Wonderful. Well thought, researched and valuable for large and small companies alike. http://wildwildeastdailies.blogspot.com
The other half of "Artists Ship"
81–90 of 132 posts
Re: The other half of "Artists Ship"
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is "one in, one out" a silly rule? e.g. you can only add a new step to a process if a step is removed from another.
Is "one in, one out" a silly rule? Yes. ;) When do you institute the rule -- on day one, in which case it is functionally equivalent to "do not have any checks"? On day 13? Day 7386? What is the quantum of a "check"? Is Sarbanes-Oxley one "check" or a collection of hundreds of "checks"? Does the limit apply department-by-department or company-wide? Your sysadmins will naturally tend to employ a lot more formal checks…
"When do you institute the rule?"
When you realise you have a (potential) problem. It stops it getting worse.
"What is the quantum of a 'check'?"
More tricky, certainly. That's a potential big problem.
"Does the limit apply department-by-department or company-wide?"
Whatever makes sense.
The idea of the exercise would be basically to:
- build an appreciation throught the organisation that checks have a cost
- provide a (albeit imperfect) mechanism for exercising some control over it
Something doesn't have to be perfect to be of use.
"The last thing you want to do is encourage teams of lawyerly meta-checkers to run around enforcing rules about rules. That's costly, squared."
That's just ISO9001, isn't it? :-)
Re: The other half of "Artists Ship"
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
From memory: the Excel bug that caused Moody's to give high ratings of mortgage securities (one of the probable causes of the whole mess) was known, but management decided not to fix it. So, greed can override checks and balances.
The bug wasn't in Excel. It was Moody's own fault, not Microsoft's.
No, their version had a bugger where zero in the denominator came back as "infinity."
Re: The other half of "Artists Ship"
#84Small side node:
I think it is very cool to have the comments here instead of his website. It is nice to have them consolidated and not some comments here, some there.
Re: The other half of "Artists Ship"
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
During their executive retreats they decided to be risk seeking instead. I wonder if the problem at the recently troubled companies (AIG, Merrill, Lehman etc) was not enough checks in place or not enough power allotted to the employees who knew something was wrong.
Same as always: greed
Ideally a system should use greed (and other emotions) instead of having to guard against it.
Re: The other half of "Artists Ship"
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well yes, because that assumes that there is some magical amount of checks that must never be exceeded. Some checks are extremely valuable and should be added based on their merits alone.
That's the point I was trying to make. Something like "always commit and run the tests before going to production" makes a lot of sense, and should be mandated. Even something like "three signed copies of an authorization form" makes sense for some projects if, for example, the cost of damages (say, lost data, downtime or annoyed paying customers) is big enough. Measuring this, though, is the hard part. It's like try…
How about just measuring how many bits it takes to describe the checks (perl code etc + informal text). Do not make any hard and fast rules - just monitor this metric.
Re: The other half of "Artists Ship"
#87"...not only wouldn't these guys have broken anything, they'd have gotten a lot more done." I don't think the claim that they would not have broken anything can be backed by facts. If you look at Microsoft, for instance, their programmers used to write very buggy code, but with the introduction of better processes, like their Secure Development Lifecycle, they saw a substantial improvement in code quality (as measure…
I meant these particular guys.
My point still is valid.
Even these particular guys certainly would have written buggy code. A QA process could correct it.
Re: The other half of "Artists Ship"
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Writer are like hackers, yes. But the reason most salesmen like to work hard is that they're paid on commission. That's very different.
Not true. Good salesmen love the power, convincing others to do their will. They are more like actors or politicians. You can't fake charisma just because you might get paid more.
You can't do anything well without liking to do it. The difference between hackers and salesmen is that hacking is what hackers like most. Salesmen who have sufficient money seem empirically to prefer playing golf, whereas hackers with money tend to keep hacking.
Re: The other half of "Artists Ship"
#89The movie "Meet the Robinsons" makes a point to children that we make the most progress when we are free to fail. Thanks for making the same point for grownups.
Re: The other half of "Artists Ship"
#90This past summer I worked as an intern for a big company. On the first day of orientation the head of the legal compliance department said very flatly to us that any individual could do far more harm to the firm than good. This mentality, reenforced by the company's bureaucratic change management system, really did not sit well with me. Fortunately for my summer experience, my "buddy"/summer mentor and I found a loop…
For large companies with a valuable reputation, that's almost guaranteed to be true. Most people won't generate a million dollars worth of value in a given year, but nearly everyone could do that amount of damage to their company's reputation in just a few minutes.
Most people might not generate a million in value per year, but some people can generate a million in value per day.