Edge of Chaos

Michael has published a post called “Curious Company” the other day. I swirled with reactions as I read it. Whereas it was mostly delight, I’d like to apply a bit different focus to the subject.

Let’s see. The common concept about businesses and corporations is that they should have a goal. TargetProcess as a company has the goal to develop the best project management tool in the world for small to medium companies. Some businesses have rather boring goals such as adding 20% to their profit, breaking through to new markets, selling more copies of their products, getting more clients to outsource their work to them. We’re very familiar with this traditional lingo of corporate culture.

I want to put an emphasis on some other, more important things.  Best people, best place to work at, comforting environment, learning,  letting people make important decisions on their own. Does it ring any bells with you?

It might sound weird and totally groundbreaking, but the new paradigm for companies and corporations is not the “correct goal-setting”, whatever this is, but the optimal experience. There’s a classical book on this subject. What is this “optimal experience” put in plain words?

It’s about enjoyment. Loving what you do. Do you have fun running like a squirrel in circles over again, hating your week-days for boring and unrewarding activities? I bet, no. Do you have fun when you spend time with your friends, people who share your passions, people who empathize with you, who understand your discoveries, chime in to your explorations, and are just there for a friendly, live, human talk and smile? (and a hug :)

Recently I talked to one of my former associates. He is an upper-level manager in an IT outsourcing company. Their job is to run two times faster to stay in the same place. They do time and material contracts, custom development jobs, they hunt for new clients, and mostly behave like brides in an oversaturated bride market (we know a zillion faceless IT outsourcing companies, whose only message to the world is “I’ll do HTML for food” or something similar to this). His point was that with that many developers (they’re a 100-500 company), and with that many contracts and clients they have a higher profit margin compared to a product company with 35 people (that is, us).   I asked him: “Do you feel that you like what you’re doing? Balancing all those human resources (that’s derogatory, sorry), behaving very much like a farmer who is trying to get the best out of his herd? ” His answer was a bummer. He said: “Work is work, friends and fun are outside work”.

What he said is, unfortunately, the mainstream belief for many more people than we can imagine. And this means, that many more people than we can imagine are spending even more than half of their conscious lives, not living their lives actually, not experiencing what they do, but looking forward to some other better times when they retire, or when they go on a vacation.

I wanted to explain so many things to him. One of them was that people are born to be creative, to live up to their dreams. That’s a bit metaphysical point, but it eventually gets down to solid ground. What are the most successful companies? Why this nation is now booming with the lean startups cult?  It seems that the enlightenment is taking the lead, and this instills hope.

If we talk figures and growth forecast, a lean team is able to do a higher profit margin than an average IT outsourcing 100-500 company. It’s very much similar to Archimedes’ “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”  The lever is the company of passionate explorers and achievers. The fulcrum is the culture of creativity and enjoyment – come on, let’s just call this a friendly environment.

Again, it might be that some people don’t have this ability to create. They’re not able to invent and explore. I think you’re either born an explorer, or you are not. But if you’re an explorer, if this creative spirit is burning in you, then your colleagues (and friends) can’t be anything else but passionate explorers. In whatever domain. Being an explorer is a pretty universal thing, and one of its incarnations is in software product development.

Now getting back to Michael’s article, to the part on friendly environment and passion. You can’t have 50, 100 or 500 friends. But you can have 8-12 friends, and each of them will have their 8-12 friends. (I borrowed these figures from King Arthur and Danny Ocean. And from my own experience).  That’s the way the bright company builds itself, and that’s what Michael calls “there’re a few people that push the train forward”. Once your company is build-up of those nodes, or mini-teams, persevering one goal and dream, and passionate about it, sky is the limit.

A gentle reminder, in our case the dream is the best agile project management tool, and we’re living up to it by everything we do.

Friends, keep me company.

Olga Kouzina,

the un-Cassandra

Bringing together agile philosophy and software development outsourcing has been one of the hottest topics over the last decade.  Lots of blog posts, discussions in social networks — people try to figure out for themselves if it’s at all possible to align agile methodology with the existing reality of outsourced projects.

How can vendors who practice agile gain new customers? How can customers as newly-converted adepts paste their vision of agile thinking on their existing outsourcing partners?

First of all, let’s look back into when and why actually did it all start with IT outsourcing. Manufacturing outsourcing existed since long ago, but IT offshoring only started at the end of 80′s – beginning of 90′s. Companies jumped at the opportunity to save bucks and use cheap labor not only for producing goods, but for producing software. So, the main point is that from the very beginning outsourcing has all been about saving money. No other notable motivation – just saving money and using cheaper labor.

Next, along comes agile manifesto. People start seeing that the waterfall approach  they’ve been using with their outsourcing vendors is not that good after all.  Fixed price contracts do not guarantee real value (Scott Ambler writes very well on that in this article). Next, the more labor is outsourced to some country, the higher are the costs, so the main point for outsourcing which is cost savings makes no sense any more.

There’re other even deeper-lying consequences. On the one hand, the country which outsources – or businesses in this country not the country itself – they save bucks but lose in the long run as they do not grow their own engineering minds, let alone all the problems that you have working with remote teams – yes, we have all this telecom in place, but nothing ever will replace face-to-face communication. If you often go on business trips to the outsourced destination to talk to your team – again, it’s more costs.  On the other hand, outsourcing makes a dangerous long-term impact on the recipient economies as well.

But the point is not about how bad or good outsourcing is.  Vendors have written an array of blog posts on how to align agile and outsourcing – and that’s natural – they want to keep going, so they do everything to back up their point of view proving that agile goes well with outsourcing. This might work true in some cases.

The companies that outsource on the other hand – they have legacy outsourcing teams. They need to get going with them as well, to stand up to all the funds already invested in their outsourcing center/provider.

So with all this outsourcing in our hands – what do we do?

As an agile outsourcing vendor, you should be ready to invest lots of time and effort to educating your new customers on the value of agile and to building a solid relationship. This might be a very difficult task since some people just don’t want to get educated and prefer to stick to good old fixed price bids, logging and billing for gazillion of change requests, lack of communication and other “joys” of classical outsourced development.

As a company with established outsourcing facility, you’re better off. But perhaps you could be even better off if you started this relationship not with an overseas company, but with a guy next door at least.

Anyway,  you are where you are – so you would need to work with your outsourcing partner to practice the agile approach, since at the end of it all work with agile methodology brings real value, as opposed to counting short-term waterfall pennies and losing long-term gain.