DeMarco and Lister on Standards

Joy Beatty recently posted an entry about standards on the Requirements Defined blog. She wrote, "[D]evelop them as a team, so that the standards are not forced on anyone who is not bought into them."

I agree with the notion of consensus and buy-in that Joy suggests. Whenever someone mentions standards, I like to quote Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. Here is what they wrote about standards in Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams:

Identifying an ideal practice, or at least a candidate ideal practice, is a useful endeavor. But the programs that mandate such a practice are something else entirely.

[Big 'M'] Methodologies seek to force convergence through statute. There is an inevitable backlash, the result partly of enforcers' heavy-handedness and partly of thinking workers' strong sense of independence, the cowboy mentality so common to those who populate any new frontier. Better ways to achieve convergence of method are training, tools, and peer review.

It's only after this kind of gently guided convergence that you may think of publishing a standard. You can't really declare something a standard until it has already become a de facto standard.

The opposite approach would be one in which every new undertaking is run as a pilot project. To the extent that there was a standard way to carry out the work, that would be the only way you weren't allowed to carry it out. The standard would be for at least one part of the effort to be run in a non-standard way. (This seems to be an informal rule within certain divisions of Fujitsu, for instance.)

In general, seek standardization through convergence, not by mandate.

Comments

Why Spreadsheets Suck for Prioritizing

The Goal As a company executive, you want confidence that your product team (which includes all the people, from all departments, responsible for product success) has a sound basis for deciding which items are on the product roadmap. You also want confidence the team is prioritizing the items in a smart way. What Should We Prioritize? The items the team prioritizes could be features, user stories, epics, market problems, themes, or experiments. Melissa Perri makes an excellent case for a " problem roadmap ", and, in general, I recommend focusing on the latter types of items. However, the topic of what types of items you should prioritize - and in what situations - is interesting and important but beyond the scope of this blog entry. A Sad but Familiar Story If there is significant controversy about priorities, then almost inevitably, a product manager or other member of the team decides to put together The Spreadsheet. I've done it. Some of the mos...

5 Ways Companies Make Product Decisions

In the last blog entry, we reviewed the four problems that companies face, or are trying to overcome, as they make product decisions . Now we'll look at the ways that most companies make their product decisions. Companies that develop, market, and sell products and solutions make strategic and ongoing tactical decisions. They decide what features to include in their products, what messages they will use to communicate the value of their products, what marketing tactics they will use, what prospective customers they will target, and many day-to-day choices. Whether or not these decisions are deliberate or ad hoc, most companies use some combination of the following ways of making product decisions. (A downloadable "map" that summarizes the product decision landscape is included at the end of this article.) Customer Wants Product decisions based on feature requests, focus groups, and what prospects and customers say they want. Companies are selling products to ...

Is Customer Development Pseudoscience?

The “Science” of Lean Startup Lean startup practitioners embrace the scientific method, seeking the "truth" about what business model and strategy will lead to product success. We do so by: Formulating hypotheses Crafting and running experiments to test them Learning from the experiments Iteratively feeding our learnings back into revised hypotheses Sounds pretty scientific, at least in spirit, doesn't it? Yet this process actually neglects a key ingredient in the scientists' mode of operation. To identify what’s missing, let’s examine “customer development”. Customer Development Steve Blank is one of the pioneers of the lean startup movement. He introduced into the lean startup lexicon the term “customer development”. Customer development consists of sessions and interactions with customers to test hypotheses. For example, a product manager might interview a prospect, asking if she agrees with the product manager’s hypotheses about the problems she faces or the ...

Cauvin

Search This Blog