Graham Chastney

Dilbert picks up on what is still a surprisingly common issue:

We’ve known this for generations, quite often, if your project is in trouble, the last thing you need is some help. The promised help rarely turns into help, it nearly always turns into more problems.

The issue here is simple, people aren’t like RAM, they can’t just be plugged in and put to work instantaneously. People need to be brought up to speed, they need to be managed, they need somewhere to sit, they need access to things. They come with an overhead that is higher than their value at the beginning.

There are things that you can do to make each of these things easier, but they need building in from the start.

If you add a number of people then you are likely to have to go through the whole forming, storming, norming, performing team development cycle all over again.

Even if people were like RAM, you still don’t come for free, adding one person to a team doesn’t add one person’s worth of value, it adds more overhead to the management processes taking away value elsewhere.

Then there is the final, and probably the most significant issue, people are all different – different skills, different capabilities, different relationships. Adding the right person can make things better, but it’s unlikely that you have access to this person, if you did they would already be working on it. More often than not, the people you are talking about adding are the spare people. The spare people are definitely not the ones you want, they are likely to be spare for a reason.

If you still don’t believe me read The Mythical Man Month it was first published in 1975, but the wisdom contained within it still applies today.

(For those of you know me, yes this book is why I keep going on and on about Conceptual Integrity)

We are in the middle of a general election here in the UK, and one of the criticisms that gets banded around is that certain politicians have created their policies on the ”back of an envelope”.

The phrase used to be “back of a fag packet”, but we seem to have gone all politically correct on that.

This phrase is always used as an insult, but for me it’s actually a badge of honour, and I see Rich Pictures as the tool to do that.

My experience after many years of solution design is that the best ones start with a simple diagram, or set of diagrams.

I’m not saying that the detailed work doesn’t need to be done, or that long lists of requirements aren’t needed. The problem with starting there is that you start in the detail and miss out on the reason why you are doing something.

The simple diagram enables you to communicate and understand the vision and the overall approach.

Whether it’s a whiteboard, a flipchart, a notebook, a blank sheet of paper, or even the back of an envelope simple diagrams are the place to start.

This is a note to self – use fewer words:

You might be interested to see what CSC is up to internally with Enterprise 2.0 type technologies:

Well done Simon and Charlie.

I’m doing a bit of work with Rich Pictures at the moment. I’m quite enjoying the storyboard elements of the process.

For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about then here is an example from the Open University:

Basis isn’t it? That’s the point.

There are a number of elements to a Rich Picture:

• pictorial symbols;
• keywords;
• cartoons;
• sketches;
• symbols;
• title.

The most interesting part for me is the “cartoons” part. As business people we can be so “professional” that we want things to look great from the start with fancy graphics. Rich Pictures allow us to step back and to deal in symbols and icons to depict an issue.

The challenge I am anticipating is that the Rich Pictures that I have created will need to go through a review cycle with “professional” people. As such I am going to have to battle the tendency to water down the message that comes with reviews. The challenge that I am wanting to depict is a big challenge with lots of facets to it. if we review it too heavily we will make it look far simpler and remove all of the value.