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Thursday, March 10, 2016

Showcase

Every two weeks, the Agile process demands that a dev team appoint a representative to demonstrate the work that has been completed since the start of the iteration.

At NerdHaven, the representative is typically a member of UX. Policy within UX is that if the completed work is your story, you showcase it. Which makes sense. The UXer wrote the story, they can describe what should happen, why the work was done, and if things get brutally technical, they can have a Dev or QA jump in to spell out the details.

I generally enjoy showcase - mostly because I enjoy explaining things, and (so long as I know the material) I'll talk to anyone. There's some AV hassle setting up a showcase (since a significant number of attendees are remote) but the procedure is known, and most of UX has it down pat.

We used to schedule a mini-meeting in the showcase room, for the 15 minutes immediately prior to showcase - just to get the webex setup and the conference call going. Eventually we got to the point where we could fly though setup given a minute or two.

Conference calls are horrid (everyone knows this) and we compound that by having part of our showcase be a video call with the west coast office alongside the webex/conference call. It's great to see the west coast folks when we talk, but it is an added complication.

Again, though - we've got the drill down pat.

Fire up the webex in the non-chrome, non-IE browser (because chrome is wonky with our POS webex software, and because IE is our demo browser - if we crash it, the webex would die, too).
Use the webex software to call the room (this saves us from having to punch in a long passcode on the room's cantankerous touchpad saucer.
Mute our computer's speakers to avoid reverb
Call the west coast on the video phone
Launch IE and log into our demo environments
Start recording the webex, pause it
Wait until the royalty arrives
Start recording
Present our stuff

There's always something going south somewhere, but this - plus a few debug steps - gets it done for showcase.

And we've tried to improve on our showcase. A lot of our audience is not getting our message. We've tested this. Dash took an informal survey of what we showcased and what people remembered and, well - folks were not getting a lot of what we said. Some are just touring the showcase, but some of those folks will need to support the features we demo-ed. If they don't get our message, we are doing things wrong.

Then there are the SMEs. Our SMEs are smart folks, but as I've said before - they live in a different universe than we do. UX is neck deep with Devs and QAs, and now we are Product, so we are up to date on what work is planned, and where it is at.

The SMEs are in the field, demoing features and helping clients set up our product. They have advanced degrees and are specialized experts in things folks like me cannot possibly understand. This is why we have them. When we are designing a feature for our clients (who often have the same advanced degrees) we need to lean on the SMEs to make sure we are not screwing things up with our non-SME ignorance.

The SMEs get this. UX gets this.

Sadly, this understanding is a one way street.

UX are designers, SMEs are not. And when I say designers, I don't mean detached "creatives" (a word I loathe beyond measure) - but designers in the Mike Monteiro "Design is a [Goddamn] Job" sense. UXers are paid to understand problems and design solutions for our end users. We are tasked with designing comprehensive, consistent designs that delight our customers. And we must do this in the Agile methodology (meaning no comprehensive redesigns, but improve what you touch - when you touch it). And do user research, and write requirements (as well as more and more business analysis).

The SMEs at NerdHaven have little patience for UX. We are in their way. I have mentioned this before - and I will keep mentioning it, I guess. Because right after I feel we are mending fences with the SMEs, we will have a meeting where they basically tell us that UX is entirely staffed with morons.

To give them their due, they have spent more time at NerdHaven than I have - and have had to deal with the likes of Noddy, the Professor, Ahh and Heater. Noddy has poisoned the well to an incredible degree - and my recent struggles with Arwafn has not improved things.

When Arwafn went over the cliff, Runner and I were suitably mortified - but the SMEs were out in the field with clients, trying to explain to them why the report was showing incorrect data. One of our SMEs - an incredibly sharp person I'll call Whitelake - has routinely pronounced Arwafn to be of limited value and perhaps something we should abandon.

The SMEs give the impression that if UX would just get out of the way, they could tell our Devs what to build and everything would be grand. They share the belief that our Devs just make things complicated and that an approach that "keeps it simple" would shorten timelines and result in more deliverables in a shorter amount of time.

The SMEs are smart people - but in this regard, they are completely wrong.

When Arwafn blew up, I remember the then-lead SME moving to ensure that future development would have greater SME oversight - sign-off, even. The thinking being that, had we greater SME involvement in Arwafn, the feature would have launched without problems.

But Arwafn's problems were deep, under-the-hood, data problems. SMEs are experts in their domain, but they are not data experts. They do not design databases, and they assuredly do not design user interface.

But they want to. And while I am not so much a UX snob to believe that the SMEs cannot help design good interface, they fall victim to the same fallacy that launched countless crappy user experiences. Designing screens is easy!

No. First, its not about designing screens - it's about discovering the actual problem the user wants to solve and designing a solution. A solution could be a screen - or it could be a phone number to call - or an incredibly complicated database-driven web application that synthesizes heaps of unseen data to present the one calculation the user cares about - when they care about it.

"I could tell you what the user needs in about 5 minutes. Here, I'll draw you a sketch..."

Being UX, you should always hear these kinds of comments out - but when they break down into "we get the right data and give it to our users, easy!" UXers like myself want to jump out a window.

Yes, I know we should show them the right data. Now, can you tell me how we distinguish from good data and bad data - so I can tell the Devs how to write their query?

And then... the handwaving begins - or references to data elements by their NerdHaven-given name, rather than the names of client-supplied data elements. Elements that should conform to a standard, but often don't.

Oh, we should use the date when event X happens? Do you realize that there are three different data elements that could have that information? Do you realize there is no way for us to look at those dates in those elements and know which of them is correct - if any? Do you realize that each client could use any of these elements - or one of their own devising? Do you understand that even if they send us the right data in the data element we expect, low level interface code could adulterate it or prevent our application from using it? Do you realize the amount of effort would be involved in getting a detailed picture of what our clients are sending and what is actually making it into our application - for even a single site?

I have been working to pin down an elusive bit of data, PofC and the forensic analysis has stretched into months. We've built new upstream processes, moved mountains and we're still barely there. Our solution for Arwafn's PofC problem will still only work for most of our clients. Not all.

Some of our SMEs are incredulous at this. "PofC is basic data, send to us in a DAT message. Don't you know how to read a DAT message? This is really very basic."

Yes, we know how to read a DAT. What we cannot read is the DAT message our clients don't send to us. Some clients only send us DAT messages half of the time. Does your 'basic' solution account for this? Are you aware that years of legacy code exists that parses DAT messages differently for different clients? Do you understand that they will send us DAT messages in parallel for the same record, forcing us to either guess which thread is the correct one, or merge the threads into a single thread? Each of these approaches has weaknesses, depending on the originating system (or systems). Do you have a recommendation for how we would approach this for all our clients, each of whom may have a different configuration?

We have explained this to the SMEs ad nauseum. Sometimes, it clearly has no effect. Other times, I see a nod of comprehension and resignation. But always, always, we seem to end up in the same place. The SMEs think we are fools for not grasping the simplicity of their solution. We are incompetent - bunglers.

I have personally explained to Ihaq the difficulties in solving the PofC problem. They seemed to get it - then later in showcase, they have asked why a (long abandoned approach to PofC) has not solved the issue so that this new work (that I am showcasing as completed dev work) is unnecessary. On the one hand, I should be happy that an explanation of our work from last year has been retained by a SME - yet I am frustrated that they had completely forgotten the in-person demo I'd given them less than two weeks ago.

And I know they are frustrated, too. Always, always - the feature work is incomplete. We'll address their concerns in a future story. They've heard this ad nauseum, too. They are sick of waiting. Every story we present is "the early version" or "for beta" so we can "refine it later." They know what they want - and we are just not getting it.

A particular sore spot with me was the printed output of Arwafn. UXDirector (way back when I first started) had flat out told me that we were not simply going to repeat what we'd done in the past. Namely, make the report output into a .CSV file. UXDirector's point was hammered home "we don't want to tell our clients that - in order to solve your data problem - the first thing to do, is to leave our application and open another program."

You could look at this a lot of different ways - but I took it as: the boss wants us to try new things. So, we talked with clients and found out what they wanted to do with Arwafn's output. They wanted modest editing, but nothing that required Excel - so we provided the ability to edit the view in Arwafn - and a PDF output that mirrored the view.

What we soon discovered, was that the client data was extensive enough to require a multiple page PDF output - which was universally unpopular. We intended to revise the approach so we would support all our client's data in two page-sized chunks - but before we did, all of our data issues blew up and we spent the next year fighting them. The SMEs were angry with the PDF, they wanted an Excel file output and could not believe we hadn't built one yet.

Now, we're rounding the bend on our data issues and the SMEs are back banging on the issue of the export to Excel. Being beaten up for a design choice I was driven into, then berated for not having fixed it by now is particularly galling. The SMEs think the PDF was some crazy "designers" idea. That it is in its final form - rather than the orphaned feature that it is.

I will ask to fix the PDF, but I am virtually certain that I will be told to make an Excel export instead. When this happens, the SMEs will nod their head and confirm each other's wisdom - and the work of the PDF export will be truly wasted. I beyond furious about this. There is no way to explain this to them - but I will keep trying.

This is UX.

* * *

Where was I?

Oh yeah, so I'm reviewing the few stories I have to do for the showcase that starts in an hour, when Red walks by.

"Did you realize that showcase is in BigLake?"

Uh....

BigLake is the largest meeting room we have and it has the worst video conferencing gear. I have had a series of catastrophic AV failures there, to the point where I have abandoned the room and made my remote attendees call into a new room. I hate BigLake. I had promised myself that I would set up a trial webex/vidcall with the west coast just so I can learn how the hell to make everything work when I don't have the entire company watching me. But there has not been time. Now, it will be trial by AV fire in BigLake.

But Red's not done. "They've changed all the AV gear in BigLake, too."

Uh...... sh!t?

I go immediately to Servicedesk and ask for the how-to for the new gear. Servicedesk is very precise, but it still learning the ropes themselves. They make a few things very clear:

Don't touch anything on Remote #3 (there are, naturally, three remotes)
There is a secret button on Remote #1 that makes the number buttons do what you'd expect them to
There is special software to share your screen with the west coast office folks, but don't use it if you are doing webex, because it causes crippling lag
We will not be able to video conference with the west coast, since the main line can only support the audio bridge call

These are not good things to learn 30 minutes before showcase, but I take note of them and thank Servicedesk, who then disappears into a puff of smoke.

BigLake's AV setup is VASTLY different. Where we used to have a desktop machine with a USB keyboard and some mic pads around the room - we now have a wireless ergo keyboard that connects to a completely invisible box whose only video display is the overhead projector that is either off, or currently receiving input from another source (guess which! such fun!) There's a wireless mouse (that lags incredibly) and no video cable to connect to if I want to use my machine. I will have to the room's machine. There's a TV for video calls. I power up the projector and - a minute or two later - I can see the faint projection of a Windows 7 screen. That I can deal with, so long as the phone hookup is working.

I test dial into the audio bridge and get it working - and watch the Window 7 screen projection on the wall get replaced by a bright blue field of nothing. There is a TV, which shows me the status of the outgoing call and soon I see the west coast office. But the room's computer display is still gone. I can't see what I'm doing on the box, and can't demo, or do anything.

F*&k.

Nugget walks in and I grab them, since they just worked this room with Red. Nugget immediately begins pressing the button on Remote #3 that Servicedesk said not to touch. The blue screen on the wall becomes a black screen with an input error message. Five minutes to showtime, folks are starting to come in and sit down.

F*&k-ity F*&k, F*&k...

Nugget then hangs up the phone. TV goes black and the projector, too. I grab Remote #3 and press the one button Servicedesk said we should mess with other than power - HDMI1. Which reconnects the overhead projector to the room's invisible PC.

I can see what I'm doing on the PC again. I start firing up Firefox to get the webex running and immediately realize that this machine has none of our bookmarks. All of our demo sites have incredibly convoluted URLs that I cannot remember (which is why I bookmarked them). The webex URL is pretty straightforward, so I fire it up-

-and am told that the invisible PC's version of Firefox needs a plugin to run the webex.

-which requires admin rights on the box.

-which I don't have.

Two minutes to showtime.

Chrome usually works for webex, but sometimes not - I go for IE (accepting the risk that we will crash IE in our demo and take out our webex).

Won't this be fun? Let's go.

IE fires up and (merciful God) does not need a plugin to use the webex. It's spooling up when the west coast calls us on the videophone-

-which turns the projected PC view back into a blue field of nothing. Sprint's on the videophone.

One minute...

I ask Sprint to bail out on the video call and dial the audio bridge until we sort our sh!t out over here. Sprint does so without a fuss - they know the drill, and they know we wouldn't ask if it didn't matter.

We get our projected PC back, the TV goes black and Sprint hails us over the bridge.

Sprint? They just get it done. Sprint is great.

I have the webex working and have fired up another tab to go to our demo site... and I can't remember the damn URL. I was hoping the prior showcase would have put it into our history, but-

I'll IM it from my machine!

But I can't because the invisible PC is a room PC and doesn't have IM, because: Bullsh!t. Some security jerkoff decided that a room can't be a user, so if you want to IM a room machine, you have to sign into the IM as yourself, then log out when you are done. As those are (naturally) separate credentials that you use exactly never (Button reads: "Remember-my-password-so-I-can-forget-it?" YES) I can't log into the IM.

Showtime!

Dash shows up. I like Dash, but they are habitually late in arriving to these things. They know their sh!t, and get it done, but as they are up first - with most of the demos - their late arrival is not helping. Sprint does the into over the bridge and asks if Dash is ready to go.

Dash says they are and the room projector flips to show the image of Dash's PC on their demo site. Dash is using the spiffy new software that came with the new AV gear and it's slick.

But wasn't there something that I'm supposed to remember about...?

Dash is partially into their first story when I realize the problem. Dash's PC is connected to the projector in BigLake (so we see it on our wall) and the projector in the big room in the west coast (which is not the room that Sprint and their team is in) but it is NOT connected to the webex at all.

So only the people in BigLake can see Dash's PC. I cut Dash off and ask if the remote callers can see the screen.

"No"

etc

I had the meeting over to Sprint, so they can go first now, while I get Dash up to speed on what they need to do: stop using the fancy room software and log into the epically sh!tty webex software we always use.

While they do that, Sprint is polishing of some solid demos because all Sprint knows how to do is get it the hell done. I'm realizing that I still don't have the demo URLs onto the invisible PC and I briefly think of doing what Dash is doing: use my machine to log into the webex, but - as if in answer - my laptop chose that moment to spontaneously switch itself completely off.

It had been doing that for a few weeks, usually within 30 minutes of undocking and Servicedesk was in the process of staging me a new machine, but y'know... as of now I'm just screwed.

I reboot my machine, and wait for the nastygram about not shutting it down properly.

Listen, bud - YOU shut you down improperly, don't go blaming me for your fail...

Sprint's wrapping up their stuff when it finally boots up. I use the invisible PCs awkward ergo-keyboard and laggy wireless mouse to set Dash up as a presenter (because Dash's webex account has never been promoted to Host or presenter).

Dash gets rolling. I call up my list of URLs and attempt to print them and -

I wish to GOD I was making this up- the nearest TWO printers are out of paper. So the room is treated to watching me walk in and out of the room not once, but twice.

I can't get the printout, and I don't dare risk using my "guess-when-I'll-switch-off" laptop. So, I'm stuck using the invisible PC with no bookmarks.

Great.

Dash finishes up and it's my turn. I have three things to demo, and each requires a separate demo site. Plus, if I'm going to reference the story cards, where I have all my notes, I need to log into our workflow webapp.

-Whose URL I have not failed to memorize.

I take a flyer at it hoping that the prior showcase used it, but no. The entire company is now watching a member of UX who apparently doesn't know where anything is - guessing at URLs they use every damned day (with bookmarks and history-autocomplete, neither of which this PC has).

With help from Nugget, I get into our workflow webapp and start showing the cards of the stories I will demo. I go into the first demo site and discover that I'd made a typo in my notes and find myself unable to log into the first demo site. When I try to refresh the page, I discover that the function keys are dual use and the standard function of F5 has been toggled off and the key now does some other (completely unhelpful thing). There is a toggle to regain normal function key behavior, but on this ergo-keyboard they (ha HA, creativity!) have placed it somewhere I cannot find.

Awesome!

To force the reload, I have to (laggy) mouse into the address bar and hit 'Enter' and plow forward like I just don't care. I muddle through the 1st story, but the ergo-keyboard makes me type like a drunk, and the wireless mouse (between sensitivity and lag) is like throwing darts at the app.

Click. Miss!

At some point, over the audio bridge, I hear music. It's the theme from Jeopardy.

Someone is playing the theme from Jeopardy. While I'm struggling to get through the demo, someone has decided that I am taking too long.

So they decided to play the theme from Jeopardy.

You know, for fun.

And I know exactly who it is. The same SME who mocked Ahhh when they were struggling in their showcase ages ago. It wasn't funny then, and I'm even less amused now.

I call them out. "I'm assuming that's you, Balin."

Balin fesses up. "Guilty as charged."

Most of our offices are watching, so I just say "Appreciate your input."

I finish my two other stories and wrap up. I'm absolutely livid and say so. I'm in Gumby's office venting about how utterly sh!tful it is to be mocked by a SME, to be made a fool of, when literally everything about the AV was falling down on my head. Gumby hears me out, although God knows why they put up with me.

It is - so far as I know, the first time I yell at work.

UX's relations with the SMEs has always been problematic, but really? This is where we have sunk to? Were the situation reversed and Balin was up there sweating out a demo, would anyone on UX razz them about it? Never.

I go off for far too long in Gumby's office and then seethe my way home. Gumby has tried to respond to any and all critiques of showcase and apparently the Dragon showcase was far worse than the one I was in. Gumby is looking to change things up and make improvements to the process, because that's the Gumby's answer to everything: more process.

Never mind what needs to happen is that we sort out our goddamn AV gear before this kind of crap happens again.

* * *

The next day, Balin emails me to apologize. They say they only meant to add a bit of levity to the meeting and were sorry to have upset me. Somebody has clearly asked them to contact me.

But it doesn't matter. I'm so glad to have an opening to explain where I was coming from. I cataloged the utter insanity of that day (in brief) so they would know why I wasn't laughing. I want them to understand - we are on the same team. I was having a bad day, a very bad day. I swore I'd be up for humor on any other day, but that day was not right time for me.

Balin was great about the whole thing. It was a great clearing of the air. The SMEs and UX will still be at loggerheads about a lot of things - but I want them to know we are people, we work hard, and we want NerdHaven to succeed. And that we believe the same about them.

We have to get past the animosity.

In a very weird way, the Jeopardy theme - and Balin's subsequent email - may represent a thawing of the ice.

Friday, January 29, 2016

Malheur or "Beware the Slighted White Man"

How do you get to this point?

Less than a second after this image was taken, the man in the hat will be fatally shot.

He is 54 years old, married and father of 11 children. And he will be shot down as he stands in the snow, reaching for a 9mm handgun as four law enforcement officers are aiming weapons at him.

What is this man thinking?

I've heard more than a few people react to this as "Good!" or "he got what he deserved," but really - this is a genuine tragedy.

Eleven people call this man 'dad,' yet he chose to illegally occupy federal buildings with a gun. Chose to declare to the national media that "these buildings will never, ever return to the federal government."

When pulled over by authorities, this man - with other people in the car - chose to flee. Risking his own life and the lives of his passenger & those of the officers who had to give chase.

With officers in hot pursuit and a roadblock ahead of his vehicle, this man chose not to slow down, but attempted to drive around it - burying the front of his truck in the snow & missing an officer by a few feet. Again, this man and his passenger could have been injured or killed in the crash. Had the officer in question taken a few more steps before the crash, they might have been seriously injured or killed.

The police could have (justifiably) fired into the truck as it narrowly missed one of their officers. This man or his passenger could have died as a result.

And finally, this man chose to exit their truck & raise their arms, the first sane thing they do in this entire sad affair. They are confronted by five officers in front and one behind. After noticing the officer behind them, the man lowers his hands and puts one into his coat four seconds later.

So the police kill him.

I have a lot of sympathy for this man's family. To watch a family member do what this man did must baffle them. Even steeped in a family mindset, surely they are wondering why didn't he keep his hands up?

And the capstone to this entire thing is that this man died for a cause that was lost before he was even born.

There is no chance that all federal lands in the west are going to become private lands, or even state lands in this century.

This man threw his life away for complete bullsh!t. Bullsh!t he apparently believed above everything else - above even love for his children. That is just sad beyond measure.

Think of how deluded a person would have to be to think that seizing a federal bird sanctuary would cause the federal government to give up federal lands. This is something that can only be done by Congress - a body that has never even brought such a bill to the floor in decades. The same body that can barely muster the energy to raise the debt ceiling - this is the group that is suddenly going to spring into action to appease a small group of malcontents camped out in the middle of frozen nowhere.

Had this man bothered to check the political winds even a little bit - he would have learned that the rest of the nation has no idea that the feds own so much land. The rest of the nation could give a sh!t about federal land ownership and less than a half of a sh!t about people who do.

What's that you say, grandpaw? You're mad at the gubment? Well, get in line.

And I get that western residents have locked horns with the feds over land for ages. Some of their grievances I might have patience to listen to. But the reality is that the federal lands belong to everyone.

And everyone outnumbers the hell out of the few folks out west who want to graze for free. That's democracy - majority rule, with rights for all. And there is no right in the Constitution that says you can use or take federal land just because you're unhappy. Unless you can win over enough people to sway Congress - you're pretty much outta luck.

And guys like this unfortunate father of eleven, were fed up with being out of luck. They will not be ignored....!

But they are, nobody cares about them - or even thinks about them.

Oh, but they will.... Frustrated and unknown, these folks are gonna get heard. So they grab a gun, all the stuff they own that looks mil-spec and dress up like soldiers of the government they claim to hate.

Because it makes them feel powerful. And they get attention. And their ranks begin to swell.

The gun makes people have to pay attention. Not because they care about the message, but because they are afraid you are going to hurt someone. This laughable nonsense that the guns are there for "defense" is even dumber than the idea that Congress is going to do what they ask.

The militia have guns for defense - in case the cops attack them.

Psst! You in the cowboy hat! I'll let you in on a secret. GUNS ATTRACT COPS.

It's a fact. You go to a public place as an armed group and cops will come to you. Guns are cop catnip, and everybody knows it except these militia idiots. Take the "defense" argument another few steps down the road and you're at the next secret these idiots don't appear to realize: GUNS HAVE NEVER MADE THE COPS GO AWAY.
If you have the weapons, they come to you - but if you SHOOT any of the weapons near the police, you will have attracted the attention of ALL OF THE POLICE. For how long? UNTIL THEY GET YOU.

So, your "defense" argument is stupid from any angle, cowboy-man.

Guns work wonders at getting media attention, though - and if you were smart - you'd find a way to attract the media without the cops.

Militias, being idiots, get both.

Still, when cameras are finally aimed at them - they come to a terrible realization:
They are in no way prepared to make a national statement.

If the Bundys had a brain in their head, they would have vetted a group of committed westerners and presented themselves to the nation in a non-threatening, but extremely public way.

The key to protesting is to make the public identify with you - so they sympathize with you.

Bundy and Co announced their collective Other-hood in 60pt bold. Chest thumping stupidity became their brand. Their ranks were stocked with a mix of those who were committed to the cause and those who needed to be committed to a padded room. Tarps, Fluffy Bunny, sumo guy for God's sake.

With every week, the militia added another star to the "We are Freaks" flag flying over Malheur.

The feds did something smart - perhaps not on purpose - by waiting long enough for these malcontents to become a national joke before they made their move.

I have wondered if the totality of their failure became evident to them before the shooting of this sad man. Such a realization might drive a slighted white man to do something rash.

But I still cannot help but wonder what it was in the mind of LaVoy Finicum that kept him going - even in the face of overwhelming evidence that his personal cause was lost. Did he really think he could shoot his way out? Did he think his death would change anything?

(LaVoy's ghost - if you're reading this, the answer to that last one is NO.)

And what, in the name of anything held holy would compel a man to desert his children like that?

Don't you even say "Patriotism." That is utter bullsh!t, too. If you love your country, live to make it better, don't die to make yourself feel important.

Father of eleven, dead in a snowbank. A month from now, the nation will have forgotten his name and his cause.

Decades from now his family will still be missing him.

Sad.

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Olympus Has Spoken

Once a quarter, NerdHaven has its big to-do with the higher ups. The All Staff. In the normal run of things I accept the invite and put it out of my mind until one day I come into the office and all the managers are dressed up.

At Nerdhaven, casual is the way of things. Atlas, who use to be the boss of UXDir, typically stalks the halls in a faded tee shirt and jeans. Until recently, Atlas has been showing up in a button up shirt - so there have been more than a few jokes about them bucking for a promotion.

But really, when you see all the managers dressed up, it's an All Staff day.

This All Staff was different. This would be the first one since Olympus assumed the role of GM. The first one since NerdHaven had the first layoff. Six FTEs were just let go and this would be the meeting that laid it all out. The how and the why.

Not the who, though. I've never understood this, but the one piece of information that folks want most is the one that does not get brought up directly. Who got canned? I can't imagine there is a lower thing to do that to just put up a list of those who were let go, but honestly - folks want to know who will no longer be around. It's not like we won't find out eventually. Might as well pull the scab off now. But that's not how it's done. When CorpWorld fired 86 people on Black Wednesday, all they did was send out an updated org chart - which made technology scrape the text of the new one and the old one and run Beyond Compare to see who got axed.

UX knew Heater was canned, but nothing else. Prior to the meeting, Olympus sent around a powerpoint deck with a revised org chart, but it wasn't a lot of help. First off, it looked to be the product of several different authors, each with a different way of looking at the organization. Some groups included their contractors, some didn't. Some represented hierarchies among people who reported to the same person, some didn't. Our group's chart made it look like I was at the same level as Gumby or Devil - and that was definitely not the case. Gumby used to be my boss for Chrissake, and yes, we both reported to Product Actual, but they clearly ranked me.

Org charts are documents fraught with all kinds of unintended meaning. I'm fairly certain that whoever put the chart for UX/Product was just making sure all the people were connected to Product Actual. Runner seized on some subtext that I'm convinced was just oversight. "Why is Dash at the top of our group?"

Which is a good question. Dash was new. If we were going by rank and seniority, our group list should have looked something like:

Product Actual

Gumby
Devil
Pogue
Sprint
Runner
murph
Dash
Red
(Open)

Instead, it looked like

Product Actual

Gumby - Dash

(Open) - Sprint

Devil - murph

Runner - Pogue

Red

Which sends entirely the wrong message to people like Devil and Pogue (and Runner, apparently). So, by this chart, Dash is up on the food chain and Runner is down.

Powerpointers of the World, hear me: Thou shalt not phone it in on org charts - all kinds of wrong stuff happens.

I digress.

So the All Staff is going down today and there's no avoiding it. What we'd originally thought was clipping Heater for poor performance was actually part of an organizational earthquake. Today we would get all the why we could handle.

* * *

The morning was a blur - I owed Sprint two stories RFD that were hot on the heels of the four stories I gave Dragon yesterday. We review the work with the devs and they clear it, barely. I went way too fast on one of them and missed a few items that I was cleaning up until a few hours ago. I get the lunch notice and happened to be en route to the breakroom when I get it on my phone.

Ahhh lunch. One of the good things about an All Staff. They figure you are essentially missing lunch for a two hour meeting, so the office springs for food. Typically, it's just subs, chips and cookies, but it's free. This time, no cookies. I run into Pepe and they laugh, "Cookies are for people who make their numbers!!"

That's sure to be a part of today's meeting. NerdHaven is not shy about spelling out the economic picture to everyone. Everyone cares because everyone's bonus depends on us making our commitments. The buzz up until now is not good. I'm thinking we might not get a bonus this year.

All Staffs are on the ground floor, in a common space used by other businesses. I file in late and end up sneaking into the back row seconds before the show kicks off. I'm next to Runner and Dash, just behind Gumby. UX still hanging together, even though we are Product people now.

Olympus is at the podium and launches into an apology for having to talk at length, but it has to be done. Olympus is a polished speaker, does this kind of thing all the time. And they fire up Powerpoint.

God, I hate powerpoint. Tufte is right, Powerpoint is for presenters, not for audiences. But Olympus is restrained and sensibly avoids most of the common mistakes of tiny fonts and overly dense slides.

They get right to the point. We have made organizational changes that will, as most of you know, affect six of your colleagues. Not too passive, and everyone knows what they are talking about. This does not represent a downsizing, this is truly restructuring. As a matter of fact we will be adding eleven positions to our company. Between additional staff and other investments, we will be adding [x] million dollars of investment in the company this year.

This is a relief. Nobody wanted to think NerdHaven was in trouble financially. We didn't make our numbers, but our numbers were for growth targets. Yes, we'd all be happier if we hit those, but growing slower than plan is a hell of a lot better than shrinking. And we are not shrinking.

Whew.

Olympus reviewed the good and the bad of the past year. I note that Arwafn is slotted under the bad. There is no other place it could be, but seeing (again) that my signature project is an open wound this far along in its existence makes me squirm. We have months of work with PofC to fix Filter B. And that's just to get us back to a baseline of what folks wanted. I have at least four other features to add to Arwafn to get it to a point where I would feel good about washing my hands and moving on to the next thing. That's assuming I get that work prioritized and...

I look up and Olympus is on to the org charts.

GMs get to do a lot and Olympus has moved swiftly to reorganize the VP level of NerdHaven. Their protege, Juice, is a new VP (has been for awhile now) and others in their favor have neatly moved up. Data's prediction came true: Remote is now the VP of Product at NerdHaven. They were part of our temporary "sister company" but now that we are no longer conjoined at the hip, Remote is still with us - officially.

Atlas looks to have been demoted. My memory of org charts is always suspect, but Portal and TheDude used to report to Atlas, and now they are peers. That just makes me sick. Atlas is the most hardworking, generous person I've known in tech - and they were gunning for higher office in NerdHaven. They've been denied promotion twice now, and this was them actually moving down the ladder. I worry about them. We've had some tech challenges lately, and if all of them are landing on Atlas...

...well, that would just be sh!tty.

Olympus wraps up with a view downrange of where we are headed strategically and at the end, I'm convinced that the Heater thing is not the ominous thing I thought it was. I believe NerdHaven was looking to get rid of Heater for performance reasons and a re-org came along and allowed them to do it faster. That's crappy, but really - Heater was not getting it done.

Listening to Olympus lay out their vision for the company, it is clear: they have a plan, and they have been busting their butt to get things moving so the market doesn't get ahead of us. NerdHaven is well positioned, but there are always threats. We got complacent for the past few years, this will not be allowed to happen again.

Next up is Juice. A lot of resentment has cruised through NerdHaven about the meteoric rise of Juice, but the fact is - they are smart, driven, and they get stuff done. Juice lays out their team's accomplishments and responsibilities - which seals the deal for me. Juice's team has a brutal schedule of ramping up clients and keeping them supported. If they can do that and live, they get my vote.

Then comes Remote. Today's meeting is Remote's coming out party for officially joining NerdHaven's org chart. They will run Product, and so they are now the boss of my new boss in perpetuity. Remote's love of Powerpoint does not translate into effective delivery of visual information. The fonts are small, the graphics - impenetrable. Remote is a good speaker and gets most of their points across. For some reason, they believe that Noddy's last project was a success. Oh, and UX will be working closer with the SMEs.

I don't know why this makes me unhappy, but it does. The SMEs are a smart bunch, with highly technical degrees and experience in the field. Working with them should be a no-brainer. But we've always managed to step on each other's toes. The SMEs have the expertise to inform our designs, but they are not designers. But design is fun - and everyone imagines that what they want is what everyone wants. One of our SMEs, MontBlanc, is particularly headstrong. They have been proven right enough to be dangerous, but the mindset of "just do what I want" is a dangerous thing. Sooner or later you will pay. I believe regular contact with the SMEs is the cure for our social differences, but procedurally - adding more cooks to the kitchen will not increase our velocity.

And we are not getting it done as a business unit.

Finance steps up next to deliver the news that everyone is sweating at this time of year. Bonuses depend on our unit and our corporate unit hitting our numbers. Finance tells us that our corporate unit has failed. At best, our bonus this year will be half of what it could be. Odds are, it won't be the best scenario. Finance goes through the rest of the numbers which show us not hitting our growth target, but still growing. Its not good news, but not truly bad.

Last up is Olympus again. NerdHaven typically gives an award for great performance since the last meeting - an award where anyone can be nominated by a peer, and management selects a winner. This time, with Olympus head down cranking out the new business plan and the re-org - there hasn't been time. Olympus apologizes and tells us all they've selected some people for recognition for exceptional performance. They stress the usual disclaimers - picking these folks isn't meant to sleight anyone - but they wanted to point out some folks who have really done well in their opinion.

Olympus taps their deck and a gold star appears on the screen with a name in it.

And it is Data. First name picked! Which is awesome. Data has been doing battle with an insanely difficult government protocol for an insanely difficult client and has come out of it with a genuine win. The protocol will become easier for our client (and everyone else - this protocol has never been done before, precisely because no one did what Data did: TALK to the govt about it). I'm cheering for them. They have struggled in obscurity to convince folks that data stewardship is key to our product. With Olympus calling them out - it is clear that a rubicon has been crossed. The GM knows that Data is a key player now. This is good for all of us.

But really, Yea! Yea for Data!

Olympus taps the deck. Another star. A name I don't know. NerdHaven has a lot of departments I never see - but Olympus makes a point of describing the person's unit and what they've done for the company.

And again, and again. I briefly hope that I'll be up there, but it's clear that the names are in alpha order and they are way past where my name would be. I'm hoping Olympus will tag somebody in UX or on BigDog's team. But there looks to be room for only six stars on the slide and the sixth one is someone in contracts who does the unenviable job of making sure our phonebook sized contracts are signed and sealed so we can begin taking the client's money. Olympus does a nice job of spelling out what this person has done for the organization, staying up until 3am to book business to make deadlines. Literally giving every spare minute to getting new clients on the books.

Rockin.

Six stars called out by Olympus in front of the whole company. Yeah, it's not a bonus check, but knowing that the GM personally appreciates what you're doing has gotta be one hell of a shot in the arm.

Olympus taps their deck. Another star comes up.

Its me.

"Where is murph? I thought I saw them?" Olympus asks. Hands point to me and Olympus begins telling everyone about how they appreciate my efforts on Arwafn.

I'm literally dumbstruck. I haven't been in a meeting with Olympus since Arwafn blew up - well over six months ago... Runner's giving me the "whaddaya know about that?" look and I manage to mouth 'thank you' to the GM.

They go to Q&A, then we file out and Portal gives me an attaboy. Portal. The cynic with a soft heart. They're happy for me.

And its about then that I realize what a freight train Arwafn has been. It is nowhere close to done - but it has been an all consuming thing. NerdHaven has promised to make it right, and even if they hadn't I sure have. This thing will work. I will make sure of it.

I'm just glad it hasn't been in total obscurity. Because this sh!t ain't easy.

Managers, take note: taking the time to notice the efforts of folks outside your immediate circle is good for any number of reasons - but it does wonders for morale.

Yeah, I didn't get a formal award trophy - or the usual gift card.

But I got a Gold Star from Olympus.

That's pretty solid.

Monday, January 11, 2016

That Old Familiar Feeling

Booting up for Monday, and what a Monday it is.

Sick as a dog, voice sounds like Barry White after a week long scream, and I've got four things on deadline for Dragonman.

I like Dragonman. Aside from their tendency to be unabashedly fit, they are thoroughly intelligent and great to work with. Dragonman has put me on notice that my action items must get done today.

I'm 99% of the way there. But the Dragon team is very particular about how their work is captured and they are backend with a capital B. I'm front end since forever - so you know, different worlds. Dragonman pairs me up with a tech resource who will help me try to speak their language of foreign keys and normalized values. It's slow going - but then, I'm UI and don't need to know all the backend stuff. I just hate feeling stupid.

And the Dragon team will pounce on you hard if they feel you're not up to par. Their experience with UX to date has been pretty choppy.

While I'm thinking about that, I get an invite to a meeting from Product Actual. Today.

Alarm bells start ringing in my head, but I stifle them. This is NerdHaven. We are different.

I check the invite. Sent 10:43am - the meeting is for 12:00. The subject is Quick Team Update. Okay, that's three out of the four signs of truly bad news. I open the invite list for number four. It looks like the entire list of Product and UX (now part of Product), except...

Heater is not on the list.

Of course. Product Actual just took the reins, and Heater has been on the bubble for a while now. Gumby had them on some kind of probation and it looks as if Product Actual is closing their account. All of this is theory, of course.

So I go over towards the Dragon room and see if Heater is in. They aren't. I ping Pepe, a Dragon QA: Hey, is Heater in today?

Pepe looks confused. "No, come to think of it."

I text Runner - who is way ahead of my speculation. They are certain that Heater is gone. I consider asking how they know, but figure I'm already too far along down the old way of thinking.

* * *

I feel bad for Heater. I think they were just getting over their head, Dragon is a really tough assignment, but I think Heater was struggling with some memory problems. Dragonman lost his patience with Heater in a discussion with me - which to know Dragonman is one hell of a rare event. Heater 's got all kinds of family issues at home as well, and this will not make things easier at all.

The meeting didn't have a room set up - it was booked as a phone conference only. I meet with Dash and Red in one of our breakout rooms. Red was wondering what the meeting was about and I unthinkingly blurt out "Heater's gone." Red seems stunned by this - they are new enough to not know that Heater had performance issues.

"By choice?" they ask.

No.

We end up doing a mad scramble to find the room that everyone else has grabbed, Product Actual is in the office today, so it makes no sense for anyone to be remote except Sprint and Data. We pile into a small conference room and Product Actual makes it official.

"This organization has not met its commitments for last year, so there must be consequences."

What the...? This was not on my script at all. This sounded bad.

"As a result, there will be Force Reductions - which is a fancy way of saying layoffs. Heater is no longer a member of this team. They have been contacted and they will not be returning to the office."

So it is about Heater...but...

Product Actual presses on, "This should not be viewed as any reflection of Heater or the work they were doing. The organization cannot continue funding at the prior levels and unfortunately this group needed to lose a position."

Wait, I thought Heater's work was poor - that they were going to be axed because of it...

I've tried to be as direct as I can at NerdHaven. I ask "So, this was a budgetary decision and not performance based."

"Correct. Other departments will be asked to lose positions as well. The full scope of these decisions will not be made available to the larger group until tomorrow's all staff meeting."

Sh!t, sh!t, sh!t. Now I'm sweating who else is on the chopping block. There are so many great people here at NerdHaven. People I'd want to hang out with on weekends kinda people.

Dash asks a pertinent question about our team's having lost Noddy, Ahhh, our Director and now Heater: Is there something we should know about the future of UX here...? Gumby launches into some corporate babble about how UX "isn't going away" and my mind is flashing back to a conference room back in CorpWorld.

Me, Din, Ruby, Stimpy all sitting around a table after Black Wednesday. Smiler is looking me in the eye in a very unnerving way... "CorpWorld is not getting rid of your group."

Eight months after that meeting, we were all gone.

UX isn't going away...

Product Actual takes over from Gumby and clarifies that we will be working closer with the SMEs and Juice's group. That we will be more collaborative.

I like collaboration, but it does not speed things up when it takes the form of final sign off meetings and late requests for design changes. This will not make us faster.

Mostly, I'm thinking what on earth is going on. Our corporate masters have reached down and established that they can hurt us. This we knew.

Now we know they will hurt us. And that they want us to change how we do things and go faster.

As a result, we will add process - and we will go slower.

And then they will punish us again.

On the way out of the room, the hairs on the back of neck go up - and stay there.

Thursday, January 07, 2016

The Universe of Now

I'm just wrung out.

I'd intended to walk through the full (and truly epic) windout of the Ahhh saga - but I never seem to find the energy.

Summing up is only marginally less unjust than skipping over it, so here is the abbreviated version. On a week when Gumby was out on PTO, Ahhh announced to the team that they'd taken another job and would be moving from the west coast to the shadow of the Smokey Mountains.

As most of the team shared a negative view of Ahhh, there was the usual mutterings of 'best wishes' and what have you, but the relief in the room was palpable. Ahhh was constantly inserting themselves into the process of tracking work, but was doing painfully little actual work. And they had been - inexplicably - put in charge of a critical piece of functionality. They'd written up a story for the team whose centerpiece amounted to "Do these 3 impossible things, yadda yadda yadda" and then went out of the office.

When the devs encountered this, they came to me in lieu of Ahhh. I read Ahhh's story and was completely mystified. "Magic" was our former UXDir's favorite shaming weapon when critiquing one of our stories. Ahhh's story was full of Magic. Not that a UX needed to write down every aspect of how a story would work, but they had to have had the conversations to validate that what they wanted was feasible. Ahhh had done none of this, so the devs were clueless of what was needed or where to even get it.

As soon as this was clear to me, I told the devs to skip those portions of the story and finish what was known and defined. We could work on the impossible items once Ahhh was back to better define what they were. Stop the bleeding, regroup.

I knew this would make some waves, but there was absolutely no other alternative. Ahhh was out - I didn't know how they felt the impossible things could be accomplished, and Ahhh had neither told the devs verbally, nor wrote it down.

Naturally, I had underestimated Ahhh. I called them to advise them of the situation and spent (I am not kidding) an hour on the phone telling them what it's taken me a paragraph and a half to tell you. Ahhh wasn't getting it. They seemed to think there was enough detail at first, then when I asked them for what the devs were asking for, they suggested that what I was asking for wasn't their responsibility.

For an hour.

They then went to Gumby and Ihaq and told them the feature could not proceed because I had insisted on a different approach. I ended up clarifying this numerous times to the boss and to others that "hey, all I said was - 'we don't have enough info to know how to do this in the story. We'll do this when we have the right info.'"

I then called Ahhh directly and said basically 'let me have it,' and got treated to an incredulous Ahhh asking why I was messing with their story.

Ugh... I'm failing at this summing up thing. I think I ended up burying the hatchet with Ahhh at the end, but Ahhh's goodwill was still suspect. On their last week at NerdHaven, Gumby asked me if there were loose ends I was worried about with Ahhh's departure and I said we needed to make sure we got all of Ahhh's user research.

Up until the last week of their time with us, Ahhh had shared exactly one file with the UX team, a file that Gumby had made them co-author with Runner. Runner had taken a first crack at it and Ahhh had independently started some epic research piece. When Gumby told Ahhh that Runner's PowerPoint would be the final format for the report, Ahhh petulantly disposed of their own report and sent Runner two photos to include in the deck.

This was all we'd seen from them. Week after week, we were told that Ahhh was doing 'user research' and I'd spent weeks asking to be invited to observe their sessions or see their recordings. All I'd gotten was pushback or silence. With the end in sight, Ahhh finally posted three powerpoint files on our wiki detailing their user research efforts. The files were light, but not badly done. One of them drew heavily on the T-E-R-R-I-B-L-E user test sessions I'd forced my way into earlier. Reading the file it was hard to put faith in the conclusions. More importantly, each of these files touched on feature work that Ahhh's fellow UXers were working on - none of us had seen them until now. Likely we wouldn't have seen them had Gumby not made Ahhh give them up.

Ahhh was leaving with just a week's notice and was probably eager to get gone. I asked for them to transfer their recordings to me, since they were on the cloud and would be hard to recover once Ahhh's account was deactivated. I sent Ahhh detailed instructions how, but they called to insist I walk them through it. Frustrating, but we got the files.

Ahhh's next move just floored me, though.

We have a lot of sensitive information at NerdHaven. No state secrets or anything, but information that has legal ramifications if it makes it into the wild. We have posters all over the halls telling people to be careful about locking their screens, displaying this information only when absolutely necessary for a business purpose, and basically keeping it wayTheHellSecure.

Ahhh mentioned that they had some artifacts to transfer to our network drive and that some of their files contained sensitive information. We'd created a secure directory on our share drive for this kind of stuff, but it was new and Ahhh hadn't been given rights to it. Since they were leaving the company tomorrow, they weren't about to get rights, either. Ahhh had asked us what they should do with the files so they could be put in the secure directory.

I can't remember my exact suggestion, but it was something like 'Hey, ping me when you're ready and you can drop it in the directory next to the secure folder and I'll move it in as soon as you do.'
Ahhh's response was to email the entire department with the sensitive files as an attachment.

Can one of you put these files into the secure directory for me?

It actually took me re-reading their email to believe they'd done something so stupid. They'd actually asked us to put these sensitive files somewhere secure by sending them to us via unsecured email.

I went and asked everyone in the department to delete (and purge) the offending email and its attachment. I then told Ahhh what they'd done, and told them to do the same.

Reality Check time....

Then I went to our experts in secured information and asked them what to do. They gave me the company policy which read like I needed to go to DEFCON-1. It required an incident report be filed within 24 hours.

Double Reality Check time...

So I went to our in house manager of secure info to ask "Really? Do I really have to do this because of Ahhh's screw up?"

What do you think a manager in charge of security says? They say "Follow the policy. Now."

So I put it in Ahhh's lap. Hey, Ahhh - I know it's your last day, but you need to fill out this incident report on your data breach. Best wishes and Good Luck!

Honestly, I'd had it. Ahhh did something any of us could have done, but really, they were the ones who brought up the fact that the info was secure to begin with, so their just emailing it was incomprehensible. Odds were, no data was compromised - but policy was policy and I was not going to let their stupid become any more of my problem than it already was.

At the very end of the day - Ahhh sends me an incident report that read like a Nixon presser:

Mistakes were made.

I pass it on to corporate, since if Ahhh won't be available for comment in 10 minutes, and *poof* Ahhh vanishes in a puff of fail.

(Three phone calls with corporate later, they agree that the incident was not a breach, but they are glad we reported it to them, since they had questions about why we were storing files of this nature and perhaps would we be willing to discuss what other kinds of files we were keeping...?)

* * *

That was one small piece of the maelstrom going on in my head now. There were the holidays, loaded with goodness, sloth and gluttony. A week of sleeping in for damn change. Holiday VISA bills, a snowless Christmas and right about the time I'm feeling normal I'm flung into NerdHaven's new year.

There's no way to really sum up the other NerdHaven history, either. Arwafn's broken features had been in Beta for months, and one of our two problems appears to have been solved, but the other was maddeningly stubborn. It involves figuring out the specific location of a person at a given point of time. Our clients were either not sending us this data at all, or were sending it to us at the wrong time, so Arwafn was showing bad data.

The seemingly simple response would be to yell at our clients and say "send us the right data" but this was not an option. There were other ways to get at this data, and we had been commanded by management to develop them. Clients would not be asked to change what they send us. They could not, or would not - and we had no leverage, anyway. We would find this datapoint for them, by leveraging the data clients were sending us. I'll call this elusive mcguffin PofC.

And it's awful.

(It is also one of those 3 impossible things that Ahhh included in their fail-a-thon story so many months ago. That I've been working with people in three time zones for months to get an idea of how we could get part of PofC drives home how inadequate Ahhh's analysis of this element was. "Make Magic." Ugh.)

As it happens, the feature that Ahhh needed PofC for still has not been built, because all of Ahhh's stories were utter crap and imploded as soon as devs looked into them. Dash is now plowing through the feature like a demon and leaving awesome UI in their wake.

Gumby met with our support team about PofC and came up with theory about how we could do it. They passed it to Data and Thespian over on the west coast to do some data analysis on it and lo and behold, it showed some promise. Thespian is one of our database gurus and getting their time is like getting 1 on 1 time with a minor deity. Thespian is humble as hell, and a marvelous person to boot - but getting time on their calendar is intimidating... "Do I really need to bug them...? What if they think what I'm asking them is stupid?"

etc.

But Thespian gives us some good data, and HockeyOne suggests additional analysis that we can do to get a better picture of where we are at. More people get involved. It becomes what Data has always been asking for "a team of people from across the organization." Gumby calls us all together and asks us to present to our SMEs, but we aren't really sure what we have yet. So I pull a smaller group together to beat our data into conclusions we can put before our SMEs for real-zies.

It goes well, and we start hammering out the ever expanding list of details we are going to need to get what amounts to a very small portion of the PofC datapoint.

It will be enough to get the features we need done and Arwafn will finally be made whole.
Olympus demands it.

Oh, yeah - there was the high altitude drama. Which takes some explaining of its own.
Right before the holidays, we had all kinds of executive turmoil. Our CEO was driven out for unknown reasons (but under a cloud, something to do with not getting Project X ready for market in time), their replacement made the rounds in a bizarrely Orwellian meet-and-greet "What is your favorite thing to do, person who could fire us all in an instant?"

UX was pulled out of the tech wing of NerdHaven and attached to Product. (Which gave me the shivers, since CorpWorld's favorite activity was passing around the unwanted UXers until they cared enough to eliminate them). NerdHaven was being meshed together with a "sister company" in the central time zone, and with Devil's boss leaving, our new Product VP, Remote, became Gumby's new boss.

Remote is nice, but very corporate. Dev background, funny. REALLY hooked on PowerPoint. But I'll give them credit, I didn't hear a lot of bunk when it came to the state of the company. They wanted transparency and honestly both ways. I'm afraid of Remote, but I believe they are not up to anything nefarious. They want things to get better.

Then our GM quit. I liked them a lot, they were plain spoken and fiercely direct - but you believed every word they said. They believed in attracting good people, building a culture of hard work and quality and keeping it that way. I heard via Remote that the GM had serious health problems and were broken up about no longer being able to do the job they loved. Depressing.

Shortly after that, we got more corporate convulsions. Having spent the past six months integrating us with a "sister company" under the big tent of our corporate masters, we would now begin the process of un-integration. Portal explained it to me as "it was a bad call, and now they are realizing that and reversing themselves. It is a net good."

I believe Portal, but it meant that UX would potentially be reporting to yet a different Product exec. As it happened, we got a new Product Actual, who would report to Remote - and everything about Product Actual is encouraging. They have a plan - they are articulate at explaining that plan - and they are letting the air out of a lot of institutional stupid.

NerdHaven is the best UX gig I've ever had, but there is more than an air of WTF with some of the decisions about what we should build next. Above a certain level, everything is politics - and the political class at NerdHaven is unable to grasp that they are not market experts. Historically, we've used SMEs, but they are SMEs of our user workflow (sort of) but they are not market researchers. Product Actual wants competitive research and actual data to decide what we do next.

It's.... refreshing.

Back when Noddy was building his new form of failure, everyone knew it was a doomed feature, because the end of the workflow we were trying to support would not be available for over a year. We could not support that workflow, yet we built the feature anyway, because our SMEs said we had to. Lots of money was spent - a lot was learned that we could use elsewhere, mind you - but Noddy's form was a sack of useless crap.

Product Actual was saying no more of this foolishness - and God bless them for it. I wondered how they would do when the (amazingly headstrong) leader of the SMEs tried to grab the reigns.

The answer was swift in coming - With our ailing GM gone, one of our VPs was elevated to GM - Olympus.

As in, Not Atlas. Olympus.

Olympus is the person responsible for our company olympics and a host of other bonding activities, but they are absolutely not a person to trifle with. Olympus will cut you off at the knees and throw your former limbs overboard. Gumby is absolutely terrified of them.

The same message announcing the ascent of Olympus to GM also includes a postscript that the head of the SMEs is leaving the company. The remaining SMEs will be attached to Product. This is a significant reduction in their standing.

I enjoyed listening to the head of the SME's presentations, they were passionate about their work (they worked on Project X), but I've come to learn more than a few troubling things about their professional ethics. Combined with their grasping political methods and big idea nonsense, I'm convinced their departure is a good thing.

So Olympus is holding the reins now. UX works for Product Actual, who seems awesome and sensible. Gumby is a peer of Product Actual, something they had to clarify, since I'd mistakenly thought Gumby was reporting to Product Actual.

Awkward.

But the truth is, Gumby has been losing political ground of late, and you can tell they are working hard to make that up with effort. I barely see them now outside of department meetings, and truth be told, I've really started to hate those meetings.

Used to be, the UX staff would get together and share what we were working on and set up collaborations that needed to happen. "Hey, you're working on a widget like that? I just made one, we should talk." A lot of camaraderie happened there as well. Good culture, as the former GM would say.

Gumby squashed that. UX meetings are now an agenda sent by Sprint to the team and Gumby reading through it, belaboring each point like they are trying to fill time. Gumby is good people, but they always use several sentences when one would do. It hurts their credibility and I don't know that there is a good way to help them with that. To mention it would be insubordinate, but I wish there was a way to help them. UXDir used to have a hand signal that meant "adequate answer, now stop talking." I wish there were a way to cue the boss when they were making half the room's eyes roll.

A Gumby staff meeting is something to be endured. Administrative procedures, corporate happy talk and.... questions? Moving on.

I haven't spoken to Sprint outside of a meeting in probably two months. It's nuts.

So much has changed. Used to be Runner and I were happily working away on BigDog's team.

I'm off BigDog's team - BigDog is now a manager, so even they are splitting time with their team and other teams.

Runner is hip deep in work with the Dragon team. Dragon is a backend dev team that fears UI work. Runner is big UI, so it's been a struggle. Runner had a huge project and appears to have landed it to the satisfaction of Juice (who is high in Olympus's favor, and now a VP). Runner threaded a series of needles and has every right to be proud.

Red is the newest member of the UX group and they are enthusiastic and very capable. They are on the contract bubble and we're all hoping they get converted to FTE. I wonder what they think of the latest batch of crazy - back when we interviewed them, things were so very different. They seem to fling themselves into the work and do well. They are getting some of Dash's work in the near.

Dash landed a big wedge of new UI that ran up against a brutal timeline spawning a series of bugs in production that made everyone unhappy. I believe this was the result of asking too much by a set date (beginning the death spiral of development) and BigDog's team doing their level best to get everything over the finish line in time. They made it, but will all kinds of asterisks.

Olympus doesn't like asterisks, and there will be lots of recriminations on this one. Dash should be proud, though - their feature is good. Far better than the rest of our other similar features, and it can be a springboard to more success in future.

Heater... I don't know what to think anymore. Noddy was the worst I've ever worked with. After they left, Ahhh was my go-to frustration. With Ahhh gone, the title falls to Heater.

I want to like Heater. They are sympathetic. They are nice, they joke around. I get the impression they want to do good work. They just....don't. Heater is assigned to Dragon, and Dragon is chock full of competent devs and QAs who know their stuff. I used to think Heater would write up stories, get them approved and present them at showcase - same as the rest of UX. With Runner moving to Dragon, I got to hear what was really happening.

Heater starts writing a story... and Dragonman or one of the other Devs or QAs will finish it. At showcase, one of the Devs or QAs will present it. Heater doesn't call clients, doesn't do research, doesn't do....squat.

And I like them, they are likable. But Runner would come to me almost daily, to tell me of yet another incredible thing that Heater did or didn't do. Heater has an amazing ability to forget things - to the point where I honestly fear they have a mild form of dementia. Things that have been ironed out by their team and written down in front of Heater will later be amended by Heater as if nothing had happened. Runner would repeatedly find a finished story of theirs had been rendered unrecognizable by Heater.

Heater is just behind the pace. That they've been on a team as clockwork as Dragon is probably the sole reason that Heater has been able to cope this long. It's also likely the reason Dragon habitually treats UXers with such contempt. Likable as they may be, Heater is hampering the speed of their team. And the rest of UX is busting their butts while getting blamed for all manner of problems to boot.

Gumby has been feeling the pressure. They have ceded huge political turf in efforts to please Olympus and Juice. Gumby doesn't seem to realize that their favor is fleeting. And you can only give away turf once.

But PofC is turning a corner, BigDog's team is putting an end to the bugs in the last release - things are starting to mend. I can feel it. Right before the holidays, Data let me know they were flying in from the west coast - which is great.

Data and I had a rough start - I was way too slow in appreciating the wider world they live in - but we've finally arrived at a place where we can trust that the other is going to do their level best to help the project. I'm excited to meet them in person.

They are exactly as I expected - a real hoot. We plunge right into PofC work and then Data disappears into an all day meeting that would have me tearing my eyes out. Data's stock is up lately, other people are finally appreciating Data's wider world as well. The future of NerdHaven will rely on things that Data has been telling us about for quite awhile now. It sounds like we will actually start to build the things we need for the future of the company.

Today was UX staff meeting - Data will actually be attending in person. Data has been attached to UX for awhile now, but they report to Portal (they asked to be moved right before Gumby started), so it's a rare thing to have Data in the room with the rest of UX. Sprint is calling in from the west coast, they are sick as a dog and I'm surprised they don't just skip it.

Product Actual is also in town, which is a bit odd. They live five hours to the west, and are usually only in for three days out of the month. These days - they've been here three days out of every week. We start up and I'm briefly embarrassed for Data to have to sit in on how awful our meetings are in person. Data does our meetings over the video phone, but somehow listening to Gumby rattle through the agenda in person seems like more than Data should have to bear.

But today, Gumby is direct and abrupt. They are taking a new position in NerdHaven, they will be doing work in Product - doing work like Devil - and they will report to Product Actual. Their portfolio will include Arwafn and Project X.

There's more - UX will no longer report to Gumby, we will all report directly to Product Actual. Product Actual laughs and tells us that they are the worst administrator around (my mind immediately flew back to UXDir's lax ways) and I laugh back "bring it!"

But mostly, we are all shocked. There was no hint of this. I ask if there is still a UX Director, and the answer is no. Gumby is leaving us, and now we are all direct reports to Product Actual.

Oh, and a big wedge of future UX work is going to be done by an external design firm.
And the head of Sales just resigned. And...

This is not CorpWorld - this is NerdHaven - but there is still that sinking feeling.

First the boss leaves, then you get re-assigned, then they start killing off the department.

Last one out...

No. It won't be like that. I have to think that this will be different. Product Actual is smart, practical. They like us. We are respected - most of us anyway. It won't be like that.

It can't be like that.

Monday, November 02, 2015

Action Needed

It's the end of July. We've just finished up showcase, where one of my stories got demo-ed - the first for BigDog's team in quite a while.

I'm sitting next to Devil, who is proxy for Product Actual. Devil is awesome. Today, everything went more or less to plan, so what happens next is mostly formality - but the forms must be obeyed.

Was everything accepted?

Agile requires that our team demonstrate what we've done to Product, and they get final sign off on whether or not it is done to their satisfaction. Devil nods, and I look in the queue and click the 'accept' button three times:

One.
Two.
Three.

And immediately forget about it. There's an iteration planning meeting coming up. I need to be ready. I think some of my stuff might get picked up.

I'm focused on that as I walk out, unaware of how three clicks will turn into a sh!t show.

* * *

From: Ahhh

To: murph

Cc: Nugget

Subject: thanks, but please don't move the tickets to accepted

Hello! There’s work I need to do on the tickets and having them in the showcase queue, checking them, and then moving them is my process. I don’t think there’s any immediate hurry outside of the showcase day. If you’re being asked to move them please let me know so I can address it with whoever is asking you. Thanks

Brief aside, here: Ahhh refers to stories as 'tickets' and refuses to call them anything else. Whatever. Ahhh has cc'ed Nugget, who is our Scrum Master, for reasons that are clear to pretty much no one.

From: murph

To: Ahhh

Cc: Nugget