You’ve picked up this book, so I assume you are a software professional. That’s good; so am I. And since I have your attention, let me tell you why I picked up this book.
It all starts a short time ago in a place not too far away. Cue the curtain, lights and camera, Charley ....
Several years ago I was working at a medium-sized corporation selling highly regulated products. You know the type; we sat in a cubicle farm in a three-story building, directors and up had private offices, and getting everyone you needed into the same room for a meeting took a week or so.
We were operating in a very competitive market when the government opened up a new product.
Suddenly we had an entirely new set of potential customers; all we had to do was to get them to buy our product. That meant we had to file by a certain deadline with the federal government, pass an assessment audit by another date, and go to market on a third date.
Over and over again our management stressed to us the importance of those dates. A single slip and the government would keep us out of the market for a year, and if customers couldn’t sign up on day one, then they would all sign up with someone else and we’d be out of business.
It was the sort of environment in which some people complain, and others point out that “pressure makes diamonds.”
I was a technical project manager, promoted from development. My responsibility was to get the web site up on go-live day, so potential customers could download information and, most importantly, enrollment forms. My partner in the endeavor was the business-facing project manager, whom I’ll call Joe. Joe’s role was to work the other side, dealing with sales, marketing, and the non-technical requirements. He was also the guy fond of the “pressure makes diamonds” comment.
If you’ve done much work in corporate America, you’ve probably seen the finger-pointing, blamestorming, and work aversion that is completely natural. Our company had an interesting solution to that problem with Joe and me.
A little bit like Batman and Robin, it was our job to get things done. I met with the technical team every day in a corner; we’d rebuild the schedule every single day, figure out the critical path, then remove every possible obstacle from that critical path. If someone needed software; we’d go get it. If they would “love to” configure the firewall but “gosh, it’s time for my lunch break,” we would buy them lunch. If someone wanted to work on our configuration ticket but had other priorities, Joe and I would go talk to the supervisor.
Then the manager.
Then the director.
We got things done.
It’s a bit of an exaggeration to say that we kicked over chairs, yelled, and screamed, but we did use every single technique in our bag to get things done, invented a few new ones along the way, and we did it in an ethical way that I am proud of to this day.
I thought of myself as a member of the team, not above jumping in to write a SQL statement or doing a little pairing to get the code out the door. At the time, I thought of Joe the same way, as a member of the team, not above it.
Eventually I came to realize that Joe did not share that opinion. That was a very sad day for me.
It was Friday at 1:00 PM; the web site was set to go live very early the following Monday.
We were done. *DONE*. Every system was go; we were ready. I had the entire tech team assembled for the final scrum meeting and we were ready to flip the switch. More than “just” the technical team, we had the business folks from marketing, the product owners, with us.
We were proud. It was a good moment.
Then Joe dropped by.
He said something like, “Bad news. Legal doesn’t have the enrollment forms ready, so we can’t go live yet.”
This was no big deal; we’d been held up by one thing or another for the length of the entire project and had the Batman/Robin routine down pat. I was ready, and my reply was essentially, “All right partner, let’s do this one more time. Legal is on the third floor, right?”
Then things got weird.
Instead of agreeing with me, Joe asked, “What are you talking about Matt?”
I said, “You know. Our usual song and dance. We’re talking about four PDF files, right? That are done; legal just has to approve them? Let’s go hang out in their cubicles, give them the evil eye, and get this thing done!”
Joe did not agree with my assessment, and answered, “We’ll just go live late next week. No big deal.”
You can probably guess the rest of the exchange; it sounded something like this:
Matt: “But why? They could do this in a couple hours.”
Joe: “It might take more than that.”
Matt: “But they’ve got all weekend. Plenty of time. Let’s do this!”
Joe: “Matt, these are professionals. We can’t just stare them down and insist they sacrifice their personal lives for our little project.”
Matt: (pause) “. . . Joe . . . what do you think we’ve been doing to the engineering team for the past four months?”
Joe: “Yes, but these are professionals.”
Pause.
Breathe.
What. Did. Joe. Just. Say?
At the time, I thought the technical staff were professionals, in the best sense of the word.
Thinking back over it again, though, I’m not so sure.
Let’s look at that Batman and Robin technique a second time, from a different perspective. I thought I was exhorting the team to its best performance, but I suspect Joe was playing a game, with the implicit assumption that the technical staff was his opponent. Think about it: Why was it necessary to run around, kicking over chairs and leaning on people?
Shouldn’t we have been able to ask the staff when they would be done, get a firm answer, believe the answer we were given, and not be burned by that belief?
Certainly, for professionals, we should . . . and, at the same time, we could not. Joe didn’t trust our answers, and felt comfortable micromanaging the tech team—and at the same time, for some reason, he did trust the legal team and was not willing to micromanage them.
What’s that all about?
Somehow, the legal team had demonstrated professionalism in a way the technical team had not.
Somehow, another group had convinced Joe that they did not need a babysitter, that they were not playing games, and that they needed to be treated as peers who were respected.
No, I don’t think it had anything to do with fancy certificates hanging on walls or a few extra years of college, although those years of college might have included a fair bit of implicit social training on how to behave.
Ever since that day, those long years ago, I’ve wondered how the technical profession would have to change in order to be regarded as professionals.
Oh, I have a few ideas. I’ve blogged a bit, read a lot, managed to improve my own work life situation and help a few others. Yet I knew of no book that laid out a plan, that made the whole thing explicit.
Then one day, out of the blue, I got an offer to review an early draft of a book; the book that you are holding in your hands right now.
This book will tell step by step exactly how to present yourself and interact as a professional. Not with trite cliché, not with appeals to pieces of paper, but what you can do and how to do it.
In some cases, the examples are word for word.
Some of those examples have replies, counter-replies, clarifications, even advice for what to do if the other person tries to “just ignore you.”
Hey, look at that, here comes Joe again, stage left this time:
Oh, here we are, back at BigCo, with Joe and me, once more on the big web site conversion project.
Only this time, imagine it just a little bit differently.
Instead of shirking from commitments, the technical staff actually makes them. Instead of shirking from estimates or letting someone else do the planning (then complaining about it), the technical team actually self-organizes and makes real commitments.
Now imagine that the staff is actually working together. When the programmers are blocked by operations, they pick up the phone and the sysadmin actually gets started on the work.
When Joe comes by to light a fire to get ticket 14321 worked on, he doesn’t need to; he can see that the DBA is working diligently, not surfing the web. Likewise, the estimates he gets from staff seem downright consistent, and he doesn’t get the feeling that the project is in priority somewhere between lunch and checking email. All the tricks and attempts to manipulate the schedule are not met with, “We’ll try,” but instead, “That’s our commitment; if you want to make up your own goals, feel free.”
After a while, I suspect Joe would start to think of the technical team as, well, professionals. And he’d be right.
Those steps to transform your behavior from technician to professional? You’ll find them in the rest of the book.
Welcome to the next step in your career; I suspect you are going to like it.
—Matthew Heusser
Software Process Naturalist