You know what I really hate? The commonly held assumption that developers are not well-rounded people. Sure there are some socially inept individuals in developer roles, but there are in any population. I have met PR people that are far worse communicators than many deep technologists. The notion that devs don’t understand business drivers is also complete horseshit.
I tell you one thing for sure: Far more developers understand the business they work in than business people understand the technology that drives them forward.
So why not listen to this important constituency? Its the quickest way to agile.
I met a guy earlier this week whose organisation is currently being reamed by an onslaught of consultants from a certain large firm that begins with G. As part of a step through the service management maturity model they have taken all the developers with domain expertise and stuck them in a shared service organisation where that expertise is no longer required. Apparently the organisation will get new “business modelling people” to model the business, and then run these models. The modellers will talk to the business and translate requirements into magic code generators. Needless to say the organisation is on the verge of collapse, and now you can hardly get a printout of a document, let alone implement a new business idea. Service management huh?
Don’t believe the hype. Talk to your developers. You might learn something. Certainly don’t assume that outsiders on £8k a day know your business.
Many business executives are so busy playing politics or whatever that don’t what know what the business is doing, so why should they be setting requirements? I have met plenty of savvy developers, and many of them are creating startups as we speak that are changing the world of business.
I think synthesisers get a lot less credit than they deserve. Yes I know its all about serving the business and so on, but technical people often say no for a good reason. I am just calling for a bit more dialogue and less decision-making based on false assumptions and prejudices.
Robin Wilton says:
February 3, 2007 at 6:20 pm
James, as someone who seems to have ended up making a ‘career’ out of translating between technologists and businesspeople, I can wholeheartedly endorse your view.
(Note that I didn’t specify in which direction the translation is most necessary…)
Interestingly, I’ve found that if you explain technical stuff to business folks, you are more likely to generate a furrowed brow and “What?” questions (such as “What the heck does one of those do?”);
if you explain business motivators to technies, you’re more likely to run into a quizzical look and “Why?” questions (such as “Why would anyone want to prioritise that?”, or “Why’s that a good idea?) ;^)
JQP says:
February 5, 2007 at 5:46 am
While I don’t disagree with the basic sentiment of the post, I would not go so far as to claim the opposing view is complete horseshit….especially if one has zero actual personal software development experience from which to speak.
It’s one thing to shoot the shit with developers – but until you’ve worked as one yourself and/or managed a development group, you offer what is known as hearsay.
Certainly software engineers have become more business-aware over the past 16 years or so, but not much more business-savvy (not the majority). They still tend to understand processes better than they understand drivers. Similarly, they still tend to understand machines better than they understand people. Sometimes business is illogical. Sometimes it lacks elegance. Heck, they’re only now beginning to understand the importance of time-to-market…the lucky few that do.
They may be developing technologies that present new opportunities and challenges for business, but don’t mistake that for changing the world of business. As many techies discovered over the past 16 years, the tools may change (e.g. the introduction of the Internet and email) and new markets may emerge (the self-absorbed Gen Y crowd comes to mind), but the fundamentals of business and human behavior still apply.
As with the practitioners of any occupation, there are notable exceptions.
Regarding hiring outside expertise…sometimes it becomes necessary because managers and developers alike tend to drink their own kool-aid. Historically, they are prisoners of their own thinking, and poor judges of their own concepts and performance (not unlike their senior executive employers). Someone needs to rattle the cage, shake things up and keep the minions on their toes. What better way than with an army of consultants at a cost that would make Chopard green with envy.
If you’re going to fashion yourself into the voice of the unappreciated, how about showing the folks in documentation some love. Talk about unsung heros – they’re responsible for taking the crap some developers like to call applications, and interpreting the features into a language even YouTube parented Generation Me kids can understand.
jgovernor says:
February 5, 2007 at 11:49 pm
thanks robin. love the what/why distinction.
ouch. guilty as charged JQP. i have certainly never managed a development team. on the other hand its not hearsay either, not if its based on direct personal experience. i talk to quite a lot of developers and hired one of them to become an analyst-Cote. he is a phenomenal communicator and knows how to take care of business. we do a lot of work with vendors and I see team dynamics in action a fair bit. again-not hearsay but experience. I also talk to plenty of development managers and line of business people. i think you make a fair point but i don’t think only a software developer that has become a manager is “allowed” to comment on whether or not developers get business. perhaps horseshit was a little strong, from a rhetorical point of view.
there are some fantastic documentation people out there no doubt. there are also some terrible ones. but i have never heard a business person say you know what the documentation team really doesn’t get it… give my some examples and i will post them.
voice of the unappreciated – give me a break. i was just pointing out something that annoys me
Thomas Bjelkeman says:
February 7, 2007 at 7:47 pm
To me, the real issue about privacy is linking lack of privacy with the power of structured data, near endless computer resources, bad systems architecture and all this connected to the internet.
The internet is creaping in everywhere. Currently the benefits are big so people let it get in deeper and deeper in their lives. Your phone has it (soon if not now), your TV recording device, your bank statements, your bank payments, you can see the trend. Personal data and credicard information is handled by people who really have no stake in actually looking after it. See the recent SWIFT broughaha for example. I mean, who is really going to loose their job or go to jail at SWIFT for breaking European privacy laws?
People seem to think that only the authorities are collecting data about them and tabulating it for future use. I quite often hear “Well I haven’t done anything, so I am not worried”. Well they should be if you look at how the authorities in many countries behave. But there are people collecting data about us for non-governmental use. There is no doubt that the DoS attack on the DNS root servers the other day was an attempt to insert their own root servers in the system, if only for a while, so that the DNS data would direct you to a bank site, which didn’t belong to your bank.
These people who are doing this are going to become more and more sophisticated. What do you do when you get letter in the post with a picture of your daugther, information about your car and your work and a map of the way you drive your doughter too school? All this together with a demand for five thousand quid or else? And they can automate this and send it to thousands of people.
Poor privacy with crap security is going to be nasty. http://www.securityabsurdity.com/