Competence Development: The Cone of Incompetence
Managers are responsible for competence development in an
organization.
But, for some reason, this doesn't always happen.
Steve McConnell has
described the Cone of Uncertainty in
his books.
his graph tells us that project estimates
are wildly inaccurate at the start,
and only become better over
time, when more is known about the nature of the project.
I now think that there is also a Cone of
Incompetence.
The Customer
At the far left of the Cone of Incompetence is the
customer.
The customer has thought long and hard about a new
project (usually more than a year)
and now that he finally decided that he wants it,
the customer wants it delivered in just two months.
There is usually some arbitrary deadline that happens to
be outside the customer's scope of control, therefore negotiation about the
deadline is impossible, because the customer "cannot" change it.
The Account Manager
A bit to the right is the account manager, who is a
little more competent than the customer.
Unlike the customer the account manager knows what a
timebox is,
and he knows some benefits of iterations and frequent
delivery, with weekly customer feedback.
He just doesn't know how to sell it, because the customer
doesn't want all that.
So the account
manager ends up selling a big requirements study,
because the customer feels safe owning a big document
with a detailed specification of a product. The customer won't read it, but the
customer will be happy. And that's important.
The Project Manager
In the middle of the Cone of Incompetence we find the
project manager.
She is more competent than the account manager because
she knows exactly how risky
the project is going to be, with an impossible deadline,
no timeboxed regular releases, and little or no customer
feedback during the project.
Nevertheless, she is very eager in getting the project
going, and the project manager assembles
a team consisting of 45 first-time employees, interns, gnomes, trolls
and pizza delivery boys.
When added together this team should be able to burn
exactly the number of days
that was estimated in the requirements study. She might
even have had time
to write down a Risk List. But it is somewhere at the
bottom of the pile
that now contains the new high priority features that the
customer has sent her.
The Software Developers
Further to the right we find the software developers.
They are more competent than the project manager because
they understand all the risks
and know that the project is never going to make the
deadline
with any manageable product of sufficient quality.
However, they still enjoy working on the small parts that
they have been assigned to.
Code is code, after all. But in the hurry to finish their
assigned tasks,
the software developers forget to test half of the stuff they wrote.
However, as for the quality of the project, they couldn't
care less, because they were not involved
in all the wrong decisions that have already been made in
the first place.
The Software Testers
On the far right side of the Cone of Incompetence we find
the software testers,
who are the most competent people in the organization, and
who will make sure
that lousy products do not get shoved out of the door to
customers.
Unfortunately, the software
testers don't exist.
Because software testing means overhead.
And overhead costs must be cut because of the losses
already made in previous projects.
This, of course, was a decision made by…
The Managers
Meanwhile, the managers are doing their best to promote competence
development
in the company. But, somehow, it just doesn't happen.
http://noop.nl/2008/02/the-cone-of-inc.html
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