Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

As alluded to in Adam’s recent post on the next steps in our Agile journey we have taken the liberty of reorganising our JIRA workflow to better suit our new practices. We want to use JIRA as much more than a simple job tracking tool and begin using it much more as a part of both our organisational memory and as a key part of our work flow. I had also been getting irritated at the large number of useless or redundant jobs in the system. Thinking back on it now, I realise that the irritation was my brain sending me a signal that our processes were not alligned with our work flow.
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This morning I was the most casually dressed person at a Thoughtworks run seminar called “Emergent Design and Evolutionary Architecture”. The seminar itself was extremely well planned and executed, despite the lack of effective air conditioning. The speaker was an American named Neal Ford, who Thoughtworks had flown out to Australia to speak at these events (there are two more, which you can catch for free in Sydney and Melbourne).”
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In long-hand, you will be known as our:

General Manager for Discerning, Developing and Delivering what the Customer Wants

That’s a bit of a mouthful, so we have shortened it to a variety of titles used on this blog and elsewhere:
1)  GM Software
2)  Chief Software Engineer
3)  Director of the Product Development “Factory”

I would stress that all three aspects of the role are important.

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Perhaps a year ago, we bought our first copy of this book. One of the guys read it then, and highly recommended that we get a number of copies such that everyone in the office could read (alas no book review online then).

We did this, and a number of others did read the book – giving similarly rave reviews.  Coincidentally, they commenced a software development project (our “UPIP project”) with the “lessons learnt” still fresh in their mind.

However, the wheels fell off – leading to the UPIP project being canned indefinitely.  This was one of the major triggers for me to instigate our Autopsy 1 process, which continued into the Autopsy 2 process, my stipulation that we were going to go Agile, and the commencement of our process for looking for our Chief Software Engineer.

Note that there is plenty more we can learn from the many things that went wrong in the UPIP project – with a view to improving ourselves for the future.  When I find the time, I will post a more detailed retrospective as a restricted post, just about that project.

Don’t get me wrong – I understand that we had significant shortcomings that were the root cause of our calamity.  For instance, it became clear through this process that our team collectively had no major project management experience – hence a read of a single book (no matter how good) was not going to make them competent (especially with respect to a complex project).

However I did wonder how a project to could go significantly off the rails (and in the early stages) so soon after a number of people had read, and raved about, this book. read more »