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.

Comments

Not likely

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Not likely

[grimmjeeper]

It's been my experience that, like so many other methodologies, there is a disconnect between the methodology and what companies actually do from day-to-day. And while I don't have 30+ years under my belt, I have 20+ years and I've seen quite a bit over the years. Companies can change and improve for the better but a lot of old farts who refuse to keep up with modern advances in the way to accomplish things is one of the biggest impediments in my (not so) humble opinion.

Done correctly for the right kinds of projects, Agile is a good way to do things. Unfortunately, a lot of companies get Agile wrong or they try to apply it to a type of project that is really not suited to it. Too many companies follow the "throw whatever s#!t compiles over the wall every Friday" process and try to pass it off as "Agile". Clearly, they are not really following the Agile methodology and you end up with a big steaming pile since they're often breaking things faster than they're fixing them. And then there are the managers who only focus on half the methodology and you get a disjointed mess that goes off the rails. If you want to succeed, you can't just pick and choose the parts you like and discard the rest. It's a complete system and you need to do it completely.

Then there's the groups that try to apply Agile to the wrong kinds of projects. The larger the project, the less suited it is to being Agile. Of course, that's a good argument for breaking large projects into smaller ones that interact with each other, allowing them to be more suited to Agile. But beyond project size, the more safety-critical the project, the less suited it is to the Agile methodology. I'm pretty sure I don't want Boeing writing their flight control software using the Agile methodology. I'd want the heavy certification process they go through to be much more thorough when validating their systems to ensure that no little bugs slipped through. I mean, it's one thing to have a glitch in your word processor. You might lose a couple hours of work. But a "little glitch" in flight controls can lead to that plane "making premature contact with the ground" which is "bad".

Can IBM improve things with a move to Agile? Maybe. If they do it right. Will they do it right? Hard to say. Changing culture at a big corporation like that is kind of like steering an aircraft carrier. It's going to take some time and it's going to require a lot of effort. My best guess is that the move will be a partial success and the success will vary from department to department.

Re:Not likely

[grimmjeeper]

It's not a fact.

You're underestimating how much crap has come out over the decades. Not following Agile correctly is responsible for only a very small portion of that crap because it hasn't been around long enough to measure up to the tried and true ways of producing crap. It's making a go of it but it started out way behind and hasn't even begun to catch up.

I am also a gray beard and I mildly disagree

[gatkinso]

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.

If you have stock in IBM...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Once again IBM misses why things are going down

[Anonymous Coward]

As a former IBM'er who spent over a decade with the company, I'm still amazed at the utterly lack of understanding of the root problems. IBM has driven away a lot of the top talent, but that isn't even the main problem. The laser focus on quarterly earnings in the form of earnings per share. When I was forced to furlough the majority of my contractors towards the end of every quarter, it wasn't because there wasn't enough work for them, it was to try to get a penny more on EPS. I could have stomached the move to "global sourcing" as IBM called it, if they had hired quality employees. Instead they hired cheap employees, I did multiple re-trainings on simple things for the same international employees.

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.

Re:leave open a Skype channel

[ShanghaiBill]

When starting a coding session, it takes about an hour to check out your source, load all your editors/profilers/test-probes, get everything back into your memory, and get into the zone where you can produce good code. It also takes about 30 minutes at the end to wrap things up, check everything in, make notes about what you need to do tomorrow, and update your status report. So a good estimate of programmer productivity is to take each block of uninterrupted time, subtract this 90 minutes of startup/shutdown time, and sum the remainder. An always-on Skype session sitting on your screen would pretty much ensure that this is zero.

Re:Agile - like everything else it is good and bad

[plopez]

Been there, done that. Did it twice. It didn't work. The communications problems are enormous. Agile relies on maximum face time. If cross cutting concerns are spread across several teams, and I have never seen a case where this has not happened, then the divisions create barriers which impede agile development paradigms. This is esp. true if the teams are scattered across sites and/or timezones. Conference calls, video meetings etc. can help but it still is not as good as having everyone in the same proximity. In fact the critical distance seems to be 50 meters!

Agile works best, in my opion, for small to mid-sized projects. Mega-corp would be better off trying something, anything, else.

Citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Dean Martin diagnosed IBM in the 70s

[swschrad]

"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.

Rooting against

[bigsexyjoe]

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.

Re:Rooting against

[WinstonWolfIT]

Agile doesn't solve your problems mate, it just exposes them sooner. If everyone is working on the same thing today as yesterday, there's your problem right there in front of you.

Re:Agile - like everything else it is good and bad

[Zero__Kelvin]

There is no way to "scale" Agile, except (linearly) as follows:

Agile == Shitpiles / Developer