STSC CrossTalk - Life Cycle of a Silver Bullet - Jul 2003

Does this sound familiar?

STSC CrossTalk - Life Cycle of a Silver Bullet - Jul 2003

Just reminds me that to fully apply a methodology or framework, you have to have a solid understanding of it plus the environment into which you will be implementing it. (Environment includes at least political, social, techinical, operational, and cultural forces.) Otherwise, the translation/integration will quickly get you into trouble and the overall sucess will be jeopordized. Sounds simple enough.

I ran into this with an eXtreme Programming experiment from a few years ago. I thought I understood XP and the team I hoped to transform. Turns out I didn’t have a solid enough grasp of either nor the skills to pull off such a radical change, so it never really caught on. But lesson learned, we’re taking a different approach and are hoping for better results. My personal change strategy is to do it often. When I look at what I do in my day job, in the last two years, I have changed about as much as you can including work environment, programming language, software tools, focus, team, and I have moved completely to Mac and everything that comes along with that.

My favorite part of change is the cascade of new insights you gain from a switch. For example, I can now compare Visio to Omnigraffle. Before there was only Visio to measure with so then I was attempting to address my issues with it when I found All Clear. Now that Omnigraffle is in the mix, I have more information and diversity to make better decisions. As I learn Omnigraffle, I have the Visio background to refer to which speeds up learning compared to not ever using a graphing tool. If my needs change, I’ll be ready to switch to another tool and able to do that even faster.