I’m David Knott. I’ve been working in enterprise technology for over forty years and I’m still learning. This blog is based on mistakes, failures, lessons and some things I find interesting:
This Christmas, give yourself the gift of knowing that your work isn’t boring
‘Sorry, this is the boring bit.’
When I hear those words, my heart sinks almost as much as it used to when I heard someone declare that they were not technical. In the field of enterprise technology, they normally mean that the speaker is about to attempt an explanation of technical detail to an audience which includes non-technical people.
Perhaps they are going to explain to a product manager why the system built for a hundred users can’t scale to a million without extra infrastructure. Or why it’s not a good idea to put a system which holds customer’s personal details into production without security testing. Or why, while it might be tempting to make the chat interface available to every user, someone has to pay for all those tokens.
Business sponsor translation service
It’s tough being the business sponsor of a technology initiative. You want to achieve an outcome; you are responsible for achieving that outcome; it’s your budget that is being spent; and you will be judged on the result. But you are dependent on people you don’t know, concepts that you don’t understand, products that you may never even see, and suppliers that you have never met.
Given how tough the job is, it seems like a good idea not to make it any tougher. However, because business sponsors are rarely experts in technology, they often accidentally make their jobs tougher without realising – sometimes just by saying a few words. Because business sponsors are senior leaders, the things they say have consequences: they prompt the people around them to take action. And, if the sponsor says the wrong things, those actions will be counter-productive.
We still don't understand one another
In 1864, Charles Babbage wrote, ‘On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" . . . I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.’
It is worth looking at that quotation twice. The first time we see the stupidity of people asking a blatantly ludicrous question. How could anyone imagine that the machine knows what the right numbers are supposed to be? The second time we see the complacency of the technical expert assuming an unrealistic level of understanding in his audience. How could anyone imagine that the audience knows what a brand new machine is capable of?
To transform in isolation, create context
Imagine the experience of going to a meeting in a physical office, back when that was a normal thing to do (who knew a year ago that we would be nostalgic for featureless meeting rooms, grubby white boards, and markers that don’t work?). Don’t think about the content of the meeting: think about the context.
On your way to the meeting room, you walk past your colleagues and you catch glimpses of what they were working. You say hello to your friend who sits on this floor, but who you don’t see every day. You walk past the charts on the wall which show team performance and progress against the big project plan. You smile when you saw that the idea you sketched out on the whiteboard still hasn’t been wiped away.
Learn sense making and storytelling from the world around you
My wife and I paid a (socially distanced and suitably masked) visit to the Tower of London last week. It was a strange experience to be visiting this site of so many historical events whilst in the middle of our own historical event, and even stranger because it was so quiet: visitor numbers are currently strictly limited.
The quiet gave us an opportunity to spend a little time longer with the exhibits, and to appreciate them in more detail. The one that stayed in my memory was an exhibit in the Bloody Tower which told the story of the princes in the Tower. (If you’re not familiar with this story, then you can learn more on Wikipedia or, if you’re in London, plan a visit when conditions permit.)
This exhibit held my attention because it told the story in two very different ways.