MK Anderson

Content & Context Strategy, Culture, Writing, and Other Stuff

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Agile as an Unwieldy Marching Band

Oct 11, 2015 By Keith Anderson Leave a Comment

Here in north Texas, marching bands are large and competitive with their own cultures.  My daughter’s high school band has around 260 kids. They are a competitive band and the competitions are extravaganzas of massive orchestration. The complexity of the shows is stunning. My little high school band had only a couple of dozen kids and they just wore green polyester and marched in straight lines with the odd occasional left turn.

My daughter’s band, however, can take up nearly an entire football field when standing still and they quickly form large patterns like their high school’s letters while marching sideways and backwards in intertwining lines. The complexity of a set’s mechanics are almost a distraction from the performance itself.  These elaborate band shows are modeled through software, but the execution is managed by section leaders and band directors. While directing by instrument and other organizational break-downs help make it easier to coordinate, in the end, the band has to operate together.

Bands of America Timber Creek HS

I use the opening act before band performances to process my working day. (The warm-up is an avant garde experiment with time displacement where giants donned in ceremonial faux-armor group, struggle, and regroup while searching for a pointy leather balloon. The surreal part of the performance is there is a clock that slows down, teasing you with the Theory of Relativity.)  As I decompress and have sensory input outside of a computer screen, I reflect on Agile, Scrum, and the nauseating smell of liquid arena cheese.

I’m less enamored with Agile and Scrum as of late. I just don’t think it’s a one-size-fits-all system. The transition from Waterfall to Agile has been a little ugly. The unforeseen consequences are rearing their heads as we spend copious blocks time fixing things we broke in haste to make dates.

For example, with Waterfall, we had accounting systems that tracked project numbers. It wasn’t perfect, but if you knew the project number, you could search any internal system and find documents, diagrams, code, etc. Now, project numbers are peripheral. Those same systems (e.g. our testing and bug tracking system) are free-for-alls. The taxonomy of projects is based on whatever the person entering the data thinks of. It could be project name, number, or cutesy Scrum names you only know if you’re on those teams.

Agile is like vaguely written legislation. It’s open to interpretation and abuse. Part of the problem lies in the Agile Manifesto, published in 2001. Each tenant of the manifesto is utopian and lacks specificity. Agile is one of the best, neutral (i.e. not religious or political) examples I can think of demonstrating how philosophical underpinnings affect the execution of an idea. Unless the organization has absolute cultural practices that supersede process ambiguity, then things will stop getting done with each new process, for example, documentation.

Organizations who don’t have a strong content strategy embedded in its culture will lose knowledge when processes don’t unconditionally require matters of record.

Traditional software development methods seem clunky. Gathering and writing requirements is perceived to be arduous. Agile software development is a convenient excuse to shortcut research and documentation. On the surface this seems like a good idea. Who reads the requirements anyway?

Basic software documents like requirements, use cases, user studies, etc. have quick expiration dates. There’s no question about it. But it’s not the documentation that’s important—it’s during the exercise of producing traditional documentation when the magic happens. When business analysts work with developers to determine technical constraints, for example, they are providing context for everyone. Yes, this takes time, but the consequences of not going through those exercises is a future full of reconstructing knowledge often, meetings with the only goal of clarity, arguments over semantics, and a disregard for complexity and nuance.

There’s fast and then there are aimless, spastic, endless releases. The more release cycles are sped up, the more things we drop to meet deadlines. The larger the scale of software, the more complex its environment. While mobile apps lend themselves well to Agile, large enterprise applications interconnected with other large enterprise applications have layers of complexity you can’t deal with in a six-week sprint. At what scale does ambiguity across dozens or hundreds of autonomous teams no longer function?

Bands of Americas 2015 Hebron HSI often feel Agile in large enterprises is like a big marching band without a planned show. We are all out on the field and left to our own autonomous teams who are trying figure out where to go to form the letter “T.” There is a band director and drum major signaling to us but they keep looking at the visiting team’s band for queues so we can improvise competitive moves. Then every once in a while the school’s principal shows up and yells at us maneuvers the district’s administration wants added into the show. And, by the way, we need to stop using one-third of the field because they’ve decided to add folding chairs there. Apparently we aren’t maximizing the potential revenue of the stadium.

Back in my Air Force days, I marched in the honor guard. Four of us worked together to present the flags at ceremonies. We were flexible enough to fall in with larger parades or individually, we could march with members from other services (i.e. the Army, Navy, and Marines). I know how to march and I have a snappy salute to boot. But I would never hold up in my daughter’s band because I learned military rather than band marching, the scale is much greater, and the purposes of each are distinct (not to mention considerable time has passed since then, but let’s keep our eyes on the pointy balloon).

Orchestration of so many people is strategic, not tactical. The trick, I think, is to work the process most applicable to the scale of the project. Using different methods for different circumstances, planning scalable processes, setting absolute standards for matters of record, and paying attention to what is and isn’t working are all more in the spirit, rather than the letter of Agile.

Rediscovering Focus

Aug 10, 2015 By Keith Anderson 1 Comment

It’s been a long time since I’ve sat down to actually write a serious blog post. If you don’t already know by my shameless self-promotion, I’m working on a book. As I’ve mentioned before and to many people, I don’t want my illness to be a defining thing. Yet, there are some things I’ve learned.

I nearly died, several times over. I was intubated for three weeks. It’s not like TV, where coma patients hop right out of bed and begin killing everyone who put them there, as well as zombies. So many zombies.

Illustration of a brain from the early 1900sInstead, recovery has been arduous and filled with false hopes, unimaginable frustration, and drugs, lots of drugs. One thing I began to notice during my recovery was my mind not working with me. Intubation took its toll: it was three years and several surgeries later before I could feel physically normal.  My cognitive functions were also impaired from being put under for so many surgeries and all those drugs I mentioned erlier. My mind needed rehab too.

That’s why I’ve not been on social media much since 2011. At first it was just hard because when I woke up after intubation, I couldn’t even hold my cell phone; it was as if it weighed a hundred pounds. Later on, I would discover I needed glasses. Being in a pain-and-nausea-drug-fog blurs the vision and dulls the wit. In the meantime, my brain flew on autopilot.

There was a point where I was afraid I would lose my focus for good. My work was suffering and I feared losing my family, house, and any reason to live simply because I couldn’t think.

About a year ago, I talked to a neurologist. I had just had another surgery in May and felt that physically I was on the mend but my mental acuity was at its worst. After my conversation with the neurologist, I went on brain rehab. I paused social media indefinitely and dug into research for my book. Real research, not just Googling. I dusted off my library card and accessed EBSCO. I read challenging books by Robert Stalnaker, Peter Ludlow, and John MacFarlane. I also dug back into favorites from my dusty bookshelf by Walter Ong, Michel Foucault, and Charles Goodwin.

This all felt like I weighed 500 pounds and exercising for the first time. There were days I cried from frustration because things I previously never thought too much about were now challenging. For example, spelling. Even today I see red squiggly lines under typos and can’t figure out why the spell checker is flagging words.

This entire process brought me to appreciate focus. Getting off social media and putting my phone away has opened up a whole new world to me. It’s a world where you can study the tops of everyone else’s heads. In this world, you can observe people mentally derailing when they hear a notification. Sometimes you can infer from their expressions that they know they are talking to you, but the phone… It’s all something creepily similar to the world MT Anderson wrote about in Feed. The only difference is we don’t have a physical implant of the Internet in our heads. Yet.

My book is coming along now that I’ve crossed the threshold of pain it took to overcome such a tremendous emotional, physical, and mental setback. I don’t recommend you try it. I do, however, recommend you begin honing your own focusing skills.

The physical and virtual worlds are always with us, singing a siren song of connection, distraction, and options. We rarely are completely present in one moment or for one another. Jackson, Maggie. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Prometheus Books, 2008, ch 2.

First and foremost, read Maggie Jackson’s Distracted. Maggie is ringing the alarm about the world’s attention deficit disorder. I wanted to interview Maggie for my book and she was amicable about it but declined because we couldn’t meet face-to-face. This is impressive to me. Since I’ve never met her in person, and I can only assume this is true, but I bet it is: she must give those she interviews her full attention. It’s apparent in her writing that she is paying attention to detail and is hyper-aware of the technological distractions most of us consider life’s background noise.

Next, I recommend you set time limits to your social media dives. Think less than an hour a day. Your family will thank you. You will also realize that you don’t have to be attached to “the conversation” 24/7. It will still be there when you get back. Also, with 2016 around the corner, what will appear in your social media feeds will be offensive, ignorant, and divisive. Why get frustrated with people soapboxing their politics online anyway? I have pre-election social media dread already.

Also, establish boundaries. This is tough because we’ve collectively attached the same level of urgency to our interruptions. Where I work, there are days where I do nothing but respond to instant messages (IMs) as an ad hoc to-do list. This is especially difficult because responsiveness to those IMs is expected, but focused work like writing and research suffer immensely. I have been blocking time off on my calendars so I can have uninterrupted working sessions. During those times, I make sure my phone is put away too. Remember interruptions can come from ourselves.  I’ll write more on that later.

Finally, talk to others about distractions. Recommend Maggie’s book and use that as a starting point to frame how you are trying to be more productive. Tell people just because you don’t respond immediately to text messages or IMs, it doesn’t mean you love them any less. It just means  you are trying to be productive and make a difference at work, at home, or anywhere you need to actually do something.

Thank you for taking the time and attention to read this. See? You’re already on a good start.

Presentation from the 2015 STC Summit

Jul 2, 2015 By Keith Anderson Leave a Comment

Under the Influences: Context as Strategy from Keith Anderson
Here is my presentation from the STC Summit. The turnout in my session was better than I expected. I received a lot of great feedback and interest in my upcoming book. Now if I could only finish the manuscript…..

Recovery, Writing, Blogging, Etc.

Jul 2, 2015 By Keith Anderson Leave a Comment

Nothing has been posted here since 2011. Many of you know I became ill toward the end of 2011 with pancreatitis. It nearly killed me, several times. The recovery has been a long, slow, and painful ordeal full of truly horrific moments as well as some good ones. I don’t want to be defined by this event yet it will be with me the rest of my life. I’m grateful to my family and friends who helped out with the fundraiser. It’s humbling to have been shown so much generosity that I will never be able to return. I can’t thank everyone enough even though I’ve tried.

My family and close friends who put with my craziness can tell you I wasn’t always there during this time. Under a recommendation from my doctor, I dropped off social media for a while and worked on some cognitive rehab. That led me to begin writing a book.

This is still the same WordPress blog I’ve had for many years now, but I’ve archived all of my old articles. I’m cleaning house. Much of this blog was me finding my way but things are different now. I will re-release probably 60% of the old stuff and delete the rest as part of my own personal content strategy.

Speaking of content strategy, that will be the primary focus over at futureproofingcontent.com. Here, I’ll still write about writing, music, and stuff I like.

About Me

Keith Anderson has more than 20 years of experience as a professional and technical communicator. He has worked in many industries including telecommunication, retail, healthcare, banking, and IT consulting. This diversity has helped him develop a broad range of experience in technology. Read More…

I'm Listening To

From Second Sight by Satan
from the album From Second Sight.
51 weeks ago via last.fm.

Copyright © 2023 Michael Keith Anderson