Infinite Shades of Grey

I was asked by an attendee last week after giving a “What you need to know about OO on this project” presentation what I would recommend they read as deeper study. Once I regained my composure, (after being challenged with the impertinent thought that my 90 minute talk did not in fact reveal all the secrets of the Object Oriented software development world) I suggested one or more of the selected works of Mr. Grady Booch as a good starting point.

While the concept of objectivism/Object Oriented  philosophy had been promulgated in the late 1950’s by Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum (more widely known as Ayn Rand), it was people like Grady Booch that crystallized the concept and gave it voice not in philosophy but in software development. What remains today IMHO the single most important positive step in software systems is not OO programming but the OO concepts and modeling techniques developed by Booch et al that allow us mere mortals to comprehend the incomprehensible.

Why is it incomprehensible?

I got coaxed/conned into participating in a psychology research experiment when I was in University(Yes, My GF at the time was a psych major). The research was essentially focused on determining how many things the human brain could track simultaneously (or dimensions). Experiment #1. They started with a basic  2-D cartesian graph (think back ..you know the XY axis thing!) then added the Z Axis (3 dimensions). All of us can picture and track 3 dimensional objects (Length/Width/Depth). They then added the fourth dimension and caused that 3D object to move through space (errantly described as the “time” dimension”). Then the 5th, 6th, 7th dimensions etc. That’s a much more difficult image to picture/track in your mind. The same testing concept was applied to a second test using a Matroyoska Dolls concept.

Briefly shown each different doll and of  different sizes, we were asked to recall and assemble them in our mind in order without seeing them again. Most people can do 7 (+/- 2) correctly each time. (Being an oddity I could do 14 consistently in the experiment and about 8 dimensions). My point  however is that the human mind has very well-defined limits to the degree of complexity that it can deal with before it blows a fuse.

Now consider a 100,000 function point Enterprise System in any large corporation. If it’s old, potentially 5 to 7 million lines of software code. Having trouble visualizing how much code that is?

x 20

It’s a bit more than 20 boxes of copy paper with printed code on every line of every page. Thousands upon thousands of programs where data and functions interface in many thousands of ways, some well documented and others long forgotten. It is simply not possible, however smart or clever you think you are, to comprehend the whole system in detail. Enter OO modeling concepts….

The Model

I will mooch the following line from Booch simply because it is excellent and it’s a much better line than I could come up with.

“In software systems… I take things that are incredibly complex and I help organizations squeeze them down so that they are not only simple, they actually disappear. The best software is invisible to the world.” – Grady Booch 2008

To deal with complexity the human mind can either aggregate or abstract. That’s about it. The best techniques and modeling systems allows us to find good ways to either aggregate or abstract the complexity to a level where the software is “invisible to the world”.  If you look at a model and can’t easily figure it out and the system it represents, you’re not stupid… It’s a bad model.

Some consultants in the IT business  seem to make their living taking the complex and making it more complex as if the test of their expertise was their ability to find the most creative ways to obnubilate the definition of the system.

It is in fact the opposite that is true.

The expert is the one that can take the complex and make it simple and relevant to the client.  Be the expert and just use the words like “obnubilate” to make fun of those that truly are not.

In my blog Negotiating the Curve I talked about three basic techniques for framing a negotiation:

• contrast
• risk
• time

But what actually makes a good negotiator? Let’s ask the one of the world’s best negotiators what he thinks. Herb Cohen says:

• “A QUICK MIND COMBINED WITH THE PATIENCE AND ENDURANCE OF JOB.
• THE DETERMINATION OF A SALMON SWIMMING UPSTREAM TO SPAWN, ALONG WITH THE AGILITY AND FLEXIBITY OF AN ACROBAT.
• THE INTEGRITY OF A SUPREME COURT JUSTICE BLENDED WITH THE IMPERTURBABILITY OF BUDDHA.
• WHILE SAYING “I DUNNO KNOW…I DON’T UNDERSTAND…COULD YOU HELP ME”, HIS OR HER BRAIN IS ACTUALLY A REPOSITORY OF THE ACCUMULATED WISDOM OF THE AGES.
• KNOWING HOW TO USE HYPERBOLE AND EXAGGERATION WITHOUT EVER BEING THOUGHT OF AS A LIAR.
• THOUGH INSPIRING TRUST AND RADIATING CHARM, HE OR SHE CANNOT TRUST OTHERS OR SUCCUMB TO THEIR CHARM….”

So how do you (or I) fair against Herb’s scorecard? I’ll keep it simple… give yourself Zero if you are not 100% confident with the label and One point if you are.

Your Total Score? 

It really doesn’t matter. What does matter is how you prepare for and execute in each of these areas when you are not necessarily born with these gifts.

Last week’s Lottomax draw in Canada had a $50 million prize. For a $5 ticket you had a 1 in 28 million chance of winning the grand prize. Yet someone did. I have been on projects where:

• the regression test just had to be 100% clean the first time, and it was
• the person you didn’t have time to interview,you took a chance on just their CV and they turned out to be a  star
• the client that after you explain why you need this $4 million change order says “ok, let me sign it”
• you chat with an unknown seat-mate in a cross country flight and at the end of the flight you have a new multi-million dollar project and a long term friend.

So it’s just pure luck. Or is it?

That regression test was the product of good team work, a good quality culture and good engineering discipline. That CV was well written, honest and the reader was getting skilled at looking for the key points and assessing veracity. The client that approved that change order without a fuss, trusts you and your judgment and you had already earned that decision. The 5 hours on a flight wasn’t just idle chatter. It involved rapport building, some quality consulting insights and appropriate influencing.  None of them are really luck.

In consulting there is no Lottomax win scenario. Our success is defined by our skill that is built on a foundation of personal and corporate integrity. That’s what makes us successful against all odds.

The tips, techniques and advice of this blog are all directed at developing consulting excellence. However, you won’t win them all. There are and have been some truly extraordinary business leaders and consultants in the world, that have accomplished feats through brilliance, tenacity and excellence in many areas. They still crash and burn every once in a while.

One of my favorite business people that I was introduced to in the late 80’s was Sir John Harvey Jones. Sir John is credited with the spectacular turn around of the giant ICI chemical corporation in the UK. A turn-around from near bankruptcy to producing the most profit of any UK corporation in history. My favorite Sir John story is the first company meeting after he took the helm of ICI. Employees from all over were invited to attend an outdoor conference at the ICI headquarters. There was a pond in front of the headquarters where Sir John ordered the placement of acrylic blocks just inches below the surface. At the start of the meeting Sir John walked past the speaker’s podium and walked to the centre of the pond, appearing to be walking across the surface of the water. He yelled through his mike. “This is what we are going to do. We’re going to perform miracles with this company. Miracles in research, miracles in production and miracles in sales to the world….” to a standing ovation. He passion was contagious, his drive unyielding and he inspired thousands to one of the most dramatic business turnarounds in history. His knighthood was well deserved in my opinion.

BBC had the idea to leverage Sir John in a BBC series called “The Troubleshooter”. The idea was for Sir John to repeat his performance at ICI except this time in front of a camera and for other iconic British companies. Could he consult to them and make them more successful?

The answer was yes except for one, the Morgan Car Company. This engagement brought to life the potential challenge you face as a consultant on every project. Can you be successful if you are constrained within the client’s own values, processes and motives?

Sometimes there is a misalignment that will be fatal to the engagement. In the case of Morgan, one such misalignment was that Sir John after viewing their manufacturing process determined that some automation in the process would allow them to reduce costs, increase production and drive top line and bottom line growth for the company. Morgan on the other hand felt that the hand-built nature of the car was its largest selling point and any change at all could destroy the magic that had kept the car company going for decades and decades. An impass.

I have worked on engagements where what the client stated they wanted and actually were prepared to implement were almost polar opposites.

• They “wanted” collaboration tools but would not allow a collaboration team site to work on documents
• They “wanted” to empower the end-user but would not let them have access to data
• They “wanted” lights-out data centre operation and cost reductions but wanted to keep every headcount in place.

In some cases clients attend one too many vendor presentations, engage in the process of implementing a solution and have no plan to really address the consequences of the solution. So the consultant may be off on mission impossible. So if you hit the wall what can you do?

First of all the consultant/client relationship is more persistent than a single project/engagement. A fatal mismatch in objectives will terminate the project and may terminate the relationship. One thing is certain, if you can’t fix the relationship, you certainly cannot fix the project.

• Recognize that success is most likely when you both work together
• Both acknowledge that the quality of the relationship is crucial to the success of the assignment
• Make a discussion of the relationship a part of the initial contact with the client
• Discuss with your client specific examples of effective client behavior
• Agree with your client how to monitor the relationship
• Be willing to invest both the time and the care that this relationship will require
• Do not ignore the realities and do not leave it to chance. Raise the issue and talk about it.
• Talk through the misalignment.
  • decide on a realignment or
  • decide to stop

In the case of Sir John he made a number of attempts to influence, cajole and persuade Morgan to listen but was never able to get the relationship to a point where he could have the discussion openly with Moran with mutual respect.

The reality of the consulting role is that sometimes you won’t win on a project, but you don’t ever need to lose the client.

There was a Scottish preacher named  George B. Duncan from whom I had heard a sermon recorded back in the 1970’s somewhere. It was one of those things that you read, you hear or you see at various points in your life that simply sticks with you forever. There is a  line in this particular sermon that could have been from any religion or humanist philosophy in the world and I believe it would still ring true, in some way, for most of them.  The line is this.

The sins of commission are not the worst sins in the world. It is the sins of omission. What you could have done, had the capability, resources, capacity and time to do but you  just didn’t do it. These are by far the most heinous sins.

If you’re not a fan of old Scottish preachers, I can restate it like this:

Making a mistake or doing something bad is not the worst thing you can do. It’s doing nothing at all when you have the opportunity and capability to help. That’s the worst.

If you believe the statement above, it changes the way you look at the world and your profession. I think about this line when I watch the news about the floods in Pakistan, Cholera in Haiti (yes you should send a cheque too!) and  when I  see a project that is not mine starting to shake off the rails and tip over.  Would I be correct in saying that most consultants these days, if it wasn’t their project would just watch it crash? Would I also be correct in saying that some consultants these days, if it was their project they would still just watch it crash? I  wonder.

Some years ago I was contracted to audit a project and as a first step I reviewed an architectural design document that was, for the most part, utter fiction and bad fiction at that. The signatories to the approval of the document were all pretty much around so I asked each one if they thought the design proposed in this document was valid and if it would work. Some said yes but the best people, the ones with real world experience uniformly said: “No, no chance”. Yet they had all let the design go by unchallenged. They omitted to speak, the “sin” of omission. We fixed the project but it was some months later and millions of additional dollars were spent to modify the architecture and reengineer components where the original design had been fatally flawed.

• “It’s SEP” (Somebody Else’s Problem)
• “I don’t want to rock the boat”
• “It will sort itself out eventually anyway”
• “It’s not in my mandate”

I heard all of these comments from the highly competent resources.

Imagine for the moment that you are a plumber. A home owner has called you in to fix a leaky kitchen faucet. You go down to the basement to turn the water off and you notice that the main line to the bathroom is heavily corroded and dripping water. Every professional plumber on the planet will tell the homeowner about the other problem and recommend they fix it. They will not wait for the pipe to burst and the flood damage to occur.  Perhaps we need to raise the professional standard for the IT consultant to at least the level of Joe the Plumber and consistently tell people about leaky pipes when we see them.

Your client will no doubt want to develop a business case for their new system. They will want to understand the costs and the benefits to be derived from the implementation. Most business cases fail to accurately represent both the real costs and true benefits of  solution. Yet year after year, clients continue to produce these works of art. They are generally flawed in two ways:

• they are unable to correctly quantify how a really good solution will enable their business to evolve and grow
• they are equally unable to state what the plan is to ensure that expected benefits are actually realized. (ie. you increase employee productivity, but what did you do with the time?)

There are really only 2 reasons why your client  would invest  millions of dollars in a new system.

• they have to
• they want to

When they have to replace a system, the cost benefits analysis (CBA) is mostly meaningless. The decision has already been made, they must replace the system. The only decision now is how much or how little money they are going to spend to do it.

• The system is old, written in assembler and their last assembler programmer retired last year.
• It fails regularly, idling their business.
• It prevents them from being competitive or worse yet prevents them from being market relevant.

When they want to replace a system, the only thing that really matters is the benefits. They are not looking for the lowest cost solution, they are looking for the solution that will drive the maximum benefit:

• to differentiate them
• to make them better than everyone else

Hence the benefits conundrum. One of the fastest growing segments of the IT industry is the premium packaged solution space. These are the SAP’s ,Siebel’s  and the PeopleSoft’s of the world. These ultra expensive solution sets let your client invest millions of dollars just to be like everybody else.  In fact that seems to be the package vendors’ very selling strategy.

It would seem to me that if they have to replace their system, they should be cost focused, looking at the Great Plains of the world to replace their ERP.  Does anybody actually think that the 2 systems actually produce  meaningfully different income statements or accounts payable reports?  There are many SAP implementations worldwide that have cost hundreds of millions of dollars to implement. Think about the sanity of that for a moment, if it’s not going to drive unique business benefits… at least do it cheaper.

Ancillary to that thought is that if they want to replace their system, why would they want to install application packages? These are the same packages that their competitors run and by definition provides no competitive advantage. At best, it levels the playing field.

Back in the 80’s organizations legitimately used technology for competitive advantage. Today customers often use these words but then install a package that makes everyone using it live with a lowest common denominator solution. True competitive advantage and  differentiation only comes through fresh thinking, fresh business strategies, fresh products and systems that help bring those unique business strategies to life. 

New systems generate true benefit when they amplify the unique strengths and assets of the organization that uses it.  You need to instill confidence in your client that they should never be afraid to build something that is unique to them. More often than not customers with helpful coaching from “experts” will expound a “buy versus build” strategy.  However I think the statement is dangerous without better defining  the statement.

• Buy Commodities and pay the least possible for them. (ie. Accounts Payable system and go buy it on a cloud somewhere)
• Build systems that build your business. Be different, Be better… Build.

As a consultant I am never afraid of telling a client to build. Today we can build with incredible speed and quality. We can not only build systems that do the job, but we can build systems that can do the job much, much better than a package solution ever could. In fact given the scale of some of the SAP “package” implementations that have been done, I would say we could even build many custom solutions for less. Imagine if you would, the system acquisition as a car. A Honda Accord is your starting point. Now you would like to race it and win in the Montreal Grand prix. You can start with the Accord and modify it to be a Grand Prix car, but it will cost more, take longer and ultimately you will lose the race against a custom built Grand Prix car. The custom solution is always designed from day 1 to win.

If your client  has to replace their systems, then by all means buy a package but if they want to replace their system, tell them to not be afraid of building an asset that will differentiate and drive their business forward.