Planning Can Be Difficult
About every month or so, no matter where I am, someone comes to me and says: “well, we are going to take you off this project. I hope its in a place to be taken over by someone else. We are going to use you somewhere else.” Then walks away.
From a management or product owner standpoint, some of this makes sense. They want to avoid having one person in a singular spot, that is, dependency on just one person. A critical person. I don’t blame them.
On the other hand, there are implications for this kind of “tech resources are widgets” approach:
- First, the loss of institutional knowledge. If you swap people around all the time, you probably aren’t going to get the domain coverage you want. Maybe that’s OK though.
- Team building. On one hand, you spread the building efforts around the company. This is good. On the other hand, it takes 3 months-1 year to get a team to work well together; you lose that. Maybe that’s OK though. Dunno.
- Planning. The fact that tech people get pulled off like this means they can’t follow through on their planning and execution of major pieces. It is my belief that this is why applications become over-complex and hard to maintain. Everyone does things different. Again, the “tech resource is a widget” works against the project here.
- General well being. I am happy with what I am working on now; I have a lot left and I want to master a few things. But taking me off of it means I only half-develop my knowledge which means less skilled implementation.
- Team coverage. If I know more of their platforms I can help out debugging the crappy architecture on more systems. lol I say this because the people they let “create” at some places are scary; usually you have to be overly verbal and political to get to design something, it just doesn’t fall on your lap.
So the bottom line is this: developers are rarely ever business domain experts and that is a plain fact. Go into most shops and ask a developer to reproduce a users experience, very few can. Maybe that’s OK though. If we are just brick layers, we don’t need to know about electrical conduit. Or do we?
Now my personal miff about this is that I am a planner. I plan, I execute. In much of the agile way I am doing requirements and analysis and improvements as I am developing — it allows for better design, architecture, and execution. But if my time is short, or I just don’t know, my planning changes. I look at short term solutions which aren’t optimal instead. That’s probably the biggest problem.
One thing we have in our hands though, is to work on projects we want to work on. So if things get weird we are free to find another project and work on it.