Everyone is talking about Lean organizations, but what does that mean?

A lot of people think becoming more efficient means minimizing cost and time to market; however, there are other ways to look at it. In the end, the only thing that matters is the ability to measure…

Thought I would give a shout out to a really great new blog – Skorks.com.

Alan has been writing some really good material on processes and people (yeah weird, who would’ve guessed I would read something like that). The article that really grabbed by attention was: Stopping People From Switching Off During Standups.

Here are some other favorites:

• Building Software Development Expertise – Using The Dreyfus Model
• What’s Your Team Building Budget? – Creating and Recognising Team Building Opportunities
• Why Teams Succeed And Why They Fail
• How To Retain Your IT Employees For Longer

Be sure to stop over and give some of his material a try, I hope you find it as helpful as I have.

As Spiderman once put it, “With great power comes great responsibility”… well unfortunately there are a ton of roles and people that have never heard that phrase because I continually run into people who believe their current position entitles them to bossing people around while providing little value in terms of leadership. I am a huge believer of leading by example and as a result I have modeled my architectural duties around the Tracer Bullet Development tactic.

If you have never hear of tracer bullet development, it was a term coined in the classic The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master. In short, it is very important to trailblaze unknown territory through activities such as mockups, prototyping, and spiking.

However, I sometimes find “architect” level people providing no more worth to their team than a whiteboard full of boxes and arrows and a mouthful of hollow words of encouragement (sarcastic quotes explained). What teams need is clear direction on a clear path.

If what I just said wasn’t clear enough, let me be more blunt – whiteboarding and diagramming are the lowest forms of architecture and they provide the least amount of worth. I realize that I will receive some comment on how in their company is special and creating BUFD UML diagrams is key, blah blah blah. The point I am trying to make is, these activities 99% of the time are nothing more than echoes of the obvious – as a leader it is your responsibility to give direction to the non-obvious!

For example, the current project I am on we need to provide a very rich search capability. As an architect you could really suck and throw some buzzwords at your developer and send them on their way. You could suck less by throwing a couple of real technologies to a developer to give them a launching point for research, but more than likely you are delegating a very important architectural decision to someone who is not veteran enough to make the correct choice. The final option is, you do your job and lead by example by researching the alternatives yourself, picking the path, creating a prototype to validate your hypothesis, and then hand it off with a pre-cleared path.

In order to become a trailblazer, you have to blaze trails. Good architects do not blaze trails with their bossyness and whiteboard markers, instead good architects do it with their intelligence, code, and ability to communicate.

PS – Here are a few more tracer bullet resources, here and here.