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Standard CCH Blueprint
The figure below is a “bent” UML (Unified Modeling Language) class diagram of a standard corpo CCH (Command and Control Hierarchy). Association connectors were left off because the diagram would be a mess and the only really important relationships are the adjacent step-by-step vertical connections. Each box represents a “classifier”, which is a blueprint for stamping out objects that behave according to the classifier blueprint. The top compartment contains the classifier name, the second compartment contains its attributes, and the third compartment houses the classifier’s behaviors. Except for the DIC Product Development Team, the attributes of all other classifiers were elided away because the intent was to focus on the standard cookie-cutter behaviors of each object in the “system”. Of course, the org you work for is not an instantiation of this system, right?
What Would It be Like?
In this TED video, Sir Ken Robinson asks: “What would the world be like if all knowledge was instantaneously accessible to everyone at any time?” My less ambitious question is “What would the workplace culture be like if every manager, from the pinnacle of power all the way down the chain, made it his/her top (but obviously not only) priority to ensure that every one of his/her direct reports has continuous access to the tools, training, and information to get their jobs done?
Malcontents
Everyone’s heard of the stereotypical, disgruntled, malcontented, long time employee (SDMLTE) who “can’t wait to retire”. Why is this Dilbertonian image a stereotype? Because it’s so ubiquitous that it’s unquestioningly accepted by the vast majority of people as “that’s the way it is everywhere”. Well, is it? Do you really think that every organization on this earth has a surplus of SDMLTEs? Call me idealistic, but I assert “no”.
I opine that there are few (very, very, very, very, few) companies whose old warhorses, graybeards and bluehairs are uncommon, happy, content, long time employees (UHCLTE). Compared to the moo-herd of corpocracies that litter the land, these scarce diamonds in the rough have a huge UHCLTE to SDMLTE ratio. I’ll also profer that as a company gets larger, its UHCLTE to SDMLTE ratio decreases. That’s because as a company grows in size, bad management increases while great leadership decreases within the citadel walls – regardless of what the corpo stewards repeatedly espouse. Bummer.
Useless Cases
Despite the blasphemous title of this blarticle, I think that “use cases” are a terrific tool for capturing a system’s functional requirements out of the ether; for the right class of applications. Nevertheless, I agree with requirements “expert” Karl Wiegers, who states the following in “More About Software Requirements: Thorny Issues And Practical Advice“:
However, use cases are less valuable for projects involving data warehouses, batch processes, hardware products with embedded control software, and computationally intensive applications. In these sorts of systems, the deep complexity doesn’t lie in the user-system interactions. It might be worthwhile to identify use cases for such a product, but use case analysis will fall short as a technique for defining all the system’s behavior.
I help to define, specify, design, code, and test embedded (but relatively “big”) software-intensive sensor systems for the people-transportation industry. The figure below shows a generic, pseudo-UML diagram of one of these systems. Every component in the string is software-intensive. In this class of systems, like Karl says, “the deep complexity doesn’t lie in the user-system interactions”. As you can see, there’s a lot of special and magical “stuff” going on behind the GUI that the user doesn’t know about, and doesn’t care to know about. He/she just cares that the objects he/she wants to monitor show up on the screen and that the surveillance picture dutifully provided by the system is an accurate representation of what’s going on in the real world outside.
A list of typical functions for a product in this class may look like this:
- Display targets
- Configure system
- Monitor system operation
- Tag target
- Control system operation
- Perform RF signal filtering
- Perform signal demodulation
- Perform signal detection
- Perform false signal (e.g. noise) rejection
- Perform bit detection, extraction, and message generation
- Perform signal attribute (e.g. position, velocity) estimation
- Perform attribute tracking
Notice that only the top five functions involve direct user interaction with the product. Thus, I think that employing use cases to capture the functions required to provide those capabilities is a good idea. All the dirty and nasty”perform” stuff requires vertical, deep mathematical expertise and specification by sensor domain experts (some of whom, being “expert specialists”, think they are Gods). Thus, I think that the classical “old and unglamorous” Software Requirements Specification (SRS) method of defining the inputs/processing/output sequences (via UML activity diagrams and state machine diagrams) blows written use case descriptions out of the water in terms of Return On Investment (ROI) and value transferred to software developers.
Clueless Bozo Managers (BMs) and senior wannabe-a-BM developers who jump on the “use cases for everything” bandwagon (but may have never written a single use case description themselves) waste company time and money trying to bully “others” into ramming a square peg into a round hole. But they look hip, on the ball, and up to date doing it. And of course, they call it leadership.
Doing And Being
Echkart Tolle has stated that every human being has an inner purpose and an outer purpose. According to Mr. Tolle, our inner purpose is “being” and our outer purpose is “doing”. Along similar lines, Mother Theresa once said something to the effect that “the west is materially rich (from doing) but spiritually poor (from not being)”. I’m on-board with these related insights because I’ve realized them through personal experience. How about you?
A problem that I see with western cultures is that most people have their self worth totally fused with “doing”, while “being” is often disdained, looked down upon, and interpreted as sloth/laziness. There is no balance, and I’m one of those unabalanced (lol!) people. Do I have “factual evidence” to back this up? Of course not. I’m not a world renowned expert and I only speak from personal experience. Plus, I like to make stuff up.
Different Views
In all triangular CCHs (Command and Control Hierarchies), the DICs (Dweebs In the Cellar) directly create the value added outputs that sustain the enterprise. It’s management’s job (I think?) to ensure that the quality of those outputs is high enough for customers to want to buy the CCH’s products and services over competing CCHs. Of course, there are many ways to accomplish this. One is to inspect the outputs, a second is to get customer feedback, a third is to directly sample intermediate points in the value stream, and a trio of closely coupled others is to; personally descend to the cellar, observe what the DICs see, listen to what the DICs have to say regarding the issues/obstacles they face, and act “aggressively” (corpo-speak for “effectively”) to resolve those issues/obstacles. Note that the verbs, which require “hard work”, are emphasized.
The simple, dorky figure below tries to convey the difference in viewpoint between the DICs and the apex dwellers. Unlike the hierarchs, who operate freely and do whatever they want whenever they want, the DICs operate within a fragmented web of constraining “support” processes and “direction” from former DICs-turned-mini-hierarchs (picture mini-me in the Austin Powers movie franchise). Over time, since the hierarchs (and more importantly, the mini-hierarchs in training) stay away from the dirty and musty cellar and don’t do anything of substance to improve the environment, the stratification increases, the latency from raw input to value-added output increases, and the quality of output decreases. Bummer.
In CCHs with stay-at-home corpocrats, the deterioration in responsiveness and quality often gets detected at that point in time in which the real issues that are wreaking havoc are virtually unsolvable. Even then, the so-called leadership team stays away from the boiler room, speculating from afar at the causes of the performance deterioration. Out of all the methods for continuously monitoring and improving DIC performance, I assert (with no backing scientific evidence, of course) that frequent, periodic trips to the cellar to rub elbow grease with the DICs is the only true way of improving performance. Even if it’s impractical for the supreme hierarchs to do this, it’s not impractical for the mini-hierarchs, dontcha think?
My Company
After reviewing most of the “made up” BS entries that I’ve hoisted on this blog, I’ve noticed (like you, no doubt) that just about every other post either starts out as, or progresses towards, a rant against standard Command and Control Hierarchical (CCH) corpocracies and horrendous managers who delude themselves into thinking they are “leaders”. It’s funny how all freakin’ roads lead to Rome, no?
To set the record straight, I honestly don’t think that all hierarchically structured organizations are soulless and spirit crushing CCHs. One of those companies happens to be the company that I work for; the Sensis Corporation.
I’ve been at Sensis for a long time, and despite what you may have concluded from reading this blog (all 2 of you), I really do like working there. For the most part, I’m given more freedom than most to do what I do best and the list of pluses far outnumbers the list of minuses. Besides matching the standard benefits package that most other companies give their workforce, here are some of the uncommon plusses:
- A CEO that genuinely cares about the people who work for him
- Subsidized in-house cafeteria
- Subsidized in-house gym facility
- No special executive parking spaces
- Special, named parking places for individual handicapped people
- Company-wide profit sharing when yearly sales & profit numbers are met
- Occasional company-wide barbeques
- Quarterly disclosure of the numbers to the troops
- In-house happy hours for significant achievements
- Free lunches at all-hands meetings
- Vacation rollover
- Free coffee
- Summer Hours (Friday afternoons off)
The two biggest pluses for me are:
- No layoffs in the entire 24 year history of the company’s existence and a policy that explicitly states that “no layoffs” is a top goal.
- I haven’t been fired (whoo hoo!) despite multiple exhibitions over the years of truly disrespectful behavior toward a handful of targeted “others”.
The minuses of working at Sensis are typical of any company in our industry (military and aerospace); they’re just not practiced as badly as our bigger and more stodgy peers.
Weakly Status Ritual
Everyone knows about the “weakly” status reporting ritual. It’s where the DICs (Dweebs In The Cellar) fill out and submit written status reports to the manager in charge (sic).
Did you ever wonder why status reporting is a one way street and it’s unquestioningly accepted as the norm in corpocracies everywhere? Whatever happened to “lead by example”? Why don’t managers fill out their very own weakly status reports and distribute them to their captive DICS? It’s because they don’t contribute or accomplish anything other than stapling the DIC reports together and kicking the result upstairs to the NLM (Next Level Manager) – who promptly ignores the POP (Package Of Poop) too. Side note: that’s where the term “POP server” originated.
If managers were required to submit weakly status reports to the DIC-force, what would they look like?
Working Software, Working Documents
Documentation is a love letter that you write to your future self – Damian Conway
The agile software development community rightly says that the best measure of progress is demonstrate-able working software that is delivered incrementally and frequently to customers for their viewing and using pleasure. For the most part, and for good reasons based on historical evidence, agile proponents eschew documentation. Nevertheless, big bureaucratic customers like national and state governments often, very often, require and expect comprehensive documentation from their vendors. Thus, zealot agilist juntas essentially ignore the requirements of a large and deep-pocketed customer base.
It’s software development, not documentation development – Scott Ambler
What if we can bring big, stodgy, conservative, and sometimes-paranoid customers halfway? Why not try to convince them of the merits of delivering frequent and incrementally improving requirements, design, construction, and user documents along with the working software builds? If we pay as we go, incrementally doing a little documentation, doing a little software coding, and doing a little testing instead of piling on the documentation up front or frantically kludging the documents together after the fact, wouldn’t the end result would turn out better?
A consequence of generating crappy documentation for big, long-lived systems is the high cost of downstream maintenance. Dumping hundreds of thousands of lines of code onto the maintenance team without handing them synchronized blueprints is an irresponsible act of disrespect to both the team and the company. Without being able to see the forest for the trees, maintenance teams, which are usually comprised of young and impressionable developers, get frustrated and inject kludged up implementations of new features and bug fixes into the product. Bad habits are formed, new product versions get delivered later and later, and maintenance costs grow higher and higher. Bummer.
Structure And Work
Under the inescapable second law of thermodynamics, fragmentation and dis-integration are natural consequence of organizational growth over time. Real leaders respect and arrest the destructive power of the second law by conscientiously applying structure and work to keep the org intact and aligned toward a higher purpose. All cookie cutter managers know how to design and impose structure. Hell, that’s the easy part because you could look one up in the standard hierarchical patterns handbook (which has only one page and one pattern – the command and control hierarchy where the kahunas at the top rule over the kingdom and ignore input from everyone else).
The “work” is the hard part. Unlike leaders, managers hate work and they’ll do anything, no matter how harmful it is to the org, to avoid it while feigning that they’re bustin’ their butt to “get things done”. Thus, after unveiling his/her latest masterpiece corpo structure, which is always an insignificant hierarchical tweak, he/she “abdicates” the day-to-day work of keeping the fragments in harmony to…….. “others”.
So, what is the “work” part of the powerful, entropy-arresting, work+structure dynamic duo? It’s a continuous and active “sampling the value stream” and a continuous monitoring of the interfaces and interactions between the org fragments to sense signals of disintegration. Without doing the work part, performance will not improve, and of course, it will deteriorate further; triggering yet another round of restructuring to “meet the changing needs of our customers”. Bummer.
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