©2007, 2009 Don Gray and Jerry Weinberg Engelbert watched Pam nervously chew on her knuckle as she stood in the door of his office, answering his call. “Come in and close the door.” He motioned her to a seat, then stood and pointed an accusing finger down at her. “We need to decide how you’re going to explain what happened with the UDCRM release”, he said. “You’ve managed to upset everyone. Sharkey told the CEO the customers are screaming because we can’t ship on time.

©2006 Don Gray and Jerry Weinberg Engelbert frowned, trying to understand why Pamela had been acting strangely. Her programming skills were among the best in the company. She had a way of getting things completed. That’s why he made her project lead for Uberdenke’s next UDCRM product release. With only two weeks left until the ship date, Pamela’s personality had shifted. Normally calm and composed, she had been seen crying after meetings. Occasionally he could hear her screaming at the programmers working for her. Something

You can tell a lot from how a story starts. If you hear “Once upon a time …” you’ll probably hear a fairy tale like “The Three Little Pigs” or “The Little Red Hen”. Around camp fires, kayakers like to tell stories that begin with “No kidding, there I was …” and a tale of heart thumping excitement and harrowing escapades of misfortune or lucky escape. In software development stories often begin (or end) with “I’m serious. You can’t make up stuff like this.”1 I

Joe Little does a marvelous job recruiting speakers for the Agile-Carolinas meetings. This month was no exception. Israel Gat from BMC Software discussed “Leading the Disruption”. This presentation focused on releases 2.3 and 2.4 of their distributed system management software. Near the presentation’s end Brooks’ Law was mentioned and the question posed, “Does Brooks’ Law still apply?” Adding manpower to a late project makes it later. ”Brooks’ Law” Why is it so? Jerry (Gerald M.) Weinberg chose to use Brook’s Law in Quality Software Management:

A quick update on systems thinking items:

Models are like kitchen utensils. You need a variety of them, and you should know when and how to use them. They should be useful for more than a single task. I recently started exploring the first explicit model I learned years ago.

Esther Derby recently ranted about Force Ranking. I’m not an expert on force ranking, or maybe as an independent consultant I am. I’m force ranked every time I work with a client.

I’m catching up on some reading this week, and I just read Willem’s disagreement with Jerry’s thoughts. Truth be known, I agree with both Jerry and Willem.

I would say that the root of the problem or “cause” was the pure and simple fact, that a poor decision was made to “band aid” a poorly designed system. If the correct decision was made in February of 2004 …

I’m working backwards. I started this entry on defining change. Then I realized change can’t exist without systems. So, what is a system? I like the following (heavily inspired by Systems Thinking Basics: From Concepts to Causal Loops)