing up and billing.  They are not compensated for creating shippable code.

Many of the people who do the work are referred to by other business people as “resources”.   People ask questions such as, “Do we have enough resources, to do this project?” or “Do we have the right resources with the correct skills?”  Every time I hear technology workers referred to as resources, it makes my flesh crawl.  It treats highly educated and smart people like they were rivets in a giant construction project.  I have never heard of iron workers referred to as “resources” by construction managers but every project manager I have known has referred to developers as resources.  It is so prevalent that I even catch myself saying it from time to time.

People who build software are not resources.  They are flesh and blood.  They work in cubicles and offices around the world from Chicago, to Belfast, to Chennai.  They are the people who are building to global economy one web page and user class at a time.  They take the vague ideas of a sales person on the back of a napkin and transform it into working software.  They maneuver through corporate politics and red tape to get things put on production servers.  They tolerate not having office supplies because there is no budget for paper clips from finance.  They work late hours and early mornings to communicate with off shore teams.  They make your business successful.  You just don’t see it because we keep all the lights on and everything working even if it requires metaphorical duct tape.

So show a little respect to your developers and the people who employ them.  They are more valuable than you know and they are more than just “resources”.

Until next time.

You can't fight mother nature.

The flooding is pretty bad in Chennai

This has been an unusual week.  My off-shore development team have been off-line because of horrible flooding in Chennai, India. I have been worrying about the health and safety of my teams which include a few newlyweds and new parents.  This natural disaster also gave me pause to think about the things we can’t control.

A common theme in Western literature for the last two hundred years is the struggle human beings have over nature.  We have fought it on land, sea and air.  We have endured terrible cold and withering heat.  Authors from the naturalistic period of writing have been very honest with their readers.  People struggle against nature and sometimes nature wins.  More contemporary writing has ignored this wisdom and has championed human engineering and willpower.  Some books pioneer the bogus notion that we can use our willpower to transcend reality.

This kind of magical thinking has crept into the business world. It is not uncommon for project managers to think that if people work harder, faster, or smarter that can overcome the constraints of time and nature.  It is true that we can manage time better, but we cannot change the fact that you cannot force twelve months of work into five months of time.  Each day project managers and scrum masters are asked to do this and it undermines the very nature of our profession.

There are contingencies which can be made and allowances which can be incorporated into a plan.  Unfortunately, real life gets in the way and projects slip.  As Mike Tyson used to say, “Everyone has a plan until they are punched in the mouth.”  People get sick, snow falls, and entire cities and engulfed in flood waters.  People who make software are not tools to be used up and thrown away.  Software developers are not resources, they are flesh and bone people; so asking why the project is not on track is not only stupid but insensitive.

My heart goes out to the development teams, their families and the citizens of Chennai, India.  I hope all of you get through the catastrophe safe and sound.  Some things are more important that project deadlines and this is one of them.

Until next time.