Agile Otter Blog

I was speaking with my friend Bryan who, like myself, does a lot of work with very large organizations. Many of them are great places and have sincere interest in being wonderful places to work with wonderful people. Sometimes, though, they struggle. In considering the nature of their struggles, I realized that I've collected or formed some observations of dynamics and I've not really vetted them all publically. I'd like to take this moment to think out loud and, with kindness and curiosity and empathy, see if we can develop and refine these observations -- or possibly strike them entirely if they seem utterly false. Please join me via comments or emails ([email protected] or [email protected]) to let me know what you think about these observations, what I'm missing, and what I can do to fill out the set better. Just remember, this is about curiosity and systems -- I'm not here to tear anyone down. Dunbar's Number Researcher Dunbar notic...

There are some special challenges with dealing with productivity of knowledge workers. Most of them have to do with the invisibility of the work and the difficulty in managing invisible work. Programmers and testers don't assemble machinery or bend paperclips or mold parts from molten goo. They don't stack boxes or bricks, or swing hammers. The work they do has no physical manifestation, which makes it both hard to observe and hard to understand. I don't blame managers in the 70s and 80s who counted lines of code. It was one of the few visible manifestations of the work programmers do. It was entirely misguided of course, and several of us have experienced net-negative lines of code in consecutive weeks of work (I've even had awkward and unpleasant meetings with managers for "messing up the metrics," ending in an admonition to stop it). Other attempts to make the work visible count data fields on screens and in databases and on reports. This is a bit...