Peter Tuffin is a wise IT professional with decades of experience. I had the honor of working with him for several years, and during this time we often tried to identify those things – faits accompli if you will – which we just live with: Unwritten rules that are established in our minds through us not challenging the status quo. We bring them with us in the morning and take them home again, safe and sound, in the evening.
Peter raised two of his: “I think these are things that we should practice becoming aware of and challenging more and more. I guess one way to become aware of them is to notice when we have a problem which seems insolulable: Perhaps below that skulks a misconception which needs blowing out of the water. I list them as the idea that we have, what that gives rise to, and what the real issue might be.
1. Idea: All of our developers need to be busy on cutting edge, technically challenging work, otherwise they will just leave.
One result of this is ‘you can’t put good developers onto maintenance projects’ (which all projects become), so the commercial money-making projects end up being over-supplied with mediocre personnel.
The reality might just be that most developers are quite happy working on whatever comes their way, and maybe especially if the product is being used by external users who pay money to use it. Perhaps the real reason for the misconception is that developers have an idea that they need to be exposed to as much as possible so that if they do in fact leave the company they will be able to get a job elsewhere.
But if our primary motive is to hold on to good people for as long as we can (and otherwise why would this issue have come up at all), then perhaps this can be addressed in other ways, such as, for example:
a) allaying their fears that they will not be able to work outside the company (in ways other than exposing them to the cutting edge, like, for example, showing them the reality of the IT world which has more cutting edge to it than a Swiss-army knife and exposure to all of that will take a lifetime and be impractical).
b) paying them enough that they don’t want to make the move.
Finally, I think we should actually ask people if the misconception is in any way applicable to them – at the moment we just assume it.
2. Idea: There is an attitude that prevails that can be worded as, “The customer is always right, and they pay our salaries, and so we will give them whatever they ask for and when they ask for it.”
Many things result from this: We spend a lot of time on unimportant things, sometimes delivering features which don’t really solve the problem (because of the attitude of ‘if the customer is right then they must have expressed their need correctly’, which is not necessarily the case), and sometimes spending a lot of time on features which affect very few of our customerss and sometimes have no discernable commercial benefit.
In reality I would like to translate the idea statement to: “The customer is always right, and they pay our salaries, and so we must keep their relationship with us a happy one at all times.” Keeping the customer happy is a lot broader than just providing product features, and sometimes immeasurably less expensive.”
Here are only two misconceptions. Are you brave enough to identify and confess some of yours and subject them to a similar analysis? If so, let us know by posting a comment.
