Southwest Airlines and the Gremlins of Technical Debt

It is Halloween season, so I indulge in a few monster movies when I have downtime.  I am partial to the old Universal monster movies with Bela Legosi and Boris Karloff.  I also enjoy anything with Vincent Price, and I consider his film “The Abominable Dr. Phibes” one of the most frightening things I have ever seen.  There is something about monsters lurking in the shadows which always gives me a great scare.  One of my favorite monster movies comes from director Joe Dante entitled “Gremlins,” which is a fantastic popcorn movie and a parody of entertainment culture at the same time.  Today, on the blog, I want to discuss a different kind of gremlin lurking in the shadows and how it has been fouling up air travel.   

The term gremlin was invented by the British.  In the early days of aviation, airplanes were not mechanically reliable; engines would jam, flight controls would snap, and canvas would tear without explanation.  Mechanics and pilots often blamed these mishaps on “gremlins,” nasty elf-like creatures who liked to cause mischief on an aircraft in flight.  By the Second World War, pilots from the United States and Royal Air Force had stories about gremlins.  If anyone has stories about these creatures from the German, Russian or Japanese Air Forces, please share them in the comments.  Suffice to say, gremlins were an excellent alibi for poor maintenance, bad design, or dumb luck.  The gremlin became a part of aviation culture. 

I keep thinking about these critters the more I work in technology.  I wish I could invoke them during a debrief of a poorly executed project or use them to explain a server outage.  Unfortunately, gremlins are mythical creatures, and if I use them to present a technical problem, the CIO of my client would laugh at me and then ask me to pack my desk and leave the building.  

Gremlins are comforting, compared to the problems technical professionals face with increasingly complex systems.  Earlier this month, Southwest Airlines could have invoked the little monsters during a three-day weekend when it faced a severe shortage of flights.  Some pundits on the internet spread the false rumor that the slowdown was a strike created by pilots who refused to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.  The reality is less about the civil disobedience of pilots than the negligence of Southwest Airlines and its Information Technology systems.

According to the Southwest Airline Pilots Association spokesperson, “I point to how they (Southwest) manage the network and how I.T. supports that network.”  It seems the union has been complaining about the reliability of I.T. systems for over four years.  Company officials have not commented on the claims but based on the events of the long holiday weekend, it is easy to see how an outage can ground an entire fleet of planes.  

I understand why something like this could happen at a large organization.  The internal system which schedules flights is buggy or unreliable.  Debate within the organization happens, and a decision is made not to fix the system because the cost and inconvenience are greater than dealing with the flawed system.  The conscious choice to do this is called technical debt in the agile community.  It sits in the organization like a time bomb waiting to explode the business at the least convenient time.  I suspect that is what happened to Southwest Airlines. 

Having technical debt in your organization is like having a box of gremlins and tossing them into a swimming pool.  Bad things are going to happen.  It is why everyone in an organization needs to regularly look at technical debt and give it a serious evaluation. Otherwise, your organization will get grounded.  To avoid a horror movie corral the gremlins of technical debt, you will be glad you did.  

Until next time. 

Let Your Employees Work from Home

From time to time, I like to call out bad behavior in the business community.  I don't particularly appreciate doing it, but when people behave poorly or say things that need challenging, it is the responsibility of people like me to call attention to it.  This week, billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin gave a speech at the Economic Club of Chicago and said young people are hurting their careers by not returning to the office.  I respectfully disagree and want to point out that a net worth of 21 Billion dollars does not equal wisdom. 

Mr. Griffin is hugely successful, and he has offices in Chicago, New York, and across the globe.  He has one of the most significant hedge funds in the United States, so when you have that level of wealth and power, people like the Chicago Economic Club are going to give you a forum to speak.  According to Bloomberg News, he said, "So for our youngest members of our workforce, I'm gravely concerned that the loss of early career development opportunities is going to cost us dearly over the decades to come." I disagree; if we work in the global economy, we need to think differently about asking people to work at a corporate office.  

Workers are going to time-shift working with teams in India and Asia.  Thanks to tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Slack, they do not need to come into the office to have those meetings.  In addition, people who work at home can avoid commuting expenses, and the savings in both time and money tends to increase productivity from the workforce.  Finally, the last 18-moths of work have proven that professional workers can do what they do from anywhere in the world.  

I suspect that Mr. Grifin is more interested in exercising control over his workforce than the personal development of younger people in his organization.  Why?  Because he runs a multi-billion dollar hedge fund and thinks it gives him absolute power over the people who are delivering value to his organization.  It is a common form of arrogance that the wealthy have regarding the people who work for them.  

Griffin can run his business, however, he chooses, but it is clear that it is a conformist place that stifles innovation and creativity.  I am confident he enforces a dress code in the office and likes to keep up appearances for his clients or competitors.  The offices he is eager to populate with his workforce are a stage to show off his wealth and power to future investors.  

Mr. Griffin then chides other CEOs for being soft because they are not mandating their workers to return to the office.  The reality is companies are struggling to retain workers because they want to work from home. The great resignation is a reaction to businesses that will not allow them to work from home.  Workers are voting with their feet, and CEOs are not being scared; they are smart.  The global talent competition is such that if you do not offer a hybrid model for working, your competition will poach talent from you.  

I have repeatedly said that workers are not resources, and treating people like machine tools who can be used up and thrown away is a recipe for failure in the 21st century.  Mr. Griffin's wealth insulates him from that reality, but that does not mean people like myself cannot call out his lack of vision.  It will only be a matter of time before that reality catches up with him or his descendants.  

Until next time. 

Dealing with the Darkness of Dependencies

As agile professionals, we learned early in our careers that agile is easy to explain but difficult to practice.  For instance, agile talks about individuals and interactions in the manifesto but does not discuss how to help a development team member going through a contentious divorce.  The manifesto also does not talk about deadline pressure or the weirdness of the project budget process.  Lewis Carroll, who wrote "Alice in Wonderland," said, "Between the idea and the reality lies the shadow." As a coach or scrum master, you spend plenty of time in the shadow.  Today, I want to discuss a particularity dark subject in agile: dependencies.  

The scrum guide is clear about the organization of work.  With the help of a product owner, self-managing teams should work with the business to deliver value in rapid increments.  Backlog items are created, prioritized, and worked on during a sprint.  If everything goes well, then the team should have working code to go into production at the end of the sprint.  It is a fantastic concept, but the organization of most corporate systems plunges teams into shadow.  

People outside the purview of the scrum team often control the web or database servers, and the group becomes dependant on others who have a different set of priorities.  These priorities do not align with sprint goals.  A developer or scrum master then wades through the politics of getting servers provisioned with the correct configuration and security permissions.  The experience is a hassle and often throws off the team's timeline, undermining the rapid delivery of value to the customer.  

I hate dependencies like this with a passion that borders on pathological, and it was a hatred that blinded me to mitigate these situations for five years of my career.  Once the rage and frustration wore off, I discovered that a dependency is a story in the backlog; if it is incomplete, the team can escalate to leadership.    

I worked on a project where the server team did not configure the webserver to allow Azure DevOps to deploy code from a pipeline.  It is a mighty cool feature from Microsoft and saves loads of time deploying code to different servers.  One day a sprint ended for my team, and the server team did not configure the webserver.  Instead of showing code in a development environment, we demonstrated the software on the test environment, which returned an HTTP 404 error.  The leadership was scandalized and asked why nothing got done during the sprint.  I produced a work ticket with the need for the configuration of the server. The team shared e-mail messages, text messages, and corporate paperwork to get the server online.  We also showed that the server team did not respond to our inquiries for three weeks.  Based on this information, leadership made a few phone calls and addressed the problem.  The server team configured our server correctly the next day.  

The moral to this story is document dependencies in the product or sprint backlog.  The approach creates a quantitative technique to measure how long it takes people outside the team to complete work.  Transparency and openness are tools to help the team and its leadership better address organizational impediments. It works for small projects of one group or giant enterprise solutions with hundreds of developers.  

Dependencies are a shadowy subject, but if you document them in the backlog and are transparent about their impact on the project, you will have a way to overcome these organizational hurdles.

Until next time. 

Using Agile to Save an Organizational Shipwreck

The agile reformation has been my passion and livelihood for over ten years.  I strongly believe in making work more sustainable.  The global economy is highly complicated, and it takes intelligent and conscientious people to transform it one cubical at a time.  I spend my time writing extensively about agile and corporate culture.  Over the years, I experienced many of the ugly realities of being a business person; the lack of job security, erratic behavior from vendors and clients, regulators with good intentions, and plenty of colleagues who act in bad faith.  

The business world resembles being shipwrecked and trapped in a lifeboat.  After days of hunger and thirst, each survivor attempts to cannibalize the others or throw them overboard to the sharks to save themselves.  Rescue is elusive, and the ocean threatens to destroy everyone.  The agile movement is a friendly shore to find refuge.  Unfortunately, I see business organizations ignore this kind of relief and remain adrift.  I have given this plenty of consideration, and I have a few informed opinions about why organizations prefer to be shipwrecked.  

Inertia is a concept from physics, and Issac Newton first described it as the ability for an object at rest to remain at rest or an object in motion to stay in motion.  You expend energy to overcome the force of inertia.  In business, this energy equals the expenditure of time and money, which are precious resources.  The corporate culture of most organizations attempts to minimize the wasteful use of time and money, so inertia builds up and acts as a weight on the organization's ability to change.  People are content to avoid rocking the boat and terrified of risk, and being shipwrecked is preferable to rowing to safety.  

Fear is another factor.  Companies have to generate a profit and meet the expected profits of their investors, creditors, and shareholders.  It puts pressure on leaders to wring as much money out of the organization.  Lay-offs and outsourcing are necessary tools in this process.  What it does is create a level of uncertainty and fear in an organization.  It forces people to ignore inefficiency or waste because exposing it might lead to unemployment.  Thus, agile with its rapid cycle times and inspection heightens fear in the organization. People who are afraid have two choices;  they flee the company, or they fight.  It is the people who remain behind who throw sand in the gears of change.  To them, the status quo at an organization is preferable to changes that are threatening.  

Fear and inertia create a cycle of dysfunction within an organization.  I must also point out poor leadership as the third piece of the triad.  Those individuals struggle to keep promises and prefer hoarding information and resources.  You point out problems to this kind of leader, and they politely ignore them and often like to fire the messenger who brings them those problems.  It is about control for those people, and anything which is a threat is resisted.  Using the Pareto rule, 20% of your leadership team creates 80% of your waste and inefficiency.  Agile is good at finding these people, but out of self-interest, they will fight back.  

Combined, fear, uncertainty, and poor leadership create an environment deeply resistant to agile.  It is just like being lost at sea.  I will continue to educate and train others about making work more sustainable, satisfying, and sane.  With a bit of luck, more of the shipwrecked will find friendly shores.  

Until next time. 

Agile Cultivates Success

Software development is a strange world of science, technology, commerce, and deadlines.  Presently, the people who keep these robust systems working represent less than one-hundredth of one percent of the total world’s population.  It means we have more work than people who can do it.  The Wall Street Journal notes that it is creating weird situations in the job market and business community.  Leadership must change to meet this new reality.  I knew over ten years ago that the current path would not be sustainable and joined the agile reformation.  It was a strange decision, but it makes sense because changing the world requires traveling differently.

The online comic “The Oatmeal” has a fantastic cartoon about high school and popularity.  We sort young people into so many categories.  Elite academic and athletic starts float above the student body.  What remains are masses of students attempting to get by and find a niche in life.  Among their ranks are the hard rock kids trying to escape with music and drugs and striving theater kinds and band members using performance as a path forward in their lives.  Finally, there are meek and unknown people looking to find anything which might provide purpose and direction to their lives.  

The upper crust of sports and academics occupy leadership roles in many schools.  Teachers and administrators find these individuals and provide them a path to college.  I was lucky and singled out in this fashion, but not fitting in gave me a different perspective and approach to leadership.  High school became a fertile soil to grow a personality.  

I would spend college learning to run a newsroom, work at a radio station, and interact with very different people.  The time I spent preparing for a career showed me how to retrain myself when economic and personal conditions change.  Funnily, my exposure to liberal arts and media made me more adaptive to the peaks and valleys of a modern economy.  

Businesses need strange, creative, and resilient people to lead change.  More than ever, to solve complicated problems, we need individuals who see things differently. These personalities look at issues and try outrageous approaches to solving these problems: more freaks and geeks calling the shots and fewer prom queens and homecoming kings.  

I am very proud that the agile movement has these eccentric characters.  People who are attempting to improve diversity among the ranks of developers.  Project people who understand that nine women cannot create a baby in one month and leaders that get their hands dirty with the teams doing the work instead of giving orders with no grounding in reality.  Each day, they are attempting to rebuild trust in the business world.  It is a struggle, sacrifice, and frustration.  Nothing worth doing is easy.  

It is why you need to look for those people who don’t fit in and give them some room to make a difference.  Instead of promoting a rising star, make them a scrum master and work across the organization building teams and clearing impediments.  When you promote these individuals, they will be better equipped to lead others because, as scrum masters, they must lead without any authority.  Teaching people to lead without authority is going to be an essential skill in business.  Many problems today require collaboration and systems thinking instead of power and hierarchy.  It is why traditional paths of leadership and looking increasingly obsolete.  

As a business person, success depends on looking at problems from a different perspective.  Organizations decouple leadership from authority.   Finally, collaboration is essential to solve business problems.  To find people who excel in these areas, you should direct your attention to the fertile soil of the agile movement and the colorful characters who make it unique.  

Until next time. 

 

Cheering on the Butterflies on Your Team

Working on large projects has a way of grinding down the best professionals.  The list of things to do is endless.  Deadline pressures mount, and technical challenges can take the most realistic timeline and transform it into a tar pit of despair.  I experience these emotions just as much as the next person.  Taking some time for myself this weekend, I stumbled on a metaphor that will help me manage the stress and strain which will build up over the next four weeks as I prepare to get ready for a new release.

Anyone who leads a team needs to learn how to tell stories.  The ability to tell stories helps you put situations into context, inspire others, and make the bad times less terrible.  Good leaders know how to read the team and what stories to tell to help them get to the next point.  Over the years, I have collected some of the better stories from literature and philosophy to help make sense of the chaos that swirls around me as a technology professional.  

After a relaxing weekend with my partner, I watched her grown children participate in the Brookfield Zoo 5K race.  It is a casual affair where you will see parents pushing strollers around the race route next to runners looking to earn prize money.  At the start of the race, cheering people on, we spread out over the course to clap and provide support to our family members.  The runners appreciated the support from family and friends to a person.  The runners went a little faster and kept pushing, thanks to the encouragement of others.  As a leader, you need to be on the sidelines, helping push people to keep running and provide the support they need when tired or running out of energy.  

In many respects, a significant software project is like a long-distance race.  The difference is with a technology project, the endpoint is unclear, and the racecourse changes difficulty as the race progresses.  It is frustrating and can undermine the confidence of anyone.  After the race, the family and I decided to enjoy a leisurely tour of the zoo via tram.  Our driver mentioned that many species of animals and insects migrate as part of their natural behavior.  The monarch butterfly is one of those species.  A common misperception is that a butterfly will travel across the United States to Mexico in the space of a year.  The tour guide mentioned that it takes four generations of butterflies to make the trip to the breeding grounds in Mexico.  The butterfly in Minnesota will never experience the warm sun of Mexico.  It is up to the butterflies' descendants to make the trip.  

Throughout four generations of butterflies living, breading, and flying, they make the trip across the continent one flap at a time.  It struck me this is the perfect metaphor for a large enterprise software project.  Often, people come and go on the project doing necessary work and then moving on to other things.  What keeps everything moving forward is the instinctual desire to finish the project and the muscular memory of the organization.  A good coach or scrum master should support this process and make sure that work gets done.  An agile leader should also point out that it will take numerous people to work together over long periods to get the job done.  It is like standing by the side of the road and cheering on people you want to succeed.  

Until next time. 

The Virtue of Rest

It is the end of the Labor Day weekend in the United States, and I have been thinking about America's unusual relationship with work.  We are the most prosperous and productive nation on the planet, but there is a price to pay for this accomplishment.  Workers in the United States take fewer vacation days, and they suffer from burnout at a higher rate than other western nations.  If we want to continue being the leader in the world economy, we must have a conversation about the virtue of rest.  

Max Webber, in his book, "The Protestant Work Ethic," argues that America is uniquely situated to be an economic powerhouse because many of the founding members of the American nation came from the Protestant denomination of Christianity. According to Webber, since work provides people with dignity and purpose, creating wealth, capitalist societies' virtues are predominantly Protestant.  It is a nice counterpoint to Karl Marx and his thoughts about how economies fit into the culture.  

Today, America is more diverse than at any time in its history.  We have Christians of all denominations, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus.  It is also common to find Buddhist temples and neo-pagan shrines in many big cities around the United States.  It is a significant strength of our nation.  While we have many religious faiths, American workers have embraced the protestant work ethic first described by Webber, and I see it among the professional people work with each day.  

The notion that work provides dignity and purpose slots conveniently with the laissez-faire approach to our economy in the United States.  We have fewer vacation days and national holidays than other countries.  Labor laws are more favorable to business owners than workers.  Finally, any support for working families comes from private businesses instead of from a government safety net.

Lost in this situation was the idea that you should rest.  Olympic athletes need to rest between bouts and include recovery time in their training.  Lack of sleep has similar effects to being intoxicated with alcohol.  Problem-solving declines the longer individuals look at a problem.  Finally, constant pressure to perform creates stress which leads to health consequences.  The biggest paradox of productivity is that the more productive we try to be, the less effective we become.

It is why the labor movement pushed for a forty-hour workweek one hundred years ago.  It is also why banks are paying extreme salaries for entry-level workers.  People, to be productive, need to rest.  The agile principles explicitly talk about sustainable pace.  It is impossible to get work finished if the workforce is too exhausted to accomplish it.

I am a firm believer in Webber's Protestant work ethic, but without rest, it isn't very sensible, something we all need to respect on a Labor Day weekend.

Until next time.