d’urmytology

Working back outside the Bubble December 11, 2007

Myself and a colleague have had our heads down for 3-4 months putting together a demonstrator to investigate the options of exposing enterprise resources in a RESTful way. The principal drivers for us have been to show we can simplify the way individuals can access their data and services and additionally reduce the integration ‘clutter’ within large scale enterprises, abstracting the underlying technologies and processes away for the owners and users of those resources. Well, the demonstrator is built and has had its first couple of airings. The first thing that hit us was that those seeing the demonstrator got what we were trying to do (which is good), understood where we could utilise such a technology (which is also good) and lastly offered up candidate opportunities to build concept out into alpha implementations (which is great).

Then real world reality struck! Where we’d had our heads down focussing on proving and building out the concepts we had lived in a bubble of our own making, ignoring interrupts that did not aid our aim, and reacting/responding to each others issues immediately (not really worrying about what time of day or night those issues arrived – Hey, we were really enjoying ourselves and wanting to do it rather than it being a external interrupt making us have to do it). As I’ve written, the experience has been hugely liberating and rewarding given our similar recent histories. As such there was no need for external motivation. This ‘bubble’ allowed us to accelerate hugely what we were able to put together in a limited amount of time, and without realising, that acceleration became the norm for us and the way we were working.

Having to now build to alpha, we are re-engaging with the ‘real world’ again and that meant cutting a great big hole in our bubble – I don’t actually know whether we are letting people in or having to step outside, but either way, the first thing that really hit us was that everything now seemed to operate in ‘bullet time’. The decceleration has been huge. Working very closely and being solely focussed on a single proposition meant very rapid resolution and execution. Now, while relishing the opportunity to address real business needs, it feels like we’ve slowed so much. We can’t just ‘do stuff’. Now, we spend time discussing and planning how we are going to address particular issues and when we can get people together to do this rather than just resolving the issue.
I suppose this is inevitable to a degree and I’m just stating the bleeding obvious, but I think also this is a cry for the environment for people to accelerate delivering innovative concepts that can assist a business; creating a culture where small groups of individuals feel empowered to explore without standard business interruption and looking at ways for maintaining momentum when those concepts are exposed to the wider community.

Its this last point that obviously is an issue for me at the moment. Do I accept those individuals we now engage with have other stuff to do besides help us? Of course I do, but what I think is a way forward (and this is maybe the measure of whether something goes from concept to alpha) is for the business to provide the time and space and the developers to enthuse those they need to work with of the value of what you’re doing. If people feel excited about something and have the time, I believe they are more likely to put that little bit more effort (or maybe a lot more effort) to help get whatever it is ‘out there’ and what that means ultimately is empowered individuals supporting each other and delivering ‘stuff’ of value to people and business more rapidly.