All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: App Dev Methodologies|Last Updated:

When my children were young, I offered them two alternatives. They could either make the same mistakes I made growing up, or they could learn from my mistakes and make a bunch of new ones instead. I’ll let you guess. Heck, I can only guess myself.

But I don’t have to guess about DevOps, where some practitioners are making mistakes IT learned to avoid decades ago.

In particular, we learned IT shouldn’t release application changes into the wild without: (1) conducting comprehensive regression tests if the application change in any way alters system integrations; and (2) providing at least delta communication, and in many cases delta training, if the user interface changes.

Wait! Why am I wasting your time with 30+ year old wisdom?

I know it looks like I’m changing my name to Captain Obvious. But while I know you know better than to engage in these IT worst practices, that doesn’t mean your technology vendors do too.

If you’ve read anything about DevOps, you know CICD is a key element. But many vendors, having invested significant money and effort into adopting DevOps as How We Do Things Around Here, only got three of the four letters right: Continuous, Integration, and Continuous.

But they read somewhere that the “D” stands for Deployment, and, with the enthusiasm of the converted, gave the matter no further thought.

As a regular KJR reader you know the difference between a release and a releasable build, and with that the difference between Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment … appropriate for eCommerce applications where what changes is the customer’s shopping experience … and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, the model that works for applications whose purpose is to support internal processes and practices.

Just in case: The difference between delivery and deployment is simple: Delivery installs to the staging environment; deployment installs to production.

It’s past time to make sure your vendors deliver to staging and don’t make you vulnerable to vendor-DevOps-driven unmanaged deployments.

Start with your contracts. Do they prohibit your vendors from deploying changes to the UI and application interfaces without your permission? If not, start negotiating the requisite contract changes.

SaaS providers are particularly notorious for unmanaged deployments, because you can’t block changes they install on their servers with your defenses. But increasingly, providers of customer-installed COTS are adopting DevOps practices too.

This doesn’t make it okay to go back to … or, in many cases, to persist in … the outdated practice of staying on stable versions as long as possible. Staying current or nearly current is no longer one choice among many. In an age of state-sponsored and organized-crime-sponsored assaults on your information systems, staying current or nearly current is now the choice, not a choice.

So let your vendors off the hook, and accept a deadline for implementing new releases. Your vendors should give you ample time to test. You should let them retire ancient versions.

This doesn’t just apply to the IT vendors you have, either. Every time you go through a solution selection, make sure you include your requirement that the vendor doesn’t push changes into your production environment without your knowledge and consent.

Second: It’s time to automate regression testing. Yes, setting it up is painful and expensive. For that matter, maintaining the automated test plan is no picnic either.

The alternative, though? There’s an old, old rule in IT, which is that you always test. Professionals test before putting software in production. Amateurs test by putting it into production.

And we’re well past the time when just grabbing a bunch of end-users and having them bang on their keyboards for an hour or two will give IT a passing grade.

Third: Make #2 less expensive by cleaning up your interface tangle once and for all. While reliable industry statistics are hard to come by (strike that — they’re impossible to come by), anecdotal and conversational evidence suggests that the ongoing cost of maintaining an ad hoc collection of point-to-point interfaces can, over time, overwhelm IT’s ability to implement new applications and application changes.

To put a bow on it: How could DevOps proponents make such an elementary mistake as conflating delivery and deployment? It’s sadly easy to understand. As a member in good standing of the KJR community, you understand there’s no such thing as an IT project.

But we’re still in the minority. The IT pundit class thinks moving from projects to products is an exciting transformation.

If the job is done when the software runs, CI/CDeployment is fine and dandy.

If it isn’t … choose the wrong goal and wrong practices are inevitable.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Up here in the Northland we practice “Minnesota Nice.”

On a good day it means choosing our words so as to avoid making disagreements personal. A quintessential example, from How to Talk Minnesotan: A Visitor’s Guide, (Howard Mohr, Penguin Books,1987), is “Ya know, a lotta guys wouldn’t be comfortable welding a full gas tank.”

On a not so good day Minnesota Nice means passive aggression and pretending to agree while face to face, only to explain to everyone else that they just didn’t make anyone feel bad.

What it never means is how Amy Klobuchar reportedly treats her staff when no one else is looking.

No, I’m not going to take a position on Klobuchar’s candidacy. That would be out of scope for Keep the Joint Running.

But headline news can be useful for spotlighting subjects that are in KJR’s scope. And so …

Imagine HR informs you of similar complaints about a manager who reports to you. How should you evaluate the situation?

The Management Compass, discussed in depth in Leading IT: <Still> the toughest job in the world, by Yours Truly, 2011), might be a useful place to start.

The compass divides Management Relationship Management into four quadrants: North, where a manager’s manager lives; east, where relationships with colleagues and peers take center stage; west, where managers interact with those their organization serves; and south, where managers work with those who report to them. One at a time:

North: For your manager, that means you. For Klobuchar it means Minnesota’s voters, as they’re the ones who decide, once every six years, whether she keeps her job. Klobuchar beat her Republican opponent 60.3% to 36.2% in the last election — an excellent score for North.

East: Getting others to follow when you don’t have authority over them is essential to success. That’s what managing east is all about — influencing and persuading colleagues and peers. Klobuchar gets universally high marks here, as evidenced by a Politico story headlined “Republican gush over Klobuchar,” Burgess Everett and Marianne Levine, 2/11/2019).

Klobuchar excels at East.

West: There’s a difference between constituents and voters: Minnesotans who voted against Klobuchar are still her constituents.

Based on admittedly thin evidence, I’ve heard and read that Klobuchar’s office does very good work helping constituents. As the boss you don’t have to rely on thin evidence. You can find out everything you need to know about your manager’s westward-facing performance through the simple expedient of asking people.

South: Based on the reports we’ve all been reading, which appear to be quite credible, Klobuchar’s southerly performance is atrocious. The same is true for your hypothetical manager.

To say there’s no excuse for throwing things at staff members or trying to ruin their careers is, while accurate, superficial.

Based on my limited experience, both on the receiving end of several bully bosses and, I regret to admit, a short stint as an excessively excitable manager myself early in my managerial career, here’s a guess as to what’s going on: Klobuchar depends too much on self-control and not enough on maintaining perspective.

It isn’t that self-control is a bad thing. Quite the opposite, leaders and managers who can’t control themselves have little hope of controlling a large organization.

The problem is, self-control has its limits. It shouldn’t be a manager’s first line of defense against losing her temper. Better to not need it most of the time because she keeps her frustrations in perspective.

It’s better because the more situations and frustrations don’t require your self-control, the more of it you’ll have left when you do need it.

So … you have a Klobuchar-like manager reporting to you. She’s talented, driven, smart, effective, and a nightmare to report to. What do you do?

One alternative is zero tolerance, but it probably isn’t the right choice. Your manager does, after all, deliver outstanding results.

And, some abusive managers are capable of growth. They should be given the opportunity, along with the sort of encouragement that ends with the words, “or else.”

Analogies have their limits. Klobuchar isn’t a manager who reports to you, she’s campaigning to become a candidate for the POTUS.

So a closer match might be how Apple’s board of directors evaluated Steve Jobs’ performance: Given his results, he got a pass on any and all behavior that wasn’t legally actionable.

When you’re hiring new managers and deciding whether to keep those you have, you have the luxury of insisting on excellence across the management compass, calibrated to your assessment of how much each quadrant matters.

When you’re voting, your choice is starker: Unless you have ranked choice voting all you can do is decide which candidate is better.

Ideal isn’t something you can insist on.

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