Chapter 23: Passing Through Riga on the Way Home

Mr. T. was dreaming. This was to be his last night in Morovia. The party that evening at the Residence had gone on forever, with a huge, celebratory crowd present. Everyone was there. Frankly, he’d had too much to eat and far too much to drink. That was probably the reason for this dream, in which he saw a swirl of smoke with a light inside and something else there, too.

The journal that had been his companion for the whole adventure was open on h s desk before him. It was turned to page 102, the first blank page. He would have liked to make a final entry, but there was really nothing he could think of that would sum up his Morovian experience.
He turned back one page to see what he’d written in what he now knew would be the last entry.

There was one more thing that wasn’t resolved, and apparently it wasn’t going to be. He hadn’t seen Lahksa since the party last night. She hadn’t turned up at the airport with all the others to see him off and when he had called her, there had been no answer.

He settled dejectedly into his seat in the corporate jet. Seafood was already asleep on the seat beside him, knocked out by his pill. Mr. T. was just strapping himself in when the steward came back to check. Mr. T falls to sleep in the jet and then a voice wake-up him «Mr. Tompkins. Wake up, sir. We’re in Riga.»

Mr. T. looked around. The airport seemed to be in the middle of a wide, pleasant meadow. There were palm trees beside the runway. The driver grunted. He opened the door, and Mr.Tomp- kins got in. Within ten minutes, they were on the outskirts of a pleasant city, mostly in sand colors and pastels. It did not look at all like the kind of northern place he would have expected Riga to be. The cab pulled up to a vast rococo palace.

Two footmen in elaborate dress escorted him through the palace. He followed them up a vast circular stairway that formed an entry into a part of the palace that, judged by a glance into its interior, was even more palatial than what he had passed through already.

Chapter 22: The year’s hottest IPO

The count down starts on May 24th the QuickerStill B-Team delivered its product, on May 29th the QuickerStill-C delivered and on May 30th the PMill-C delivered. Mr. T was happy because they actually pulled off three deliveries, all before Belok’s dates. Belok had actually committed to the distribution chain for all six products to begin shipping starting tomorrow. June first wasn’t even a sensible stretch goal for any of the larger projects.

A good goal is right on the edge of possible. So, it makes a lousy scheduling date. A good schedule is likely to be met, so it doesn’t make much of a goal. On June 1st, word came that NNL was finally back. Mr. Tompkins was summoned with some urgency to see him. The assistant who had made the appointment seemed almost breathless with excitement. Head Office people tended to get excited when heads were rolling or work was about to be canceled. He took the morning train to Korsach with some trepidation.

As it was during Webster’s first visit those many months ago, NNL’s office was again unlit but for the glow of his mon- itor. Again, it took a moment to locate the man, lost in the huge room. The IPO is scheduled for next week. This is a major coup. The underwriterssay it’s going to be the hottest IPO of the year.

The NNL clamed himself and start to talk with Mr. T. the underwriters inform the NNL that they have to terminate his contract before the offering. That means he gets paid off but has no further obligation to them as of the offering date. For legal reasons, apparently. New management will be after he signs on for another contract.

As soon as Mr. T. was back in his Aidrivoli office, there was a telephone call from NNL. The NNL ask for the Minister of Internal Affairs, he hasn´t seen him since he gets back. Mr. T answers that he is on extended sick leave, actually. He’s been gone for about four months.

Mr. T. was just settling down to think of something to write in his journal when the phone rang again. Mrs. Beerzig had left, so he picked it up himself. The voice on the other end was one that he might have thought he’d never hear again. «Tompkins. Look alive there. This is Minister Belok.».

The phone connection was crystal clear. Did that mean that Belok was calling from close by? Could he be back in his office in Korsach and about to consolidate his crumbling position? Mr. T was asking his self about this.

Lean And Mean is a formula developed in failing companies by the people responsible for the failure.

Chapter 20: Standing on Ceremony

Mr. T piled with his new consultant into the back of the Institute’s ancient Buick and told the driver to head toward the old town of Varsjop, where there were some nice little coffee shops. He looked across the car at Mr. T but I have a hunch you’re going to tell me you don’t really have any problems. Oh, just some little minor annoyances maybe, but nothing significant.

Mr.Tompkins introduced Dr.Winnipeg to Melissa Alber, who led him away to take part in the weekly PMi11-A staff meeting. It was not until just before noon that his new consultant showed up again. Dr. Winnipeg looked at him sharply. It was as if he were puzzled that Mr. Tompkins hadn’t seen anything obvious. «Why don’t you bag the project Webster? PMill-B and -C seem to be in pretty good shape. The A project has just been through too much. Progress has come to a grinding halt; nobody has any idea of what to do next the design is a botch the implementation effort is, as you’d expect, totally misdirected.

As soon as the staff meeting was adjourned, Dr. Winnipeg and Osmun had repaired to his office. After a very shoa conversation, they came out, both looking pleased. They explained to the staff that Osmun was being transferred to a new responsibility. Then, Osmun went back into his office to pack. Dr. Winnipeg spent the rest of the morning wandering around the Aidrivoli complex.

One thing that he found was on the Air Traffic Control project. He happened upon a working meeting mid morning and sat in for an hour and a half, not saying much of anything. The meeting was in the largest conference room in Aidrivoli-3. The tables had been arranged in a huge oval with Gulliver Menendez, the project leader, sitting at the head. Mr. Tompkins caught his eye and nodded to him before sitting with Dr.Winnipeg quietly in the back. The first thing he did was to count the people present. There were thirty-one, not including themselves.

Dr. Winnipeg raised Gulliver Menendez to his feet and positioned him at the front of the room. And start saying «The ceremony has five parts. One, you declare, Gulliver, the value of releasing even one person from the meeting and your intention to do so. Two, the group gives you its consent. Three, you select and release at least one person based on the critical nature of work that he or she could do if released. Four, that person makes a parting statement to the group about what he or she would like to see happen at the meeting. Five, the group signals approval as the person leaves.

Keep meetings small by making it safe for unessential people not to attend. A published agenda, rigorously followed, is the easiest way to make nonattendance safe. Take steps to protect people from abusive anger. Remember: Anger = Fear. Managers who inflict abusive, angry behavior on their subordinates are almost always doing it because they’re afraid.

Chapter 21: Endgame Begins

The six A-Team projects are all zombies, Mr. T told them. They are long dead, only propped up to look alive for political reasons. With the unfortunate departure of their beloved Minister Belok. They need to present it so no face is lost. The A-Team projects are zombies, but the people on them aren’t. They have feelings.

They all know, they’ve known from the beginning, that only one product will go out the door. Two of the teams will not produce the winning version. PMill-A, for example, has known for a while now that they were not going to be the winner. Mr. T has a hunch the other A-Teams are similarly aware. They need to present this as a rescue of valuable resources. they are moving them out of a dead-end effort and back onto the critical path.

Gabriel say that moving the A-Team people directly onto the B- and C-Teams. If they do that, half of them will be set up for a second defeat. He proposes instead is that they set up staff groups under each product manager, and use the A-Team personnel to populate these groups.

With Belok out of the picture, no one could fault Mr. T for returning to the original schedule. He had done that promptly. There was a huge sense of relief around the complex. The new date was one that gave a good chance to all the B and C projects, even the largest of them The smaller ones, the Quickerstill projects, for example, were likely to finish well ahead of the new target.

Once the groups had been successfully restructured, there was precious little for Mr. T to do. He wandered about most days, chatting with people, picking up scuttlebutt, expressing admiration for all the good work, and, most of all looking for opportunities to lend a hand. The projects were proceeding smoothly, and he was beginning to feel extraneous. This is the way the ends of projects are supposed to be, but almost never are. Sometimes, your only option is to bide your time, waiting for the problem to resolve itself, or for a good opportunity for you to move on.

Chapter 19: Part and Whole

Aristotle Kenoros was a morning person. If he was going to make an appearance, it was most often the first business of the day. This morning, Mr. T arrived at his office to be told by Mrs. Beerzig that Morovia’s First Programmer was waiting for him inside. Mr. T. found him sitting on the desk, staring up at a matrix of letters he had drawn on the whiteboard.

For the purposes of this grade, I did not consider so much the quality of their designs as whether they had produced a design at all. If you have a low-level modular design that serves the function of a blue print that is, it establishes what all the coded modules will be and what interfaces there will be among them then Kenoros gives you an A.

All the small teams got A’s and B’s. The big teams got all the F’s. and the Oracle’s concept of Last Minute Implementation is going to be impossible without a good design. In fact, they are not going to be doing Last Minute Implementation. The six A Teams started coding long ago. I had no success persuading them to defer implementation. all the B and C Teams are trying out the Oracle’s approach. They are all trying to push back implementation, and to do as much verification work as pos- sible before a single line of code is written. Some of them are trying rigorously to defer coding until the last sixth of the project.

Kenoros has a teory that the teams were too big. During the whole time that design should have been going on, they had too many people to involve in that activity. Design is a job for a small group. they can put three or four or maybe five people around a white board and they can do design together. Mr. T didn´t understand what was happening and say «You can put three or four or five to work on design and put the rest to work on something else.»

The design step is the critical act of dividing the whole into pieces. Once you’ve done that, then you have good opportunity to allocate these pieces to people to work on sep- arately. But before you’ve done it, you don’t have pieces. What you’ve got is a whole.

Design Process in Software Engineering is a very important step that precedes building or implementing the product. For example, consider constructing a building. It is unimaginable that builders go straight to the field and start the construction before detailed designs are established by engineers. In fact, constructing a building without designing it beforehand would be dangerous and the building may have serious issues that could put people’s lives in danger.

Mr. T was still not convinced. «If it’s true, what you say, then most projects are effectively overstaffed during the period when design should be done. So, most projects wouldn’t get any real design done.»

Mr. T rehashed the notion that early overstaffing effectively precludes sensible design. To the extent that Kenoros was right about this, the ramifications went far beyond Aidrivoli. They suggested that the entire software industry might be sub optimized in this way, addicted to early staff buildup and thus making a sham of the key internal design activity.

When work is divided over a large staff prior t o completion of design, the interfaces among people and among work groups are not minimized. This leads to increased interdependence, meeting time, rework, and prustration.

Chapter 16: PLANNING FOR THE SUMMER GAMES

Mr. T. arrives at the office, I found a huge pile of documentation in black, loose-leaf notebooks waiting for him. On the huge pile of documents was an accompanying note on the engraved stationery of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, that says: «I had Hoolihan steal this from the States. With a head start like this, there will be no excuse for missing the summer year 2000 deadline.». Also was Kenoros that was waiting for him. He had one of the black notebooks open on his lap. He look to the notwbook and see specifications from the FAA NASPlan contracts. He think that all of those projects ended up in litigation. Then he think that if Belok really wanted to help us, he might have stolen the specs from the French system, or even the Spanish system.

Mr. T. began scooping them up and loadmg them into Aristotle’s outstretched arms, and then into his own until there was only one notebook left. Kenoros voice came out muffled fiom behind the pile of black notebooks. «We take on too much,» the voice said, «because we are terrified of too little.» Osmun Gradish was still pleasant-seeming and still soft spoken. Mr. T. invited himself to sit in on the weekly staff meeting for the PMill-A project. Also present was the PMill product manager, Melissa Alber, Gradish’s boss.

Mr. T. shook his head and say «Our response to having the A-Teams overstaffed and overpressured was to set up B- and C-Teams. Now, when I’m feeling down at all, I just stop by Notate-C or PShop-C or Quickerstill-B or almost any of the others.». webster say that the All projects are sacrificial pawns. But we shouldn’t think of them that way. We should think of them as training opportunities. Even if the work is frustrating and the deadlines hopeless, the team is learning to work together.

Belinda had been working for the past few days with the Air Traffic Control project group. Now she had them all focused on one of the recently pinched FAA specifications, the one covering the Radio Governance System. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is a governmental body of the United States with powers to regulate all aspects of civil aviation in that nation as well as over its surrounding international waters. Its powers include the construction and operation of airports, air traffic management, the certification of personnel and aircraft, and the protection of U.S. assets during the launch or re-entry of commercial space vehicles. Belinda conclude that in fact, it doesn´t specify a system at all and contains only vague descriptions that could be applied to various possibilities.

Belinda found some rules to follow the firts one is the spec needs to have a count of inputs and outputs. They can be named, sized, and counted. an the second one is if the specifications are ambiguous and the transformation policies are not clear, this will create a conflict.

Chapter 15: Think Fast

Kenoros’s letter had bought him a few weeks of respite, but then at the end of August, Mr. T. was summoned again. Mr. T. wandered past the office suite occupied by NNL, hoping that Himself might be back in town. He figured he had a few markers to call in with NNL, maybe enough to have Belok refocused onto some other poor soul somewhere. The NNL will return on June 1. Belok’s receptionist led Mr. T. back though several ornate rooms to the minister’s secretary.

Mr. Belok was waiting for Mr. T. to tell him that everything he was doing was costing a lot, since every year he spent $ 31.5 million and Belok did not see anything clear, because everything seemed that the products were not going to come out in the specified time and that Belok did not like. Belok says this to Mr. T. «It would be a bad day for you if you had to stay here and tell me that you weren’t going to make the first June delivery for all six products.».

Mr. T. began to tell them the times of the products, apparently everyone could finish on date and form, but PShop was the only one that was not going to be on time that had a remnant of Six hundred measly hours of overtime scheduled project. That works out to barely ten hours of overtime per person on that project for a whole month.

The Olympic Games are leading international sporting events featuring summer and winter sports competitions in which thousands of athletes from around the world participate in a variety of competitions. NNL stopped in at Olympic headquarters in between his other projects and made the deal. He can be quite persuasive, what with all the resources he can bring to bear. We’ll be hosting the Olympics for the year 2000, because his personal year is the 2000.

If they want to win the venue for the Olympic Games, they have to make improvements in their cities and, most importantly, improve air traffic and the airport. They would also have to rehabilitate, build stadiums or facilities for the different disciplines apart from which they would have to see where they would house so many athletes, it is a very large investment that they have to make in order to win as a venue for the Olympic Games.

Belok has a model which had to follow the most so that the projects could come out in time. Belinda creates a model that says that increasing P initially gives you a pretty big hit of productivity. People in the business like pressure and they respond to it, at least to a bit of it. They knuckle down and really tear into the work. The model says that moderate amounts of pressure might give you a twenty five percent improvement in productivity and even a twentyfive percent decrease in total time to deliver. But that’s only true if you apply the pressure moderately.

They contacted oracle to ask how their workers worked under pressure and if we think about it, no one is good at working under pressure and clearly oracle answers that «PEOPLE UNDER PRESSURE DON’T THINK FASTER.» Working under pressure more than something that is presented is a skill of the person, if he manages all the emotions or sensations that occur when he is under pressure he can do it without problems but if he does not know it is very difficult for him to endure that rhythm of job.

Chapter 13: Quicker Still

From the beginning, NNL had decreed that the Quicken look-alike product would be called Quickerstill. The name caught on with the teams. the result was that the performance requirement for the product had to be bumped up in order in order to justify the name of the product. There are only 345 days left until the products were finished, from now on there was only a little of the year left until June 1, which is the day of the delivery of projects. In developing the six products, Mr. T. knew, they’d be lucky to achieve anything more than three function points per person-month. The problem was that PShop would take at least three years to put out the door. There was no chance for a project of this magnitude to be completed in the established time.

These projects must be put under the gun to demonstrate improved process. They’re currently rated at Capability Maturity Model Level 2. And Minister Belok wants them at Level 3 before the end of the year.

The Capability Maturity Model is is a development model created in 1986 after a study of data collected from organizations that contracted with the U.S. Department of Defense, who funded the research. The term «maturity» relates to the degree of formality and optimization of processes. The model has 4 levels:

1. Initial – the starting point for use of a new or undocumented repeat process.
2. Repeatable – the process is at least documented sufficiently such that repeating the same steps may be attempted.
3. Defined – the process is defined/confirmed as a standard business process
4. Capable – the process is quantitatively managed in accordance with agreed-upon metrics.
5. Efficient – process management includes deliberate process optimization/improvement.

Process improvement results in productivity improvement. We know that from the researches. Bumping up a single CMM level should push your productivity up by twenty-four percent. The Audit Group manager and a few of his lieutenants were assembled in Mr.Tompkins’ office. The Audit Group manager made his report, that says «Look, here’s what we found, Mr. Tompkins. Not too bad really, but there was one rather upsetting deviation from process; that’s Mr. Grosz here and his group.» The last year the MSEI certified the group as CMM level 2. Level 2 it’s called Repeatable, meaning that whether your approach is good or bad, ideal or imperfect, at least you’re doing it the same way each time.

Every MSEI-certified CMM Level 2 project has to build the requirements document using the same methods and notations it was certified as using. That’s what it means to have a Repeatable process.

Chapter 14: Morovia´s first programmer

Mr, T. wants to complete the times that Minister Belok says, but one of the problems is that Director Menotti is focusing on long-term improvements of skills and aptitudes, while Mr. T. focuses on the success of the projects. Mr, T. want to invest in training and process improvement on projects with no deadlines, as it will cause many delays and be even more unlikely to be completed. But Director Menotti says that «Webster, the deadline that these projects are toiling under is impossible anyway. Everybody in Aidrivoli knows that every manager and every programmer and every secretary. The projects are going to come in very late because the schedule is very wrong.» The problems was that the little time the people dedicate to making real improvements to Mr, T. methods can make projects twenty months later than eighteen.

Mr, T needed to protect the other projects as well, all of them, most particularly the secret ones in Aidrivoli-7. He knew most of them weren’t going to be able to finish on Belok’s schedule, but he still had all of his pride on the line to meet his original November date.

Dr. Menotti instructed him to go upstairs alone. There was no need for anyone to call in advance, he said. In fact, Kenoros had no phone. Mr-Tompkins went upstairs. Mr. T. discovered that the fourth floor was a huge dark room, an office without lights. There was a soft hum in the room, the sound of a humidifier, he thought, but other than that nothing, just silence. He sees a lock of white hair, a little movement.

Mr, T. took a breath and began to explain the following: «Write a letter to Minister Belok saying that you are personally taking on the process improvement of the people in Aidrivoli-1 and -7. Say that they are already at Level3 and will soon be at -4. All you need is to be left alone to do this work your own way «. Kenoros says that «I can program, debug, design, review, analyze, specifi, plan, estimate, and document. I have been doing these things since 1954. I am very, very good at what I do. I am so good that they made me president of this Institute. But I am bored to tears up here. So, give me work. «. So Mr, T said to him make the letter and I will give you the job.

Later Kenoros proposed to teach the eighteen teams was a technique he called Last Minute Implementation,and it scared the hell out of Tompkins. The scheme involved deferring coding as long as possible, spending the middle forty percent or more of the project doing an elaborate, exaggeratedly detailed low-level design, one that would have perfect one-to- one mappings to the eventual code.

They’d had the assis- tance of the six product managers and the twelve newly redundant B- and C-Team managers. They’d divided them- selves up into groups of three and blitzed through ex-General Markov’s staff, looking for the best people. Now all the good developers had been combined into the six A-Teams, great idea. The official org chart showed him sitting directly on top of the six A-Team managers. This was something of a fiction, generated to keep Minister Belok off their backs.

Mr. T and the A-Teams were housed in the prestigious and very visible Aidrivoli-1 building. The six product man- agers and the B- and C-Teams were all hidden away in space that the ex-General had found for them in Aidrivoli-7.

Mr. T received a fax from a Cam bridge company instructing him to meet T. Johns Caporous at the Varsjop airport the next morning. When T. Johns arrives, He spoke about twice as fast as anyone Mr. T had ever met before. His words came like bullets out of a machine gun. Mr. T come to guide with some of the data they had, asked how much equipment they had and was surprised to hear the amounts of computers, people, etc. that they had at their disposal. He helped them create the numbers they needed.

Data is valuable, and this system of metrics could give them a lot of it. Belinda saw its potential and was eager to retrieve information from previous projects. In order to get it, though, a lot of research was needed. They need to find as much information as possible about past projects and their new projects in order to model their information. if not, the information that T. Johns is giving you would be of use.

After T. Johns left they saw they could look at each project in exactly the same way. At the coarsest level, the project is just a valve. They model it in terms of the teams and the partitionings and the effects of pressure and deadline and staff level and critical-path delays. For the rest of the afternoon, they closeted themselves in Mr. T. office, reconstructing the sizing algorithms that Caporous had shown them.