Friday, April 23, 2004 Friday, April 23, 2004I just received notice that the Town of Beekman, New York, is holding an open space planning charrette tomorrow morning. We might go, but the Big Sister has gymnastics class then, and we all know which is more important, right?
I doubt many citizens know what a charrette is. Sounds like a charade. If you need a parenthetical statement to clarify what you mean, maybe you should revise what you wrote in the first place. The process sounds like a certain software development process, which is not surprising given their common heritage.
1:55:02 PM # Google It!
categories: Language, Place
France's last coal mine closed today.
Since coal was first discovered in France in 1720, the mineral has been a driving force behind Europe's transformation from a continent of peasant farmers to a land of smokestacks and factories. And coal miners were among the first to push for worker's rights.
But with France now getting more than 80 percent of its power from nuclear reactors, the last mine is closing.
....
Only a dozen working mines are left in Britain, and three are due to close later this year.
Emile Zola's Germinal is the story of a coal-mining town.
12:28:25 PM # Google It!
Watching last night's West Wing on TiVo. Topics: media ownership, and trade. CJ gives media ownership story to reporting hounds, and they don't take the bait. Because they're owned. Because the Internet makes broadcast ownership rules history. Nice creative solution in the briefing room though: give each owner one seat. :-D
On jobs, the creative destruction of the markets runs into the CWA.
Meanwhile, I tried to find a copy of the current issue of Harper's at the newstands around here, but I can't find it or The Atlantic. Lots of beauty, house, and sports magazines though.
12:17:25 AM # Google It!
categories: Media
Thursday, April 22, 2004CIO Magazine has a brief article on the failure of a Siebel upgrade at AT&T Wireless (AWE). [AT&T Wireless Self-Destructs, CIO Magazine, April 15, 2004] It is not directly helpful, so I have some more pertinent observations, based on what little data is in the article.
There were three kinds of failures, each aggravating the others.
The article directly addresses morale problems, and attributes them to a lack of job security because of direct evidence that AWE was planning a resource action: outsourcing to India. That's one part of it. Many aspects of the work environment will contribute to a lack of morale, but improving it is mostly a matter of stress reduction. Inflexible deadlines increase stress. And the staff aren't stupid: they can see that there is no contingency plan. This too increases stress. Add management chair shuffling and outsourcing rumors are just the straw which broke morale's back.
Lines of communication among staff, between staff and consultants, between vendors (TSI and NeuStar) and the industry (WICIS) broke down — if they even existed at all.
"Everything was siloed among the different groups, and we all worked independently of each other," says a project team member.
Communication problems, which is essentially what integration problems are, were addressed by throwing more man-months at them.
The back-end systems-integration work was so complex that it wasn't unusual to see teams of 20 or more people assigned to write connections for a single system, says a former employee. Coordination between the teams-the responsibility of the lead integrator on the project, Deloitte and Touche-quickly got out of hand.
But the project was set up to fail by it's technical practices. It would have succeeded only if morale were high and communication excellent.
First, the decision to use a commercial product, particularly one which required extensive customization, limited AWE's ability to address problems. Extensive customization is always a problem in upgrades: you are merging two branches of a code fork. If a problem were found in Siebel's software, would Siebel be able to fix it? Would AWE be able to work around around it effectively? This is not to say that all commercial CRM products are lousy — an allowance I make only because of Rick Klau — but that if you need to customize the product that much, you need control of the source code.
Secondly, the environment was not stable. Too many cooks were in the kitchen, adding too many pieces of baling wire and duct tape to the batter. The mix was in constant flux, so tests were unable to identify failures.
Teams would work on a revision to their piece of Odyssey, for example, only to find that when they finished testing, code had changed elsewhere in the system, rendering the testing meaningless.
Later, after successive failures,
Deloitte and Touche project managers relaxed testing requirements for various pieces of the system. Rather than freeze the code for the system once problems began, teams continued to add new pieces to the project in an attempt to get it all working. But the new pieces simply added more errors to an already bug-ridden system, which complicated the process of finding root problems and fixing them.
Testing, whether for code functionality or for performance, needs predictability.
No one knows. They don't integrate often. They don't talk outside of their silos. They're under immense pressure. Maybe this will fix it.
And so the project spirals downward into oblivion.
12:31:58 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry
Wednesday, April 21, 2004All politics is local, but
Newer suburbs don’t have the same types of community institutions as older, established neighborhoods. There also is more political isolation, less political participation.
Found in [To Sprawl or Not To Sprawl: A National Perspective for Kansas City, Dr. Robert H. Freilich, Charles N. Kimball Lecture, University of Missouri, Kansas City, April 21, 1997] while looking for something else.
4:17:42 PM # Google It!
categories: Place, Politics
The Plains Indians, Bedouin, and Mongols originate in similar regions. Of the three, the Plains tribes were the most recently exposed to beasts of burden. Compare the experience of each, and how that relates to their history and current place in the world.
For extra credit, mention Dune.
3:33:55 PM # Google It!
The Accounting Department, that is, my wife, said, "Get what you need." Woo hoo! Discretionary spending account! Shopping cart ahoy!
2:34:56 PM # Google It!
Somehow TeleTruth got a copy of my phone bill, before I switched to a Verizon Freedom package, and let some of the itemized charges disappear into the flat rate. [via BroadbandReports]
2:18:54 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry