Is Your Team Welded Shut?
A common question in the open source arena is “Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?”. The answer is always an emotional “No!” But most teams have crawled into a box and welded the lid closed behind themselves. And it’s tolerated.
Bob Young, RedHat’s former CEO, published an article in 2000 (Open Source is Here to Stay ). Much of the article applies directly to the team-wide metrics 6th Sense gathers. And I think, just like RedHat and Linux really moved open source into the business mainstream, 6th Sense will have just as large an impact on the software industry.
Let me quote Bob’s article:
The best analogy that illustrates this benefit is with the way we buy cars. Just ask the question, “Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?” and we all answer an emphatic “No.” So ask the follow-up question, “What do you know about modern internal-combustion engines?” and the answer for most of us is, “Not much.”
We demand the ability to open the hood of our cars because it gives us, the consumer, control over the product we’ve bought and takes it away from the vendor. We can take the car back to the dealer; if he does a good job, doesn’t overcharge us and adds the features we need, we may keep taking it back to that dealer. But if he overcharges us, won’t fix the problem we are having or refuses to install that musical horn we always wanted—well, there are 10,000 other car-repair companies that would be happy to have our business.
Today the consumer is the management chain and the engine builders are the teams that lock out their managers. Maybe they don’t trust their managers. Maybe they think that withholding information makes them more powerful. All it really does is breed mistrust and make it much harder for managers and technical leads to do their jobs.
When we hide information from the management chain who signs our paychecks, why are we surprised that they outsource our jobs?
Are our managers software gurus? Usually not. Just like the internal combustion engine experts example… managers with software expertise are uncommon. Does that give us the right to deny them access? No more than it would give Ford the right to weld our car hoods closed because we don’t know to build an engine.
Will your manager abuse this information? Not unless they want to their team to quit. To put it another way, when’s the last time you popped the hood of your car and started pulling wires? Hopefully never. It would be a stupid thing to do. How many stupid managers are going to start messing with a teams’ internals? If Dilbert is to believed, all managers are dumb. But I suspect the truth is that there a lot of smart people out there doing the best job they can. Let’s make sure they have access to everything they need to do their jobs.
6th Sense gathers information from both the desktop and the server (see our list of sensors). Does that make it a “big brother” tool? No more than having a hood latch makes you a car vandal. It’s just a tool.
Is it a tool that makes you comfortable? Maybe. Maybe not. Is it a tool that makes more information available? Absolutely. Is this information we’ve traditionally made available? No, it’s a new way of thinking about productivity and product management.
Make the information available. Open the hood of the car and let everyone see what you’re doing all day. Pretend our software is a pair programming partner. Then stand proudly on what you’ve done. Sign your work. Don’t hide it and hope for the best.
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ankur_gupta10 ( 2008.6.06 4:37 am )