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IBM CIO Thinks Agile Development Might Save Company
Nerval's Lobster writes: A new Wall Street Journal article details how IBM CIO Jeff Smith is trying to make Big Blue, which is going through some turbulent times as it attempts to transition from a hardware-dependent business to one that more fully embraces the cloud and services, operate more like a startup instead of a century-old colossus. His solution centers on having developers work in smaller teams, each of which embraces Agile methodology, as opposed to working in huge divisions on multi-year projects. In order to unite employees who might be geographically dispersed, IBM also has its groups leave open a Skype channel throughout the workday. Smith hopes, of course, that his plan will accelerate IBM's internal development, and make it more competitive against not only its tech-giant competition, but also the host of startups working in common fields such as artificial intelligence.
Slack ftw
When I worked at IBM, there was Sametime, any and all employee worldwide could be reached 24/7 already. How would Skype help?
Hmm. Wonder if the 'whatis' robot is still there..
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
[IBM] attempts to transition from a hardware-dependent business to one that more fully embraces the cloud and services
I though that IBM was already mainly a services business...
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
There is no silver bullet with Agile. Plus, the fact that Agile doesn't scale well at all would make it unsuitable for many IBM projects I should suspect.
That said, many Agile-like practices could really help in some situations.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
"...as it attempts to transition from a hardware-dependent business to one that more fully embraces my butt..."
Well, that about sums it up, IBM-wise.
Agile? Give me a break! That is the most over-hyped bit of sh!t that someone wrote a book about in order to make million$. More crap software has been the result of it (in my opinion as a 30+ year software engineering professional) than just about anything else. Good processes will resemble to some extent agile, but companies who take it literally have not done well. Have a weekly staff meeting to go over progress, issues, roadblocks, etc. Daily? Please! Do NOT waste my time! Professional engineers have better ways to do that!
It is hopeless. Too many managers, too much corporate overhead, too much process, an obnoxious Dogbert HR department, too many accountants, too many managers with good hair....all the corporate crap that makes the big dinosaurs like IBM hopeless.
The only thing they have to make sure to succeed is: "Sell/push/hawk/promote agile development tools".
But, when it comes to, the buyers and users of the Agile tools and methodology, the results are mixed.
Agile proponents have managed to sell the "no true scotsman" argument convincingly, probably because the management is willing let itself believe, "All we have to do is to give a few million dollars to this latest vendor selling the latest tools, all our problems will magically disappear".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
IBM ... agile??? That sounds like an oxymoron.
I always worry when the "century old colossus" is trying to act like a startup. Because it usually ends badly, because management and the bean counters have their own inertia, and are sure as heck not going to give up their control over stuff, or stop going by the 5,000 page manual of procedures.
I've known people who used to work at IBM ... and most of them still owned the starched white shirts.
They have anything resembling "agile" surgically removed when they're hired.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Then fund a startup. Seriously, their problem is them trying to turn an existing IBM group or team into a "startup". That isn't going to happen. You need to hire a new staff, new management, and simply hand them the money, and let them work outside the box, including not having to use IBM products by default, even deeply discounted IBM products. Perhaps *especially not* discounted IBM products.
Yes, Agile (if done correctly) is one methodology that may help them with certain problems, but you need full buy-in from the executives and product owners. If IBM management still expects the same sort of planning and budgeting and milestones they got with waterfall, then Agile is never going to deliver on what it does best. Then it will be a bunch of people working out their waterfall plan in a "standup" where everyone sits around a table. There are certain things an Agile development cycle isn't going to give a executive, and if they can't handle that, then it's going to fail.
A lot of the people who work for an IBM or a big company like that are institutionalized, much like prison inmates become. They speak a certain language, they think a certain way. That doesn't preclude individuals from breaking that conditioning, but if they are surrounded by people who think the same way, then the group will return to old ways of thinking, perhaps with a new buzzword.
IBM needs to step back and actually change their culture. They have a lot to offer simply by insisting on profitability and having decent accounting structure that many startups dearly need. But they can't just turn their existing development teams into Agile teams by fiat. I think the best way to assure that is perhaps for IBM to almost become a venture fund or an overall holding organization for these teams where they provide adult supervision, but they don't tell you how to build your sand castles.
I think for smaller projects, on a team with good interpersonal dynamics... Agile can really deliver a decent product fast, in the absence of any real requirements.
But those are the keywords: no requirements, fast, small. I have seem agile projects go right down the toilet also. YMMV.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
If you have stock in IBM, sell it now. This is going to go down as well as the Hindenburg.
Doing Agile just for the sake of doing it sounds like a recipe for disaster. Are they trying to solve a problem or install a cargo cult-like approach? Is the goal to reduce annoying overhead, or burden the engineers with procedures and rain dances that appease the gods of SDLC?
A company will be successful if it employs motivated people that naturally want to work in small and productive teams. In those cases an informal "agile" process develops naturally. Forcing it from the top down is more likely to cause problems instead.
Agile will save us. And if it doesn't, it's because you didn't do Agile correctly. Agile is always the answer!
as the old American football coach said: i like my players to be mobile, agile, and hostile.
You know that when a director of a Fortune 500 company says something like "agile might save the company", it will do anything but.
Downgrade of IBM from HOLD to SELL.
An agile start-up has few levels of management, IBM has many-many-many levels, it's these levels that mean the transition to cloud is doomed
IBM is undergoing a restructuring process and there are lots of lay-offs, it's shed a lot of its hardware business all in an effort to pursue Ginni's dream of being able to compete in the cloud arena
Customers are being pigeonholed into various parts of IBM's CAMMS streams in a furtive attempt to make it seem these areas are succeeding, however the root cause of the issues remains .. the senior managers, and the monolithic pricing formulas used to bid for work
Ask any IBMer how many levels of managers are above him and the top, you'll be shocked at the number (and these are official positions, and do not include things like team leaders who may not appear on the management tree)
Would you buy Cloud from IBM ?
In our experience, customers are leery of it at first. Then they get excited as they see the project progress. After a few iterations, they get bored and want to return to the old method. It gets hard to get everyone necessary to attend sessions. It soon collapses back to a more waterfall like state, or the project gets cancelled.
I haven't paid much attention lately to IBM.
That out of the way, this: historically IBM produced low-defect software. The UIs were often clunky or even bizarre, but the stuff was stable and did as advertised. Meanwhile most newcomers (MS, for example) produced horribly buggy stuff. Not saying revising how they do things wouldn't help, but adopting what everyone else is doing is going to result in... what everyone else is producing. Not a worthwhile goal.
Now on the Agile side of things, I have no doubt it will go like the LEAN and Six Sigma culture reorg's went. Anything that costs money to do will be ignored from the Agile methodology, anything that saves money will be implemented. With LEAN and Six Sigma this mean that team were re-organized into blues and rhythms and staff was reduced before the effects were understood. Sure the re-org was supposed to make things more efficient but the staff savings were supposed to have gone into documentation and a backup pool in case the re-org didn't work. Instead people were let go through resource actions before the impact of LEAN and Six Sigma could be judged. That meant many teams were seriously understaffed.
Agile/waterfall/Forkitarian
It doesn't matter what methodology you use or what you call it if your business model is based on exploiting your disappearing market position.
IBM's horrible business model is "Of course they have to buy IBM and once they do we will punish them for buying IBM by making them pay for IBM over and over again on the "integration services" and "custom maintenance" consulting racket.
That worked great back before every company was a software company, but in the modern era, every company with enough money to look fat and juicy to IBM can and must simply hire their own coders.
Basically the more coders there are in the world, the worse IBM will do. Or rather, the more people understand technology enough to realize IBM is a scam, the worse IBM will do.
And IBM goes from one heavy weight process to another.
They can make things even heavier weight and go full on Scrum + TDD.
They want their headline back.
.
This results in people who had already been working 12 to 14 hour days now having to work extra hours on top of that to cover all the projects.
It's making IBM look like a grossly mismanaged company, grinding its employees down to a bloody nub.
But don't be concerned, there's a Skype channel open on everyone's desktop.
IBM isnt your fathers supercomputing company anymore, and cutthroat capitalism has led it to where it stands today to a large extent. 3 very public layoffs, a newfound reliance on 3-6 month contract jobs, and no tangible innovation for major consumer markets. Marketing that pushes AI supercomputing during the superbowl is great, but at the end of the day the PHB that watched that commercial is going to weigh her next desktop or server purchase in terms of Dell and Silicon Mechanics. That is to say she will certainly place a premium on the visible discounts shes already seeing in the market, instead of relying on IBM's brand name to justify the cost.
Power doesnt run things like it used to, and while IBM is pushing it for virtualization you can do the same thing big iron touts with more hardware and lower cost. Where IBM isnt challenged is in SAP and JDEdwards, markets where its written itself in as defacto hardware provider. IBM supports linux, true, and fought valiantly in its name, but what IBM represents is a client server sales model that doesnt scale to a world where even the toaster is expected to run an apache or memcache instance.
Good people go to bed earlier.
"There's too many chiefs and not enough Indians around this place." switch gears, fire 2/3 of the manglement, and get some programmers and hardware engineers actually programming and prototyping, instead of screwing around on pet projects that do absolutely freakin' nothing off their floor in the building.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I hope IBM bets big on Agile, and it's a complete disaster, and then no one ever has to hear about Agile ever again. Oh, and I won't have to stand around like an asshole every morning while everyone explains they worked on the same thing they worked on yesterday.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Adopt the latest fad so that, when it does not turn out to be the silver bullet that many would have us believe it is, the CIO at least can claim to have done the sensible thing. Mr. Smith, do waste your time (and IBM's) in this fashion at your peril.
IBM's new business model is to rob good paying jobs from IT professionals. That makes me want to promote anything that is NOT IBM . At the Bank where I work... where I will make it pretty clear when I am gone .. even the Mainframe folks days here are numbered. I am in Middleware. I write automation code, provide capacity and performance trends, tune kernels, make recommendation to tune applications and databases. We have a small tight crew. We are getting outsourced not because we are expensive. We are getting outsourced so payroll can show up as an expenditure written off over 7 years. When I'm gone I am going to make a point to make this illegal. The work environment was great, the commute was short.. Greedy bastards pulling in over 10 million dollars a year are the root cause of this. Greed. and there are at least 20 of them earning that. If they all chipped in $250k / year we can all work here. IBM Global.. I believe when we leave all the proactive work we do to be sure applications perform well will fall out of scope with IBM. The IBM Global Bitch can suck it.,
Fuck you IBM. Take your IBM Global outsource team and shove it up your ass. You are just promoting more division in our country. what's going to happen when the good jobs are gone and all the immagrants with h1B visas are working for you displacing our jobs. I tell you what.. Revolution.
It's going to come faster than you think.
IBM needs to make a product that I want to buy. I do not care if they use agile, waterfall, spiral, or whatever other model is the flavor of the week.
Highly competent, detail oriented developers with new ideas might save it. CIO pablum won't. Fact is they got no smart people left. The reorganized them and sold them off.
My senior managers recently discovered the agile process and have proceeded to school the development teams on it. They were so excited about how it will improve our company that I didn't have the heart to tell them that all the development groups have already been using it for years now.
Jumping onto bandwagons is never a good idea. *Acting like a start-up* is the last thing I want to see. Or maybe it means they're looking for a buyer.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Now IBM is going to have to put up with the pure awfulness that is Agile, too. I'm sorry, guys.
1) Use agile NodeJS in the cloud with Hadoop. It will allow them to synergistically provide access to economically sound catalysts for change to allow them to conveniently monetize high standards in holistically motivated mindshare opportunities.
2) Don't be a dick.
Table-ized A.I.
I'd expect the clueless focus on process from an executive, to the exclusion of any consideration of what's actually wrong. What is this new Agile world order at IBM going to solve? An inability to adapt at a corporate level? Forcing development methodologies onto the rank and file isn't going to fix that. Agile management would just equate to listlessness and loss of what little focus they appear to have. At IBM's size, they need to be leading IT, not tweaking trends others set. That requires Vision, which I suspect is sorely lacking from the current IBM management. This focus on trivia won't fix IBM's downward slide.
Agile is good but only in small doses.
The amounts of meetings, standups, pre-sprint planning, post-sprint, requirements..etc eats up way too many cycles.
I've worked on many Agile projects and seen 15+ devs + BAs + Project manager sit in meeting rooms 8 hours a day for four days a week for six months on multi million dollar apps and seen it run out of funds with not much to show for. Also, the unrealistic sprints tasks because of so much time wasted in meetings = burnt devs.
4 out of 5 Agile project I was on failed because of the above.. Too much planning, too many people involved too early in the game...etc.
So I have this suggestion for IBM, project planning phase, keep a lean team, short meetings. Daily standups are good, 5 min max.. what are you working on? Any impediments.. next guy.
I've found 3 weeks sprints work best.. Longer than that and branching/code merges get messy.
My 2 cents.
I'm in a big company and google has it right. You use the correct blend of methodologies for any given individual project. I am currently watching crap code being made because of the "we are agile" mantra.
Agile as THE way to do things, in my opinion, is good for startups. not for mature development houses.
Getting stakeholders and users to put in the time necessary to think things out is always going to be tricky. Timely feedback is a scarce resource no matter what methodology you use. For this reason, the practical thing is to assume you'll get crappy feedback and have to redo a lot because of lack of feedback. Thus, it's probably better to optimize the rework process rather than obsess on preventing it.
Standardizing GUI and CRUD interface standards is one area that may help. The web browser stack in current use is a fricken mess. I'd like to be able to focus on business rules rather than details of scrolling or drag-and-drop bugs.
Table-ized A.I.
At least back a while ago, Skype was forbidden from IBM systems as IBM doesn't trust the closed code system. Has that changed? Can anyone confirm that they are actually using Skype and not Sametime or something similar?
Saying Agile will fix their problems is like saying a hammer will fix their problems.
Good technology requires planning for about 5 to 7 years out. If you burn the future to get profits NOW, then you'll eventually burn your reputation also. I don't exactly know the best corporate management strategies to optimize solutions for 5 to 7 years out, but IBM's "profits now!" program clearly failed.
Focus far more on customer satisfaction and loyalty. If you don't give them IT headaches, they'll pay a premium and/or more projects. And listening to your engineers helps also. They want to feel like they are working on something useful instead of being pawns in marketing or financial gimmicks.
You can screw some of your customers all of the time and screw all of your customers some of the time, but you cannot screw all your customers all of the time. (My apologies to Mr. Lincoln.)
Table-ized A.I.
Although too many people think that just saying "Agile" will solve all of your problems, IBM has actually been working for a few years now to change their development tools to allow more Agile development. Rational Team Concert is a suite of tools that provides a lot of functionality for scrum development. It certainly won't happen overnight, but this announcement isn't out of the "blue"...
The media seems to be acting like this has something (anything at all) to do with the software IBM sells. But it is actually the IT department guy talking about how he is building internal tools. Nothing to do with IBM products, not going to save IBM - this guy is just the IT dude.
When you have fired all your talent and outsourced every last thing but the kitchen sink to the diploma mills in Bangalore it's gonna take more than tactical management reshuffle to bring the magic back.
Big Blue deserves to die for abandoning the golden goose in the first place.
Agile doesn't solve your problems mate, it just exposes them sooner.
That is the best explanation of Agile I've ever heard.
How about making the company someplace where people would actually want to work? If you keep treating your people like "human resources" to be mined out and cast aside then fuck you you get exactly what you deserve, a bunch of devs just trying to do enough time in the salt mines to get themselves a job for a good company. I know the company were pioneers in the field of efficiently working people to death but they may want to finally change their Auschwitz approach.
Agile is a tool, it's good for things it's good for and bad for things it's not good for. How about letting the team select the methodology they think is appropriate to the task rather than letting a bunch of empty suits make the decision for the whole company?
I was under the impression that much of what IBM does involves very large projects and often with packaged software such as SAP or even some of their own software.
Typically in packaged software like SAP or Oracle they deliver functionality that you can build upon to suit the customers requirements. But it has to be built upon using frameworks that they provide and - more importantly - it has to be done in a way that doesn't break what is delivered. These systems contain literally millions of lines of code. Any time you try to bolt something on to it you run the risk of breaking something. Often in very unpredictable ways.
As a result these projects need to be managed in a very formal fashion. Agile just doesn't lend itself well to this sort of thing in my experience. Maybe some sort of hybrid model but certainly not Agile as I know it.
Just on the face of it "IBM" and "Agile" could not be further apart.
Find a word that fills that blank and really focus IBM on being that company. The agile process won't fix bad leadership at the top. The agile process never fixes bad leadership at the top.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Is it really so smart to rely on Skype, a Microsoft holding, for internal operations? I would assume they have the capability to listen in to whatever they like, and would certainly not want to use Skype to transact business that is in direct competition to another one of their divisions. This is above and beyond the fact that the Feds will be able to listen in, since there is only so much they can do to avoid that anyhow.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
When a technology company is to be saved by business process, it's a sure sign they don't understand their technology.
"Smith hopes, of course, that his plan will accelerate IBM's internal development, and make it more competitive against not only its tech-giant competition, but also the host of startups working in common fields such as artificial intelligence."
Well, that's not going to happen.
I was at IBM lin the very early 2000's. They were already using agile development methodology, and using Skype as an incontrollable interrupt source, rather than Lotus Notes is unlikely to do much beyond making executives feel better that you are always reachable so as to be a le to conveniently move the goal posts out from under you.
Also IBM's internal development model is to polish customer facing systems, which tend to be human-centric, while internal systems tend to be held together with spit and bailing wire, while doing the absolute minimum to get them to work, and they tend to be very labor intensive for the humans who have to end up using them. I really don't see this ending up where he wants things to end up.
Example: there were twenty three separate systems that someone had to drive the process through to get an IBM Web Connections account up and running, and a lot of that work had to do with copy/paste between browser Windows, TN3270 terminal Windows, sending email requests via Lotus Notes, and so on. Once these systems were up and running, I did an analysis of all the interactions and steps required, with an aim to reducing the overall complexity and change of error. Management was not interested: once something is barely working well enough to get the job done, there's zero interest in the process of working on the process; among other things, it means less job security.
I don't see this changing wildly, given the reward systems in place for employees have not changed significantly, according to people I know who still work there. The entire business model for IBM Global Services is based on giving people what they ask for, as opposed to what they actually want/need, and then iterating the process in an "Agile" fashion to suck as much money out of the customer as possible. This was true of internal IT systems as much as it was for customer facing contracts.
Once again: I really don't see this ending up where he wants things to end up.
I have never used software as badly done as ibms. There are whole books out there about standards and things people expect when installing or configuring enterprise level software that IBM ignores. If I walk onto a jobsite that's tmeven thinking of going IBM, I walk off.
what are they selling that is going to make there stock go up is the question? And why am I a going to buy IBM???????
It is going to take a lot more than that to save the company.
There are a lot of practices that are going on that are not in the best interest of the company, not the least of which are:
1- Treating developers like they are McDonalds employees in terms of pay, options, benefits and say in how things get accomplished.
2- Poor lines of communication with customers, again throwing developers under the bus when milestones are not achieved.
3- Firing large amounts of employees as a result of trying to cover up mistakes, instead of bringing the people involved in the failures to right the ship.
4- Breaking laws, at least in the terms of US labor laws, in terms of disowning former employees and some managers slandering former employees. Unprofessional.
5- Having financial experts in charge of making technical decisions, this has a bad track record and historical anecdotes abound.. the Challenger disaster, the housing crisis, the Enron scandal, The war in Iraq.. etc..
I know that IBM has been a historical example of a company repeatedly reinventing itself to fit the times and succeeding again and again, but since about 2012, they have been like bull in a china shop. Hopefully they do right by their former employees and the industry in the next rework of the company, but at this moment it does not sound like their head is in the game.
And now they just have to kick off a committee to find out whether they do Scrum or Kanban. After that, the company is saved.
1) How does a CIO NOT know that IBM has been using Agile for years, and
2) Why does he think that it's suddenly going to make a difference NOW?
IBM has (supposedly) been using Agile for at least 7 years - I spent a couple of decades inside an IBM software lab until I was purged in the infamous "Project Waltz" in 2011. Agile was management "golden-bullet-of-the-month" for at least the last 3 years of that - and just as ineffective as all the others that I'd seen come and go. My perception was that it was largely inappropriate to the scale of code (millions of lines) that we were producing and managing. Much of what was good about it was the stuff paid lip-service to but otherwise ignored; most of what was bad about it was almost anything that management could see and enforce (scrums in particular were mostly a pointless and expensive waste of time - a day or more of cumulative development effort spent daily so that everyone could report on stuff that affected no-one else, and management could put a tick in the box). Frankly, it was a mechanism by which development was obliged to churn out code with less thought in design and less opportunity for customer-scale testing, on a release schedule that no customer would want to follow, in a way that middle management could spin to the higher echelons as positive accomplishment. I'd really love to see the APAR (customer problem report) rates now that that code's had time to get out there and fester; I strongly suspect that they're - to choose a word at random - "interesting". But, naturally, I'm long in the tooth and jaundiced about new-fangled stuff (mostly because I've seen all the hype 20+ times before, and seen the vast difference between that and reality - but experience and cynicism doesn't count when management is clutching at straws).
Ha hahahaha.
...what they want.
If you're a company producing "division" size software and you don't know what you want - Agile isn't going to save you - it's going to obscure your problems.
IBM - stop hiring PROJECT managers as PRODUCT managers and get some domain experts for the software you wish to build and have them be your product managers. You might, just might, get a clue as to what your software should be doing.
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That is not agile, that's bad management. true agile is about making sure everybody knows exactly what they need to do, then go about doing it, and come backfor more.
Having been through the basic Agile training (and exposure to other processes like Lean/Six Sigma and the entire PMI catalog), the only thing I can think of when I see stuff like this is: oh, good, another largely misapplied methodology to getting things done that's a sub for really good management.
I know that a lot of these processes CAN be effective, but they ONLY work if everyone is willing to buy in and play along and if everyone is competent and motivated enough to meet deadlines (in both cases, it means that virtually nobody's dead weight).
After 15 years of working for organizations big and small, the only conclusion I can make about these "standard processes" is there isn't a single one that is asshole-proof. The only thing that ever, EVER solves that particular problem is a dynamite manager that adapts rather than conforms - and isn't afraid to fire people when necessary. But because the paradigm (shudder) states "tailorability, but stick to the process", what you end up with is a bunch of officious morons who emphasize process over ingenuity.
I'm not saying that there should be complete chaos at all times (a good manager lays out the ground rules and provides a structure for activity) or even that these processes hold no merit, but when you have a turn-the-crank process created by someone who seems to have forgotten (or never knew in the first place) what it's like to be boots-on-the-ground, you're going to get resistance by people who just want to get stuff done and not be hampered by the snooty administrators with two-year-degrees who routinely it over the PhDs because they know "the process" and the guys who know how to get shit done don't.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
True agile sounds a whole lot like true Scotsman...
Yes, this is one of THE MOST annoying thing about Agile proponents: it seems that every time they are told that Agile sucks, their reply is that it wasn't being done correctly. Which may be true! However, if that's the case, it means that Agile is so difficult to do correctly that it is a questionable thing to do.
I am a firm believer than 80% of programmers should not be programmers. Why is it so difficult? Programming is hard. It's even harder when you're stupid.
This is the answer to why Agile is so hard.
IBM started agile development ten years ago. I was there. I convinced the initial teams that they needed to provide SOME training/documentation to the target users, otherwise you would have a spiffy new feature/function, but no one would know how to use it. Also, IBM started moving away from hardware decades ago: the; got out of the sold disk drive business; sold of their PC business to Lenovo in 2004(?)...some friends lost their jobs in that one; and tried to sell of their server business. For over ten years, more than half the company revenue comes from Global Services (consulting).