Okay class, take out your #2 pencils, and read the following PostMortem while I read allowed (sic):
http://www.thinksecret.com/news/powerschoolanalysis.html
(403 - archive.org cache here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070326143827/http://www.thinksecret.com/news/powerschoolanalysis.html )
Now every body write down every ProcessSmell that article described. You have 20 minutes.
Quoted from the XpMailingList. The names have been changed to protect the guilty:
- Tons of already existing processes which you have to work within.
- As Steve Berczuk said, I may try to fake the existing processes to an extent here, but have no way of avoiding them. So, yes, they still want the 100 page documents that typically go with such systems.
- Lots of legacy systems with which you have to interface and which take time to modify.
- You can't really do quick changes to such systems. You can only do changes once and then you test them and you are done.
- Cubes, cubes, and more cubes with no way of re-arranging furniture.
- Creating the right kind of environment is a big problem. As is, office space is scarce. Even if we get a C2 like environment (or war room) it would be difficult to argue to still have our private cubes at the same time.
- OnsiteCustomers? [not users] that are all over the place spanning timezones.
- PST, CST, EST... and definitely not on-site. We typically *listen* to our customers on audio conferences or use collaboration tools like Webex.
- Development or even testing which is outsourced offshore (10 hr difference in timezone).
- Some of our testing is done in Asia..
- Managers who live, breathe and bathe in the WaterFall
- Most of the members on the project team are unlike this, but everybody else (including systems that you have to interface with, and the customers) are so full of the waterfall process, it isn't even funny.
See
ImTooBusyTodayIsaSmell