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December 21, 2005
Peter O'Farrell 1946 - 2005
IN MEMORIAM
The Cutter Family mourns a deep and tragic loss.
Peter O'Farrell was the beloved husband of Karen Fine Coburn, President and CEO of Cutter Consortium in Arlington MA USA. He died - far too soon last week - in a terrible car accident while taking his son Nathan to visit a school in Maine. It was a father-son journey, something very typical of Peter, given how much he adored his children.
They say behind every great woman is a man (or something like that), and Peter was the man behind Karen. In many ways, Karen's seemingly boundless enthusiasm for creating the Cutter extended family was made possible in part by the loving attention that Peter dedicated at the home front and in his deep (yet understated) involvement with Cutter. He was not so much interested in being famous, although as my friend Ken Orr writes below - he should have been far more famous than he was. The man was brilliant, and most of all he was kind, but in a world often filled with egos, he wasn't so much interested in fame.
No, Peter was the quiet and tender guidance behind the scenes, and he preferred it this way. During the times that I was privileged to see inside the world of the O'Farrell-Coburn home, I often saw a father and husband first, before I saw the genius consultant and member of the Cutter Business Technology Council. Peter always spoke so proudly of his family; when he talked about Karen and their children Leah and Nathan, his eyes would fill with a bright sparkle that could light up a room.
Once during a Cutter Summit conference, one of my admired colleagues, Ken Orr, said something like - "I don't quite believe in nations very much. What I *really* believe in are families, communities, villages and tribes." Man, has that phrase stuck with me over the years . Ken probably doesn't even know it, but to me, that embodied the entire essence of the Cutter Consortium. In between a few quiet tears the other day with Anne Mullaney, VP of Cutter, we talked about the Consortium being an extended family. I recently heard a phrase that describes "family" as a starting point; then you grow up, maybe move away, to go out and find your tribe. Cutter is indeed a very special tribe. There is a reason for this: It is simply sourced from the unshakable sense of family that started with Karen Coburn and Peter O'Farrell.
We all deeply mourn the loss of Peter. When my dear friend and fellow tribesman Tim Lister called me with the news, I keeled over as though someone punched me in the stomach. The details of Peter's passing had struck a powerful chord for me personally. When I was a young boy/man - similar to Nathan - my own father died tragically while I was on a journey with him away from home. In many ways, this singular event defined almost every dimension of my life, including my deep appreciation for family and what it means to be a father. In the broad landscape of the Cutter community, we acknowledge that one of the backbones, one of our fathers, one of our tribal elders, is gone and no longer with us.
I will miss Peter O'Farrell very much.
For those of you who may not have experienced the poetic eloquence of my friend and fellow Cutter consultant Ken Orr, I share with you below his dedication to Peter. It is being published as this week's Cutter Trends Advisory. While you'd normally have to be a subscriber for the content in Trends, I asked Ken if I could share his feelings for Peter in this blog. He told me that he would be honored. So with humble admiration, I offer Ken's tribute.
Michael Mah
Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium
Past Editor, IT Metrics Strategies
(Funeral Services will be held Thursday Dec. 29 at M.I.T. Chapel, 77 Mass Ave, Cambridge, 11 AM-12 Noon. Relatives & friends warmly welcomed and invited to gather at 151 Summer St, Arlington commencing at 1:30 PM following Services. In lieu of flowers, memorials in Peter's name to Robbins Library Trust Fund, 700 Mass Ave, Arl., MA 02476 are much appreciated. DeVito Funeral Home Arlington 781-643-5610)
PETER O'FARRELL -- IN MEMORIAM
Grief spreads on the wings of communication. When George Washington died on 14 December 1799, news of his death was carried by word of mouth and newspapers on horseback and on boats across America, and took weeks (months) to reach all parts of that very sparsely populated country. Only 65 years later, word of Lincoln's death took just minutes to cross the continent, carried by the first electronic communication, the telegraph. A hundred years later, word of John Kennedy's assassination came to me from a television monitor seconds after it was announced in Dallas as I walked across a restaurant lounge in Chicago. On 14 December 2005, news of the passing of Peter O'Farrell came to me via a cellphone call from my friend Lou Mazzucchelli. The time for tragic information to move from source to destination has shortened dramatically over the last two centuries but the effect is still the same.
Peter O'Farrell was an engineer, a thinker, a writer, a citizen, a husband, and a father. Peter was truly a 21st-century Renaissance man. Peter was not as famous as he deserved to be, but he was enormously important to all of us who knew him personally and to the thousands who knew of Peter only through his contributions to the Cutter Consortium. While many people in the Cutter world had read his articles and opinions, not everyone knew that Peter was also the husband of Cutter founder and CEO Karen Coburn and father of Nathan and Leah.
Peter was perhaps the nicest, kindest person I know. I don't think I ever remember Peter saying an unkind word about anyone, except an occasional politician or wrong-headed business or technology guru. And he was funny. Peter had a dry, self-deprecating wit that would break up a room of world-famous experts or a family gathering. In an increasingly in-your-face world, Peter was an old-school gentleman. He was gracious to a fault but not in the least wishy-washy or confused. Peter knew what he knew, and God, he knew a lot.
Peter was a member of the Cutter Business Technology Council that I've been fortunate to be a member of for the last half-dozen years. The Council, as most of you know, is made up of some pretty bright and accomplished people (present company excepted). If you attended the Trends Council meetings, Peter would seem to blend into the background -- until he had something to say! And when Peter talked, he always had something to say. And for me, what he had to say was always informed by a mind that had among the broadest range of knowledge of anyone I have ever known.
Peter was an engineer and manager by training, but he read everything. He understood economics, he understood politics, he understood history -- but most of all, Peter understood people. Peter understood that the true impact of technology depended upon how people utilized that technology. He understood the transition from a national economy, in which most of us grew up, to a truly global economy -- for all the good and bad that that observation implies. Peter was always pushing the limits of our assumptions. "What does this mean?" he would say, "What does this imply? What are the consequences?" He was interested in the really big trends.
True knowledge, I have come to believe, only exists in the minds of people. What is written down or captured on audio or video tape are only knowledge artifacts. The knowledge in the minds of living, breathing people is not static or finished. So when great minds are gone, there is a tear in the fabric of the world. Peter's loss leaves such a tear, not only in the fabric of the world, but in the lives of all those who knew and loved him. Our grief and love goes out to Karen and Nathan and Leah and all the people at Cutter. Peter, we will sorely miss you.
-- Ken Orr, Fellow, Cutter Business Technology Council
Posted by Mike at 01:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 16, 2005
Film Editing on “The Producers”
Rick Derby is an HBO award-winning documentary film producer (“Rocks With Wings”) and a senior film editor on one of the hottest Hollywood film projects of 2005, “The Producers”, starring Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, and Uma Thurman. It opens today in New York and Los Angeles.
Yesterday I had the chance to visit my good friend Rick at the Broadway offices of Sound One, one of the major players in the film industry in New York’s Times Square. What a treat. I got an up-close and in-person look at the inner workings of digital film editing and sound effects in one of the hottest of hot American industries, and one of our biggest exports.
I was amazed at how much raw technology there was in the various studios as I made my way through the halls, adorned with posters of all the top movies produced at Sound One. Millions of dollars of the latest digital hardware were stacked in dozens of racks of equipment in room after room. In every studio, teams of editors and special effects professionals were huddled behind glass walls in dimly lit rooms with multiple screens, surrounded by state-of-the-art mixing consoles and multi-track sound equipment. It was a techie’s dream. It even looked like the engineering lab from my days as a systems test manager on the nuclear submarine program.
However, one thing that amazed me: how frequently a place like Sound One has to re-tool. Every couple of years, the stuff is turned over because new technology comes on so fast. (And you thought your PC went obsolete quickly.) So much for “owning” hardware; ownership really comes down to a term-use license. Since things evolve so fast in the world of film, it wouldn’t surprise me if equipment is often retired before it’s paid off.
But enough of the big-iron talk. What I was acutely interested in was the artistic and creative process around film editing – putting all that “software” into a coherent, integrated whole out of the bazillions of units and modules shot earlier by the director and all the actors. The night before, I called Rick at 7pm, expecting him to be home finishing dinner with his lovely wife and daughter, Sandy and Kemlee. But no, Rick answered and told me that he was “double slammed” with exhaustion, lying prone on the couch in his editing studio. He was almost passed out from all the overtime, trying to make a deadline for the film’s release. It seems like film editors live a similar life to those of software integrators at the tail end of a project. Deadline looming, 70-hour work weeks, and total chaos. Whether the software is a movie or a corporate internet portal, it’s all the same for the folks at crunch time, with a lot riding on a deadline.
Two things impressed me about these parallel worlds. Both came from how Rick described how he saw the creative process. First, all that tooling meant nothing if it weren’t in the hands of a skilled professional. Hardware is dumb iron without a creative mind. A fool with a tool is till a fool, but in the hands of a master and with great content to start with, you can have an Academy-Award winning blockbuster in your hands.
Secondly, it was really hard to be creative when you were dying of exhaustion. The night before, Rick hit a mental brick wall when I spoke with him after a killer day. No amount of pushing was going to get him that “Aha”. We talked about how non-stop production may sound like a good model for factory machines, but when a creative human being stopped being creative because his/her brain was overcooked oatmeal, then leaving the pot on the stove late at night wasn’t going to result in any major breakthrough - just soggier brain/oatmeal.
It’s amazing how much software designers and film editors have in common. I also find it curious that we’re really not talking “film” anymore. It’s all a bunch of digital bits assembled into a sequence on big hard disks; essentially computer.exe files that unfold according to a time-generated sequence after you hit a button that says “Start”.
Posted by Mike at 07:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 10, 2005
Stan Rifkin's Wisdom Part 2
How to Select a Software Project Estimation Tool
Here’s a follow up to my earlier entry on Stan Rifkin’s wisdom. In Part 1, Stan basically said “Don’t plan beyond what you’re capable of delivering.” This might seem to be pure common sense, and that it is so obvious it’s almost insulting.
But if you consider this fact - projects that meet their deadlines and cost commitments do so by cutting out almost half of what they promise, then it follows to reason that most teams over-commit by a factor of two! Moreover, these overruns are frequently in the millions or tens of millions of dollars. One team that called me in for help in recent times was suffering an overrun of $11 million. When this happens between companies, they sue each other. My friend Ed Yourdon, an intellectual giant in the technology field, is now - almost exclusively - an expert witness for software-related lawsuits.
These things tell me that somewhere along the way, companies drastically lose sight of their estimates. (It's my belief, as you've probably read on this blog, that a major cause is the blinding bias caused by the deadline.) Estimating is very very hard. Often you need a computer to help do it right. If you were to shop for a software project estimation tool, here is what Stan says to look for, in his words:
1) The underlying algorithm is published in the public domain. No surprises. If the duration=effort/resources formula is in the tool, I would reject it. The relationship among duration, effort and resources is not linear.
2) It accurately estimates completed projects. We use a few typical completed projects to see if the tool estimates them accurately in retrospect. If the tool cannot accurately estimate our type of work, we do not want to use it on real, future projects.
3) I don’t want to subjectively “guess” at the values of variables. I only want to work with items that I can objectively measure during the conduct of a project.
4) The assumptions of the tool mirror my realities. Estimates are application-area specific so we need to be sure that the candidate tool has been particularized for my application type.
5) The tool will not generate an impossible schedule. Clearly, there is a region or range of project values (duration, effort, rate of adding people, quality, and number of features) such that it is impossible to accomplish a project with that combination. I want to know that set of values so that I am sure to steer clear.
6) The tool takes into account the effects of schedule compression. In software projects we are commonly asked to produce the minimum duration estimate; i.e. what is the effort required for the stated requirements such that the project will finish in the shortest time? One of the reasons I like tools that model compression is that we are commonly given the delivery date during the commitment process, so I need to be able to ask and answer whether I can stand (manage) the compression in the dictated schedule.
7) I want a range, not a point, estimate and the probability of achieving it. We need to know the probability or risk for each feasible band of estimates. This way, we can adjust our input parameters in order to compute not only an answer about duration, effort, quality, and features, but also a risk level that the organization can tolerate.
Posted by Mike at 10:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 07, 2005
Stan Rifkin's Wisdom Part 1
My good friend Stan Rifkin (formerly a key member of Watts Humphrey's team at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute, and now principal of Master Systems Inc.) once penned the following criteria for software project estimation:
1) Commitments have to be based on work [scope] to be performed; therefore, there must be agreement on this.
2) Estimates have to be based on a) the work to be performed and b) historical records of performance.
3) Commitments must not exceed the capability to perform, or else there is no reason to estimate.
What Stan meant on bullet 1) has to do with the importance of the quantitiy of work products entering a negotiation discussion. The key words are commitment, and agreement. These work products can be number of features or requirements; later on during design they can also be the number of software elements like modules, programs, objects, or new/changed code.
Translating bullet 2) is about knowinging your capability. Most teams don't keep good records of their most recent projects. It's not hard to get, and I offer a roadmap in my article "Corporate Alzheimers and Deadline Management".
Bullet 3) is most important. It means "don't plan beyond your capacity." Nearly everyone does it; hence the ever-present statistics on project failures over the years. But what I think Stan means when he uses the phrase, "else there is no reason to estimate", is that you WILL start what is called a Yourdon Death March project, and you are doomed.
How does this pertain to software estimation tools, you might ask? The answer has to do with keeping these goal-line objectives in mind, and recognizing the importance of calibrating a tool based on your own completed projects, and explicitly solving the issue of software sizing. Easy to use templates should be the order of the day on both items. In the event that you may not have ready access to historical projects, the tool should be able to access records from an up-to-date industry database to get you started.
Posted by Mike at 11:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 04, 2005
Creativity, Exercise, Music, and Brain Power
I've always talked about creativity and innovation being the essence of knowledge work in high technology. It's also been my belief that creativity is almost impossible if you're depressed. In any given year, about seven percent - between 13 million and 14 million people - experience a depressive disorder, and about 97 percent of those reporting depression also report that their work, home life and relationships suffer as a result. Depression is also known to weaken the immune system, making the body more susceptible to physical illness. If creativity is an outgrowth of one's passion for life, it can surely be elusive if the passion isn't there.
I just received my December issue of Dr. Andrew Weil's "Self Healing" newsletter, with the cover story being about how exercise benefits your mood. The article cites a Duke University study of 156 middle-aged and older people who experienced depression. It compared the effect of treatment with exercise alone versus using anti-depressant medication.
The long and the short of this study is that the exercise was as effective as medication. Moreover, in a follow-up study six months later, depression relapsed in 38 percent of the medication-only group, but in only 8 percent of the exercise group!
This piqued my interest since one creativity trick that I use in writing this blog is to "meditate" at my health club on the stair-climber with a small pencil and slip of note paper in my pocket. When ideas fly into my mind, I quickly write them down. I'm not depressed, but perhaps a reason I feel creative and happy in the first place has to do with my exercise routine.
Other forms of my exercise include competitive tennis, yoga, kayaking, skiing, and strength training with weights. I can't jot down ideas that excite me for my columns and consulting engagements while smacking a tennis ball, but I've been pleasantly astonished at the workings of my mind when writing ideas on the stair-climber or in between reps on the cable-rower. One of my most creative articles came while lying in the sun on my kayak, notepad in hand while tied to a tree stump on the banks of the Housatonic River, here in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts.
By the way, keep the iPod on the next time you're at the gym. A University of Ohio study showed that listening to music while exercising helped to increase scores on a verbal fluency test among cardiac rehabilitation patients. Your brain is smarter after exercising with music. Think about "The Mozart Effect".
"This is the first study to look at the combined effects of music and short-term exercise on mental performance," said Charles Emery, the study's lead author and a professor of psychology at Ohio State University.
"Evidence suggests that exercise improves the cognitive performance of people with coronary artery disease," Emery said. "And listening to music is thought to enhance brain power. We wanted to put the two results together."
So - exercise, listen to music, be happy, have a healthy heart, get creative...
Posted by Mike at 12:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 01, 2005
Complexity's Rising Tide
Recently, I had the privilege of being a guest keynote speaker at symposiums for two of the world’s largest financial services companies, where I spoke about the people dynamics and success/failure trends of deadline-intensive projects – something near and dear to all our hearts. Between the two events (one held in Chicago and the other in Boston), there were about 700 technology professionals in the audiences. It was an exciting time.
Something struck me that both organizations had in common, which was touched upon in the opening remarks by senior executives who introduced me to their audiences. The paramount challenge before them -- more often than not -- stemmed from being a global company with geographically dispersed teams, dealing with the rising complexity of technology projects, while under higher pressure of ever-tighter deadlines.
This macro-challenge is one for the ages. It is especially daunting in today’s Information Age, because being a company that only uses technology as a peripheral aspect of its core business is an outdated paradigm. As a banking executive once told me, “We’re not a financial services company where we simply use IT. Today, more than ever, we’re discovering that we must be a TECHNOLOGY company that happens to be in the financial services business.”
With that shift in thinking, companies need to reconsider how they can win the game, within the context of solving the riddle of building harder stuff in less time. If you accept that you are now a technology company, then you might also imagine that whoever innovates the best under these circumstances, wins.
Clearly, those who *do not win* are the ones that fail to grasp the essence of this dilemma. Like it or not, everyone is in this box. When I give a conference talk, I often ask the audience whether what they design today is more complex or simpler than what they did five years ago. I also ask how many are given the deadline first, and whether they have more time or less time for their projects than they had five years ago. In all cases, the answers are: more complex, less time.
And yet, every time I read another project failure statistic about the percentage of projects that miss their date, deliver less than promised, or overrun by 100% or 200% or more, I realize that most of the IT world continues to be stumped by this riddle. Some leap onto the offshore bandwagon, thinking that smart and less expensive Indian programmers will know the answer. Others once swore never to write a line of new code again, figuring that buying software packages would differentiate them in the marketplace (huh?), and still others decided to turn over all their IT to an outside supplier and let them worry about it. (You might also reconsider where the “blame” may lie for projects that are deemed “failures.”)
A few – the Harry Potters of the IT world – realized the essence of the riddle. You might wonder whether the answer is contained in these paragraphs -- and you might be partially right. Here are a few snippets that took me a while to uncover, after visiting a lot of places over the last decade or so and sifting through plenty of projects at clients who graciously invited me to do so (you don’t want to know how many).
■ IT projects are about blending the minds of a team. In this model, it’s possible that 1+1+1+1 doesn’t equal 4. It might be six or eight if you get the blending right, and discover how to make real magic happen.
■ Blending these minds is vital – especially since the things you’re innovating today are harder than the things you tried to innovate yesterday. (It’s called knowledge work for a reason.) Mind-blending is very communication intensive.
■ It is a lot harder to blend minds that live, eat, and sleep on different continents.
■ Harder projects don’t like to be time-compressed. They get angry when you try.
■ Adding people to compress time dramatically increases defects.
■ Because of this, you have to think about promising less, but getting it RIGHT and talking a lot with your clients about their needs and interests, every step of the way.
■ If you are in the technology field, chances are you are a compulsive multitasking, overpromising people-pleaser. Accept this and start healing.
■ If you discover a recovery path from this affliction, you will resist your inherent tendency to overcommit. Less can indeed be more.
■ If you don’t believe this, then attempting to cram 10 pounds of knowledge-work into a five-pound bag can actually lower productivity with energy-sapping rework and mind-numbing overtime, while driving defects skyward (by the square of the team size). Ironically, this will mean that your projects will actually take longer and cost more -- the very opposite of what you were desperately trying to achieve.
■ Those who figure out the above, and understand how to execute in light of these truths, will eat you for lunch and deliver successful projects, while yours get canceled from missing dates, overrunning budgets, while slashing functionality anyway at the 11th hour.
Posted by Mike at 01:05 PM | Comments (0)