How we can learn better software project management from sex
Feedback. We all love to hate it. You make love to your partner, you don’t want to hear them tell you what to do to make it better since you think you’re so great at it. The truth of the matter is, you need to hear it so you can improve and make love better to them instead of them having to go find it elsewhere. Amiright?
Here in lies the problem with feedback: actually learning from it each time you try to improve.
The example of your lover is a great one since we all have sex at some point in our lives and we all think we’re great at it. Imagine if your partner said, “I want you to kiss me more passionately.” What the fuck does that mean? Well, you have to ask to get more information so that the next time you kiss them, you can see if it’s better. This is perfectly OK. You don’t come out of the womb knowing how to kiss.
Once you know how to ask more questions about the problem, you start implementing what you’re learning. Will you constantly be asking questions after your make-out session to see if it’s better or worse? No. Will you always have to worry you’re still passionately kissing your mate? At some point, no.
This is the part where some sort of feedback tool comes into play. If you tell yourself on a Monday night that you are going to ease back and just “peck” your lovers lips more in the first couple of minutes of making-out, you’ll be on your way to being a better kisser. What about Tuesday? You’ll have to ask yourself, “Did I peck more in the beginning and start off slowly like I said I was going to do last night?”. For the purposes of this example, we’ll say you did a great job so you’ll be able to move on to the next thing for making out on that Tuesday night.
The next piece of feedback you get is “I want you to hold my head with your hands while you make-out with me”. Guess what you’re going to be implementing on a Tuesday night while you make-out with your partner? You guessed it: holding their head with one of your hands, or both maybe?
Wednesday you’ll ask yourself if you did that and if you say “no”, then you know you have to do that Wednesday, you can’t move forward until you do this next step.
What happens when the next three days go by and you’ve still not held your partners head with your hand while you make-out with them? You’re going to realize you’re failing and you need to do something now or figure out why you’re not doing this action. Maybe you need to make-out while standing up instead of laying in bed etc…Something else, anything, to get you to do what you said you were going to do to move-the-peg-forward.
The above is an example of how software projects can be run to great success. Keeping the feedback loop extremely tight allows you to spot problems extremely fast, before they end up in something like divorce — maybe not from your partner, but definitely the people paying for the software to be developed.
We’ve been using our tool Standup Bot (http://standupbot.com) to automate the entire process of making sure we stay accountable for the projects we work on. When anyone starts to repeat themselves on things their working on, it’s an indication something is not being learned. Just like becoming a better make-out buddy for your partner: you have to have a way to see if you’re improving or moving forward.
If you’re not improving or moving forward, you’re just wasting your time and someone else’s money.
