This has been on my mind for a while, so bear with me…
I have just watched a whole series of vendors stand up and talk about their products. The message was always the same: “we realise that our products are hard to use for you to use without (gasp!) training, that we use too many TLAs so you can’t understand us easily, that we behave too much like specialists and don’t ‘connect’ with you on your terms, etc., etc. Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa.”
Now, I understand that a vendor probably has to take this approach…he/she most likely wouldn’t make too many sales otherwise (try to imagine a sales pitch concluding with: “…and you are required to purchase sufficient training and to devote sufficient time and effort to ensure that you are using our product correctly.” it ain’t gonna happen [and for some perfectly good reasons, too]). I do worry about this, though. Complex products that address complex requirements are hard to use…no amount of wishing/denial is going to change this fundamental (consider please a computer numerically-controlled lathe). All specialists have their domain languages and we do ourselves a disservice by pretending otherwise. Let’s face it as well: would you really expect to consult with a top-surgeon only to be told “we need to go snippetty-snippety on the pink dangly bit here.”
This issue of Mea Culpa seems to go deep: I have just finshed Certified ScrumMaster training. In Scrum, a fair proportion of the ScrumMaster’s role involves working with the Product Owner to ensure that what is happening in the team is visible and appropriate for the needs of the project. There are no real requirements placed on the Product Owner other than to ‘represent’ the business. To my mind, there is an obvious imbalance here: while the dev. team has to work hard to be seen as working clearly, quantifiably making progress, ec. etc. there is no such requirement placed upon the Product Owner, who (as far as Scrum is concerned) may as well be handing down Product Backlog Items on tablets delivered from above.
Spot the issue? Clearly, development has such a highly problematic history (Mea Culpa) that it must be able to be overseen by all and sundry to make sure that things don’t go badly off the rails (Mea Culpa). Where, pray, is the requirement on “the Business” to work in an equally transparent way so that the dev. team can oversee and have visibility into the way that requirements are gathered, analysed, presented, etc.? Organisations are regularly seen asking for developers with n+ years experience in products only n-1 years old (”just to be safe”, it appears) while at the same time feel free to ask for BAs with little or no training (note that my cat has “Demonstrated ability to be able to communicate to a wide variety of people from all levels of an organisation”. Harsh words, perhaps. I am sure that Agile Analysis exists, I just don’t see too many job adverts. Meanwhile PRINCE2 project management is gaining popularity in leaps and bounds since it is obvious that if a big hammer isn’t doing the job then a bigger one is clearly needed).
Who knows, if both sides worked equally hard, if both sides admitted Mea Culpa, we would get real improvement…it certainly won’t come about if this fake and ineffectual tendency to take on blame continues.
