Software development – a model for knowledge work as craft

I’ve been working out the notion of knowledge work as craft for a while now. Knowledge management approaches fail to the extent that they try to shoehorn knowledge work into an industrial framework. If I buy a thousand Thinkpads for my organization, I want and expect everyone of them to function identically. If I distribute them to a thousand consultants, their clients will expect each presentation, analysis, and report to creatively reflect the unique needs and characteristics of each client. If I’m a smart manager, I’ll focus on making it possible for that uniqueness to appear. I certainly shouldn’t expect the management practices designed to eliminate variability to be very much help when variability is what I actually want.

Last week I had a chance to catch up with Greg Lloyd, founder of Traction Software, which is an enterprise level weblogging environment. Traction is rooted in the work of Doug Engelbart and the early hypertext/hypermedia research of Andy van Dam at Brown. One of the topics we talked about was where to find helpful models for understanding knowledge work and how it differs from production work.

Software development is arguably one of the oldest “modern” knowledge work fields and holds many lessons for all of us doing knowledge work. Better still, for my purposes, software development has worked through the blind alley of trying to force knowledge work into a factory model and come out the other end as 21st century craft.

The goal here is to focus on the principles and practices that software developers have developed to guide and manage their work, not on the substance of the work itself. Think of what software craftsmen take for granted that the rest of us knowledge workers lack or have to cobble together for ourselves–version control, issue tracking, forking. These are just a few of the techniques for making the work of software development more visible and, therefore, more manageable. Other concepts that come to mind include iterative development, granularity, prototyping, and modular design.

Lots of details to work out here, but this feels like a productive line of thought. Some of the sources I’ve been monitoring and can recommend:

Character encoding quirks in the aggregator

Weird Characters in RSS. Does anyone else see these weird high-ASCII characters in the Corante: IdeaFlow RSS feed?

If it’s true that the bust is about busted, I hope that the resulting opportunity to innovate innovation itself isn’t overlooked. There’s been a lot of thought in the last few years about how to make sure innovation doesn’t pack up and leave town when the venture capitalists close their wallets. For example, in the Open Innovation scenario, loose-pocketed venture capitalists aren't as necessary for technology innovation.

[b.cognosco]

I have the same problem. It appears to be a bug in the way “Radio”'s news aggregator handles the character encoding. It doesn't happen in some other aggregators.  It's one of those standards quirks that programmers get to worry about I guess. I think of it as a bit of sand in the works — adds a bit of flavor. Since I'm not qualified to fix it, I try to ignore it.

Adding (n)Echo support to my copy of Radio

Major fun: Radio gets some kind of Echo support.   [Scripting News]

(n)echo feed. There's now a valid (formerly known as | not) echo feed for this weblog. I would hope that the namespace gets set soon, so far I've seen about 5 variations. [Simon Fell]

And it took me longer to write this post than it did to add (n)Echo support to my copy of Radio. For a user worrying about what all the noise around RSS/(n)Echo will mean, that's cool!

Extreme mobility and knowledge work effectiveness

Extreme Mobility: a rant that I had to write after reading Tim, Dave, and this all in one day. [Ray Ozzie’s Weblog]

Just getting around to reading this post of Ozzie’s from last week (one of the advantages of news aggregators). Full of lots of Ozzie’s usual excellent insights.

I believe we’re currently in a transition period for personal computing: from a tethered, desk-bound, personal productivity view, to one of highly mobile interpersonal productivity and collaboration, communications, coordination. We’re focused right now on devices and networks because we’re coming at the problem bottom-up: preoccupied by gizmos and technologies’ capabilities rather than focusing on how our lives and businesses and economies and societies will be fundamentally altered.

I’ve been living in this mobile world arguably since the early 90s. My primary computer since 1993 has been a laptop of one variety or another. I’ve lived the the scenarios Ozzie describes including the joys and aggravations of Lotus Notes when it was the only environment to deal with keeping a mobile workforce in sync.

Most organizations still operate on the notion that the corporate network is a fortress to be protected. This makes my life difficult from two perspectives. First, getting into my own network is more difficult than I would like from my selfish, time-pressed, user perspective. Second, when I am with clients, my effectiveness is compromised by the hurdles I have to negotiate to get access to material on their networks. Email becomes the lowest common denominator for coordinating work and the impacts on knowledge work effectiveness are invisible to the organization. Extra hours that I work to cope with these limits don’t show up anywhere in the reporting systems.

One aspect of this transition to extreme mobility is that I control the tools of my craft. I do have to reach an understanding with the folks in IT support so that they trust I won’t do anything stupid and will keep them in the loop. But I can experiment with new tools and practices. The challenge is to bring the useful lessons back into the organization. Ozzie sums it up well:

Regardless, one thing seems certain: with the notable exception of a small number of truly visionary CIO’s such as the one mentioned above – exceptional individuals who are willing to move their enterprises forward by taking risks – discovery and innovation in mobility and interpersonal productivity & communications – in “relationship superconductivity” – is being driven primarily from “the edge”: from small businesses, organizations and individuals who are experimenting with new communications technologies and software. Innovation now works its way into the enterprise; it no longer migrates outward. The technology leaders of the past – enterprise IT – are now focused (for very good economic reason!!) on cost reduction and efficiency, on “fast solutions”, and on a very tough regulatory environment, through strict controls. Liability, and the sheer mass and difficulty of managing broad ICT deployments encourages conservatism, and this won’t be changing anytime soon.

 

Project Management and Horses

Project Management and Horses.

Spotted this gem on Anders site:

The tribal wisdoms of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that ‘when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount’. However, in many companies as well as in the UN and NGO community a range of far more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Changing riders

2. Appointing a committee to study the horse …

It just gets better from there.

[High Context]

It does.

Productivity tips on how to handle E-mail – thinking about how to use our tools

Taming the E-mail tiger – how to manage your E-mail to be more productive. Dennis Kennedy has some great productivity tips on how to handle E-mail.  I like his idea of a folder that is labelled something like “action items.”  That is, a place that you can move emails relating to things that need to be done, but not right away.  I recently started aggresively managing E-mail in my inbox, and it has made a world of difference.  I wish I had read Dennis’s article a couple of years ago.

The key is to keep as few emails in your inbox as possible.  If you can do that then you are in good shape.

[Ernie the Attorney]

A nice pointer from Ernie to some useful tips.

It’s also a good example of how important it’s becoming for knowledge workers to start thinking explicitly and systematically about how they use the tools they have at hand. The marketing behind most technology tools gets in the way here, because it emphasizes such fuzzy notions as “intuitive interfaces.”

For all the power built into the tools we have, we take far too little time to think about how to make most effective use of those tools in our day-to-day work. When we do, more often than not, we get stuck in inapplicable notions of productivity and throughput drawn from industrial models of mass production..

Dial-up isn’t so bad when the alternative is no dialtone

My computing life centers around my laptop computer. And I usually grumble when I have to fall back to dial-up connectivity. That was until Monday when we got to our summer place to discover that no dialtone is significantly more difficult to live with than slow dial-up.

Just when I had finally gotten the backlog of items in my news aggregator down to zero, I end up with three days of no connectivity whatsoever. At least everything was there for me to scan through (all 800 some odd items). I’ve got the backlog down to about sixty items that I want to spend some time thinking about and reacting to. something to keep me occupied over the weekend.