As the “father of management” Peter Drucker pointed out, 21 century is the century of knowledge economy. For a business to thrive in such economy, the most important capital is not physical nor fiscal but human. Who can recruit and retain the best minds in town will be the winner of the game.

Even in an economical downturn like now, while the unemployment rate in United States has gone over 10%, talented people still have plenty of opportunities awaiting them and they ARE making the move. They are not scared of the weak job market. They don’t care about the job security. Because they have a totally different needs than people who are worrying about keeping their jobs in the hard time.

The great psychologist, Abraham Maslow, published a famous theory called “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs” more than 50 years ago in 1943. That theory reveals to us the fundamental and universal human needs.

This theory organizes human needs into five categories, physical, safety, love/belonging, esteem and self-actualization.

Physiological: breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, excretion

Safety: security of body, of employment, of resources, of morality, of the family, of health, of property

Love/Belonging: friendship, family, sexual intimacy

Esteem: respect of others, respect by others

Self-actualization: morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts

These needs are predetermined in that order of importance, often depicted as a pyramid. “The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are met. Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level, needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized. If a lower set of needs is no longer being met, the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs, but will not permanently regress to the lower level.”

In another words, if we would like to engage and motivate talented people, we have to satisfy ALL their needs, from low level to high level.

Here are some examples what tips we can use to satisfy various levels of needs of the talented employees:

• Physiological:
  • No sex harassment
  • Comfortable work environment
  • Pay fairly with a good compensation strategy
• Safety:
  • Play by rule, set the clear boundary at the first place
  • No finger pointing, don’t blame good will
  • Award creativity,
• Love/Belonging:
  • Treat people nicely – Equally, Flexibility of work time, Respect, Intimacy (friendship, family), Fairly
  • Team atmosphere: Create the team (physical tokens, like flags, songs, rituals e.g. weekly meeting), Inclusive, Sharing, Help each other, Protection from outside blames
• Esteem
  • Establish ownership: Specialist, Owner of an functional area, responsibilities, Expertise
  • Contribution: being listened, participated in decision making
• Self-actualization
  • Challenge: Throw challenging works
  • Vision: Clear vision of the future, whole picture
  • Progress: Career path, growth planning, achievements, honors, awards
  • Honor: External feedbacks, Marketing, Ads.

Most importantly, a good manager should assess the right level of needs of his individual team mates. Some people may not be paid fairly. Some are paid well but may be worried about his/her job security. Some may feel safe but may feel isolated and doesn’t belong to the team. Others feel loved but not respected. He/she would like to participant in the decision making process. More senior people may feel stagnant in career and would like to move upwards.

An important aspect of the Maslow’s theory is that satisfied need won’t motivate people any more. Only the unsatisfied needs motivate. That’s why understanding people’s level of needs is the key. Continuing to tend to the low level needs after they are satisfied, e.g. raising the salaries after they are already above market level, won’t help. In the meanwhile, neglecting the lower level needs is also dangerous. Putting a lot of responsibilities to an under-paid employee is a fool-proof recipe to get a resignation letter on your desk.

The talented people are the most valuable assets to our organization. Retaining them requires open conversation with them to find out their needs and thoughtful efforts to satisfy their needs. Maslow’s theory is there to help.

I was listening to the Berlin Philharmonic playing Brahms Symphony No. 3 & No. 4 in Carnegie Hall last Friday night. While I was indulged completely in the beautiful harmony of the music, suddenly I thought about the frustrations I encountered day after day dealing with the Integration of the different IT applications for our company. How I wish those IT systems and the IT teams support them can work flawlessly and in total harmony just like this piece of music! And right at that moment, I realized the key problem here. It’s not because we don’t have the world’s greatest players. It’s because we don’t have a conductor who understand not only all the instruments but also the overall music!

We have a Portal team that develops and maintains our company Portal. We have another team in charge of the application that handles single sign one, authentication and authorization. We have multiple teams who maintains IT applications that specialize in some business functions. We are talking about dozens of IT applications and hundreds of servers. But, that’s the least complicate part.

The most daunting factor is the organization structure. Each application team at least has an analyst team, a develop team, a testing/QA team, and a deployment/configuration management team. On top of that, we have multiple hosting centers, some centralized and some decentralized system engineer, network engineer and DBA teams, various types of technical support teams, performance testing team, capacity planning team, etc. And they are located all over the world in various time zones.

Our goal is to glue everything together, hide all the complexities and give our customer a single entry point for all the business functions they need. This task is certainly no less complicate than the Berlin Philharmonic’s job of delivering Brahms to New York audience.

I can feel that each team is doing their best to make their parts of the system working. Everybody want to do a good job in their own scope. But, nobody really knows how the whole system is glued together, especially the nitty-gritty details. So, whenever an issue happened, people started with saying “It’s not my fault so it’s not my problem” and continued with finger pointing. After several rounds of finger pointing, the right person who know the right details will be dug out. He or she will simply fix the problem in 5 minutes. But it’s never his or her problem since he or she doesn’t even know that integration scenario is possible to come to his/her part of the world!

In my opinion, nobody is in charge is the key reason the integration process functions so inefficiently. We need a conductor who knows how to play violins, what the oboes sound like, how to use to drums. No only that, he/she knows exactly what kinds of music the Orchestra would like to deliver. He/she knows exactly the time when the strings should enter and when the woods should fade out.  He/she will pick the right players into the game and rehearsal the Orchestra time and time again until the end result is satisfactory to his high standard. He/she will be the one who receives the applauds or the blames. Actually, a good conductor will take the blame himself but attribute the success to his/her players.

We have conductors in each application team but we lack such conductor in Integration level. Without this central control person/team, the Integration process is doomed to perform in disarray, like a Orchestra without a conductor, only yielding inharmonic melodies.

I just finished reading an interesting book, “The Greatest Salesman in the World” by Og Mandino. Its Chinese translation was marketed in the name “Scrolls of Wealth” in China and was very popular.

I didn’t realize it was published just 40 years ago in 1968, a best-seller since then, until I read some critics about the book. The story of the book was set in biblical time in Arabic world. It’s about a poor camel boy, Hafid, who eventually became the greatest salesman in his time with unmatchable wealth. However, I can see the story is just a “make-up”, like all the stories in the TV advertisements. Essentially, the author would like to sell his “manuals for salesman”, which he developed for his insurance company while working in rural New Hampshire, as he disclosed in the preface of the book.

The author is indeed a very good salesman for his ideas. The story is catching, persuasive, full of drama, even having a mysterious link to the Bible. Obviously, he followed his own advices to sell, capturing people’s interests, making connections through familiarity (Bible story), demonstrating success stories happened with other ordinary people, and making the items for sale seems scarce and rare thus valuable. Another interesting way he did his selling is to command the reader to read each principle (a chapter or scroll in the book) three times a day for a month. That’s almost like a religious practice. I have to agree it’s the best way to build the principles into habits.

Setting aside the sales pitches, I feel the principles promoted by the author are indeed valuable. It reminded me of two books I love, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie, published in 1936 and “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Steven Covey, published in 1989. It focuses more on principles for living as The Seven Habits than the social techniques as Win Friends. Its ideas of achieving success through building good habits based on good principles make the Seven Habits book not as innovative as I thought.

However, I felt the book has two problems. First, some of the 10 principles for success, elaborated as 10 secret ancient scrolls, are vague. They cover a group of ideas instead of one. For example, “I will live this day as if it is my last”. This idea is powerful but not concise. To describe the principle, the author mentioned other ideas like “appreciation”, “don’t waste time to regret”, “get things done today” and more. Those can hardly be described as one principle. Instead, The Seven Habits are much more precise and fundamental.

Secondly, the author keeps luring the readers to follow the principles by the promises of getting rich and abundant. He keeps appeals to the greedy for material wealth and fame. But, in many places in the book, even the author himself contradicts his own idea of material-oriented life goals. People who don’t value wealth and fame probably will feel as frustrated as I did. Again, the Seven Habits did a better job. It didn’t set the goals for you. You can pick your own life goals and it just helps you to achieve that goal. It doesn’t alienate or exclude any groups of readers.

But, after all, I still feel this is a good book with a lot of thought-provoking ideas. Its way of story-telling and its poem-like writings are enjoyable. Despite the name, the principles it promotes can be used not only to salesman but to all of us who would like to live a rich and successful life, regardless the meaning of success. After all, success in modern world requires us to interact with other people. And in many occasions, that demands selling either tangible things like products or intangible things like ideas, services, or our experience and skill sets.

Some of my notes taken from the book about the 10 principles:

1. Beginning of a new life

• You can change your life by changing your thoughts
• Change requires commitment.
• We are the slaves of our habit. So build good habits.
• Read loud the principle three times a day. Every roll per month.

1. I will greet the day with my love.

• Love everything, sun, rain, animals, all the people, etc.
• Open other people’s heart with love.

1. I will persist until I succeed
2. I am the nature’s greatest miracle.

• I am unique. There is only one exactly like me in the world and in all time.
• Product and salesman are unique.
• Rare is valuable.
• Self-confidence.

1. I will live this day as if it is my last.

• Appreciation.
• No regret. Don’t waste time regret yesterday.
• Finish things today don’t wait for tomorrow.

1. Today I will be master of my emotion.

• Emotion changes constantly.
• Good and bad moods will circle around
• Productivity is based on mood.
• One’s own feeling influence customers.
• Control the emotion by counter action. Laugh when you feel sorry.
• Force the action to control the thought.
• Forget people’s bad treatment because their mood will change.

1. I will laugh at the world.

• Smile is the most human thing.
• Maintaining good mood helps living long life.
• Don’t take myself too seriously.
• Face the world positively.

1. Today I will multiply my value 100 fold.

• Shooting high by set a impossibly high goal.

1. I will act now.

• Only action can turn dream into reality.
• Don’t fear failure.

1. Cry/Pray for help.

• Never for material things.
• Pray for guidance.
• Show me the way
• Knowledge is the most valuable wealth.

Living in New Jersey for almost 10 years, I recently grew some deep interests in the history of New Jersey. After all, knowing the place we are living make us comfort and proud in our everyday life. The places we are driving by everyday start to become meaningful if we can tell their histories. I don’t feel like a stranger or a foreigner as I felt before. “Blossom where you are planted”, my newly acquired motto, starts from knowing the history of where I am planted.

I just came across a good description of the history of New Jersey. It’s short enough to read through quickly but thorough enough to cover all the important points. I like its way to see the history. Not as a boring sequence of “big events” like we used to read in text books, but as a continuous changes of people’s ways of living, driven by economical, technical and political forces.

Hope discovering the history of the place you live and work will give you the same joy as I do!

History of New Jersey

1. Fortunes in Furs (before 1664)

For centuries, the Lenape Indians lived on the land that would become New Jersey. However, their way of life began to change in 1609 when Henry Hudson explored the Atlantic shoreline. Anticipating potential fortunes from the fur trade, the Dutch established the colony of New Netherland. They soon came into conflict with the Lenape, and then with the English and the Swedes, who also sought control of the region. The program ends with the 1664 English conquest of New Netherland.

2. The Two New Jerseys (1664-1702)

After the English conquest of New Netherland, King Charles II of Britain granted the former Dutch territories to his brother James, Duke of York, who divided the colony into New York and New Jersey. James gave New Jersey to his friends, John, Lord Berkeley, and Sir George Carteret, who sold their shares to other investors, known as proprietors. In 1676, the colony was divided into East and West Jersey. From the outset, the two New Jerseys were beset with problems. In 1702, the proprietors asked the crown to take over the government, reuniting New Jersey.

3. Royal Rule and Religious Revival (1702-1776)

The reunion of New Jersey did not solve its problems. New Jersey shared a governor with New York, Lord Cornbury, who aroused the ire of many New Jerseyans. In 1738, New Jersey obtained its own governor, Lewis Morris. Land ownership continued to be disputed, resulting in widespread rioting. At the same time, a religious revival known as the Great Awakening spread throughout the British colonies, resulting in the founding of Rutgers and Princeton universities. African Americans and Native Americans were drawn into the Awakening. In challenging established church authorities, the revival helped pave the road to the American Revolution.

4. The Republican Rebellion (1776-1791)

New Jersey was the Crossroads of the American Revolution, being strategically located between the British military headquarters in New York City and the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia. This program examines protests in New Jersey against the Stamp Act and other British imperial measures, the passage of New Jersey’s first state constitution in 1776, Washington’s stunning victories over the British at the battles of Trenton and Princeton, and the effects of the Revolution on women and African-Americans.

5. Monopolies and Mechanics (1791-1804)

Alexander Hamilton’s vision of a manufacturing center at the Falls of the Passaic River lays the groundwork for a discussion of the founding of the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures in Paterson in 1791. The program looks at the chartering of corporations and the granting of transportation monopolies to steamboat and railroad companies and how these monopolies became a major political issue during the Jacksonian period in New Jersey. The so-called Market Revolution resulted in a fissure in the unified world of masters, journeymen and apprentices of the colonial period. The early organization of unions, the development of a political movement of workers and the lives of women and children working in the textile mills are explored. The documentary examines how the Market Revolution changed home life as well as work life, resulting in a new definition of women’s roles.

6. Vistas of Democracy (1804-1865)

The American Revolution unleashed a flurry of new ideas about freedom and equality. But not everyone in the early nineteenth century enjoyed these rights. New Jersey gradually abolished slavery in 1804, but while women and free blacks who owned property could vote under New Jersey’s 1776 constitution, that right was taken away in 1807. African Americans and Quakers helped slaves from the South escape through New Jersey on the Underground Railroad. After the Civil War, the women’s movement split over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution, which guaranteed the right to vote to African American men, but not to women.

7. A State of Many Nations (1865-1876)
New Jersey has been ethnically and religiously diverse since colonial times, but the colonial religious denominations were mostly Protestant. In the early nineteenth century, immigration shifted to Germany and Ireland. Many of these newcomers were Catholics who settled in New Jersey’s cities and brought with them the tradition of drinking beer and wine on the Sabbath, shocking the Protestant establishment. Middle-class reformers attempted to “Americanize” the German and Irish immigrants by promoting temperance and using the newly created public schools to make the immigrants into good Americans (meaning Protestants). The German and Irish immigrants resisted these attempts to use the public schools for religious proselytizing and created their own parochial school system, requesting the state to provide funds for their schools as well.

8. Technology in the Garden (1876-1910)

In 1876, Thomas Alva Edison opened his so-called “invention factory” on a hill in Menlo Park overlooking the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks. Between 1876 and 1882 Edison filed more than 300 patents, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera and the electric light. There were, however, social implications for technological development. When Paterson broad-silk manufacturer Henry Doherty increased the work assignments from two to four looms, his weavers went on strike with the support of the radical Industrial Workers of the World.

9. The Progressive Banner (1910-1947)

In the gubernatorial election of 1910 the Democratic Party nominated the president of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson. As governor, Wilson proposed reforms, including direct primary elections, banning of ballot box stuffing, an authority to regulate public utilities and a workmen’s compensation act. Despite his reputation as a reformer, as president of Princeton, Wilson continued policies that denied admission of African Americans; and, as governor of New Jersey, Wilson was reluctant to support woman’s suffrage.

10. The Suburban State (1947-Today)

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a major of shift in political power in New Jersey. In the early 1900s, a coalition of rural Republicans and urban Democrats controlled state politics. In the second half, the century political power shifted to the suburbs. The new state constitution of 1947 established a powerful Supreme Court, which became a flashpoint for controversy in the last half of the twentieth century.

More to read:

• New Jersey Legacy
• History of New Jersey in Wikipedia
• History of New Jersey from New Jersey Government website
• A digital archive of New Jersey History from Rutgers University

Serving in an IT department of a non-IT company, I learned over the years one or two things about our business partners, who are our best friend and patrons, at the same time our ultimate source of headaches.

Bittersweet Partnership

After all, my job is to help them to be successful in their fields, in Sales, Marketing, Finance or Service. In a sense, IT department exists only because our business partners need us. And we need them too, to define the requirements and specs, to decide about the business logics, to promote the products we developed, to sponsor our projects, to give us feedbacks for improvements, etc. So, it’s truly a partnership.

However, we constantly fight with our business partners. They want too much from us within unrealistic short time. We insist on an absolutely necessary infrastructure change they don’t understand and consider too risky. We are furious that they keep changing their mind about the requirements in the last minute. They are bitter about the delay of the new release. This list can go on and on.

Bad guy, good guy

Standing in IT’s shoes (even dress like a developer), I used to think it’s all their fault. They are too picky, technically ignorant, inflexible and simply arrogant. Until one day, I was asked to sit with one of our service representative in the service center, who is responsible for answering client’s calls. She must type in client’s data as fast as she can and answer client’s questions at the same time. She has to be quick because other clients were waiting in the call incoming queues and the average time to handle one call was tracked. To accomplish all her tasks, she relied on the computer and the software, which we produced and maintained. She had to apologize to the client if she couldn’t find the information she needed or it took too long to load up a screen. I can understand how frustrated she was when the software gave her an error she didn’t understand at all.

That experience totally opened up my eyes and I started to see things through the eyes of our business partners. As application users, they don’t understand and don’t want to understand how many cutting-edge technologies we put into the system, how many servers we have setup for an application, and even how many sleepless night we spent to guarantee a smooth release. They see the application as a block box, which provides the necessary functionalities they need to do their jobs. They only care if the application behaves as expected, is available when needed and allows them to login as quickly as possible.So, they are not the bad guys who just want to make our life miserable. They just want us to solve their problems without giving them more troubles.

Root cause

The biggest challenges are the differences between us. We have different tasks in hand. We see things from different view points. We have different criteria for success. We have different expertise and we don’t even speak the same language! When IT people start to talk about the Web Services, RMI invocations and Object-Relational Mapping, our business partners just get dumfounded.This difference by nature caused distrust between IT and Business.

Sometimes, the “black box” idea is leveraged to IT’s benefits. We sneak in the new technologies we would like to learn in the next release. We don’t tell Business about the infrastructure change because they don’t need to know. Well, things blew up. The new technology has some unexpected bug that crashed the application for specific clients. The new server IT rolled in over the weekend processed one third of the client data wrong. Business doesn’t ever trust IT any more. They scrutiny any changes IT propose and become suspicious about any thing IT tells them.

A group of people are brought on board to solve this communication issue between IT and Business. They are the business analyst and the project managers in IT side. In business side, some of them start to accumulate some technical expertise and become the contact person or user champion to represent business when IT needs to be dealt with.This new middle layer is supposed to smooth the operation between IT and Business. However, another issue arises. IT people starts to tell business how to do business and Business people starts to mandate IT how to design the software and the system. Because people think they know enough to have some control on the other side.

Solution

So, can two people from totally different background work well together and develop a productive partnership? Yes, at least the famous book about relationship, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, says so. If a man and a woman, who are designed by nature totally differently can work together to organize a highly productive unit (called Family), why cannot IT and Business work together effectively?

Here are some of the suggestions based on my experience.

Fundamental

Shared goal/vision

Find the common ground with business partners. We both want to make the product successful. We both want to serve our customers better. We both want to eliminated or at least reduce the number of issues, so we can all have a good sleep at night.Once the common goals/vision is constructed, we can both work toward the same direction and we have some criteria to evaluate our decisions.

Understand and accept the difference

The first thing to work on is to understand the difference between IT and Business. What are other people would like to accomplish? What do they care and don’t care? How they approach this issue and how they think about this issue? IT people tend to think an issue mathematically and abstractly, while business people tend to think more practically in terms of business impacts.Embrace those differences, not reject them. Make good use of the differences to tackle the same issue from different angles. Learn to appreciate an different view.

One Team

The organization should be designed to reward the overall results and reward collaboration based on the shared goals.If everybody is put into one team, with clearly goal and clearly defined positions, people will play like one team.

Techniques

Think Win-Win

Encourage people to think Win-Win solution. Don’t stop at win-lose and lose-win solution. Relationship is as important as the end results.

Build up Trust/Respects

Trust is the magic that makes everything working seamlessly. There are many ways to build up trust between IT and Business, including face to face interaction, cross-training, experience each other’s job and encourage interactions outside working environment.

Communication channels

Make the communication channels smooth. Let the information flow freely between IT and business in an honest and open way.This can be achieved through periodical questionnaire for feedbacks, frequently meetings, share of the documents, inclusive email distribution, discussion forums, and the web 2.0 techniques like wiki and blogging.

After all, we need to treat our business partners truly as partners. Time should be spent to build on relationships, trust grown, appreciation expressed and happiness of success shared. If we do so, not only we will find our life as IT professionals easier and merrier, but also we will find more friends and less enemies in our life.

Business History is a field that studies the evolution of business in all periods and all countries. It’s an interesting multi-discipline field that involves research by historians, economists, sociologists, and scholars of business administration.

Associations

Association of Business Historians

Business History Conference

Japan Business History Society

European Business History Association

Journals

Business History Review

Books

The Oxford Handbook of Business History by Geoffrey Jones (Editor), Jonathan Zeitlin (Editor)

Business History around the World by Franco Amatori (Editor), Geoffrey Jones (Editor)

The Management Century by Stuart Crainer

Other Resources

BusinessHistory.net

The Basics of Business History: Top 100 Events at a Glance

In the recent town-hall meeting, our vice president of application development mentioned that in her experience, usually applications will only become great in their version 3.0. That’s in terms of feature richness, usability, stability and performance.

This insight fits well with my own experience and observation. The implications are developers are spending a lot of their times doing re-factory, which means rewriting the underline implementations for the existing functions.

At the first glance, re-factory seems to be an awful thing: tedious, time-wasting, boring, but unavoidable. However, if we really want to tame this beast, we need to take a deep look at its origins and natures. And it may come out as a necessary and valuable way to improve the quality and the business values of our applications.

Why not do things right at the first place?

It’s a question lingering in our minds when we take over a project for other people, either the consultants or colleagues who move on to other projects, and we feel the strong need to re-factory the codes. We feel if things are done in the right way, we don’t need to waste time and efforts to re-factory now.

We can blame the previous developers with their laziness or ignorance or lacking of skills or vision. However, if we retrospect our own experience, we will be more understanding.

There are several main reasons:

1. Pressure to market

This is especially true for first iteration of development. At that time, the business wants something out to the market as soon as possible to beat or match the competitors. The managers care about getting things done more than getting things right. They are running a very aggressive schedule and keep pushing things forward. There aren’t many time to waste in figuring out the best solutions.

And they are actually right. Innovation or “first in the market” matters most for new products.

2. No feedbacks

Before a product first goes to Production and welcomes its first user, it’s very hard to imagine how people will use it, how frequently they will use it and how many of them are going to use it simultaneously.

One way to overcome that is build over capacity and very flexible but very complicated solutions, which may eventually turn out as unnecessary.

Another extreme is build simple and straightforward solutions just to satisfy the limited requirements.

Either way will be considered “wrong” in the eyes of later developers who are equipped with more knowledge about the use patterns of the application.

3. Technology advancement

We used to write our own MVC framework cause at that time there is no popular ones available. Now, when we compare that house-made framework with Struts, we find it cumbersome, not flexible enough and not maintainable.

Traveling back on time, the technologies or best practices we have now are simple not available at the time when the application is first developed. We can hardly blame those developers with lacking of knowledge of something doesn’t exist at their times.

Why things are not working now?

The driven reason for re-factory is that things are not working smoothly any more.

Business are either changing to another direction or the same business simply flourishes, bringing hundreds of thousands users. New features are needed to earn big clients or match major competitors. The neglected requirements for performance, high availability and scalability are revived.

Even things aren’t broken. Once we have accumulated better knowledge of the business and the operation and the better technologies are available now, we know we can make things better and faster with cheaper cost.

The moment for re-factory comes!

Re-Factory is Painful

Whoever goes through the full process of a major re-factory project will agree it’s a very painful process.

Several main technical obstacles:

• Large scale. The sheer number of codes that need to be touched is overwhelming for a large project. That manifest in resources, time and budget. That’s the very reason the re-factory project in one of the places I worked before failed three times.
• Lack of documentation/knowledge: Consultants, out-sourcing and high turn-over rate make it hard to find people who know all the details of the project. And software developers are notorious in producing poor documentations.
• Hard to test: Unless the tests are automated, it’s just time consuming to retest all the functional points with all the exceptional branches.

Usually, those technical obstacles will invite many suspicious voices in the management team before launching the project.

Here are some examples:

• “Why fix it if it’s not broken?” – Lack of vision
• “It will impact our delivery schedule.” – Resource conflicts – continuous delivery vs. architecture change
• “Just throw in more hardware” – Hardware can resolve all the problems.
• “This is huge investment with uncertain results” – Fear of unknown risks
• “Developers just want to play with new tools” – lack of understanding of the new technology and no trust for developers

Those negative feedbacks are expectable and understandable. Without careful planning ahead of time, a large scale re-factory project can be a huge black-hole that drains up all your resources and times and eventually your credibility.

Solution

Several years ago, we did a re-factory on a large internet application. The project was pretty successful. We completed the majority of the work in 6 months and successfully went to Production in 12 months.

Here are some tips I learned from that project.

Prototype/Pilot

All the re-factory ideas should start small, with some prototype or pilot programs. Don’t just write down the ideas in documents. That means little to the management and the business partners.

A pilot program supported by solid improvement numbers will be more persuasive than any documents.

By the way, since it is small scale, you can easily squeeze some time to crack that out. Don’t need to wait for the green signal from the upper management team.

Tangible Improvements

The re-factory must have some tangible improvement. The vague terms of “improve architecture” or “use advanced technology” hardly fly.

Although the biggest improvements in our project is a more scalable and modern architecture, the actual improvement that earn the credit (and the investment) is the user interface. Our business partners in marketing department simply love the new user interface and it’s improved usability.

In additional to User Interface, anything vital to business and also measurable are ideal. For example, another re-factory project I am aware of improved the throughput by 17 times, cutting the operation duration for one business process from several hours to 10-20 minutes. That’s the tangible result you want to present to the management team.

Dedicated Resources

The worse thing for a re-factory project is a prolonged project cycle. I saw so many projects that last more than 6 months simply die out. Too many changes in the business environment can happen in 6 months. So is the management’s mind.

For a re-factory project to survive, it has to be done as quickly as possible. The key to make that happen is have a dedicated group of developers working on that. If possible, don’t have the same group of developers work on supporting the existing product and simultaneously working on the re-factory project. You will find them spent 60% of the time working on supporting issues. It will only slow things down and eventually kill the project.

Involve QA at very beginning

The biggest challenge for re-factory is not development but testing.

If fortunately you already have all your functional tests automated, congratulations, you are in the dream land and don’t need to worry about tests like rest of us. Otherwise, the early you have the testers involved, the better.

After all, re-factory is test-driven development. The QA can bring to the developers the very much needed test cases and business knowledge. Sometimes, developers are having hard time understanding why a piece of logic exists in the existing code. There the QA knowledge comes handy.

Pairing testers with developers along the development process is also very helpful. Usually, re-factory will apply the same improvement idea to the entire application. Having that idea tested early, finding out any catches and fixing them will save big times in later stages, when the same error will be repeated everywhere.

Co-Existence

You are done with the re-factory project. Time to kill the old bird, right? Absolutely not!

The chances are the re-factorized product, although new and shining, have some bugs. Maybe some less-frequently used functions are missing. Maybe some data-triggered issues are hiding somewhere. It’s a new product, not the one heavily tested over the years by the users.

The best choice is to deploy both the old and new applications. Select a small number of Beta clients and put them in the new application. The majority of the clients remain in the old application. For them, it’s business as usual.

Only after 3-6 months and several iterations of hot fixes, you can gradually switch clients from the old application to the new one. By doing so, you always have a fall-back plan. If a client has some serious problem in the new application, they can be easily switched back to the old one.

For The Long term

You are done with one successful re-factory project. Great! But unfortunately, the forces that drive for this re-factory are not stopping. They will continue to drive for next re-factory. It’s a non-stop game.

Don’t need to be disappointed. Just look at Microsoft Windows and Office. Basically, their business is “re-factory business”. They keep inventing new and better ways to do the same thing. And that’s how they earn their living.

Same to enterprise application development. We all need to be prepared to continue this cycle of reinventing ourselves.

Now, we have suffered one re-factory project. We know all the catches now. What we can do to make the next and the next after next re-factory project easier and faster?

First, obviously, we need to establish the culture of agility and continuously improvement. Just keep in mind, we cannot stop with what we have and we have to keep improving.

Second, force developers to write more documentation, in any forms, comments, word doc, wiki, notes, read me, etc. Even the best developer will forget about why he puts that weird piece of logics there after 2 years without some hints.

Then, once you have a chance, automate your test cases. It will be a life saver in re-factory project. It can cut the project time into half while improve the overall quality. Because developers won’t forget about any test cases any more. And they don’t need to go through the manual test again and again.

The last but not least, keep in touch with your business partners. Not only you will know what to improve, but also you will gain the very much needed support when you promote your next re-factory idea.

Good luck and Happy Re-factory!

At the days when the first computer was designed in 1940s, the software development business was born. It has been evolving fast and furiously ever since that.

Talking of software development, we, developers, will immediately think of programming languages like C++ or Java or their ancestors like FORTRAN or COBOL. Programming with those languages, or “coding”, is at the center of our software development career.

However, several new software development trends started to threaten the crown position of “coding” in the kingdom of Software Development.

Take a deep look at Software and Codes

A piece of Software is a set of instructions that can be deployed on a hardware platform to carry out certain tasks. Usually, it’s broken into hierarchical layers. The lower layer is closer to the hardware and tends to be more generic while the upper layer is more application specific.

“Codes” are a bunch of instructions written in high level languages like C++, Java or C#. They need to be compiled and deployed to the platform before the hardware can utilize them.

We can see codes just one form of software. It’s hardly the only form for sure.

Configuration Programming

There is another type of artifacts we deal with frequently, the Configurations. While the codes are stable logics and have to be developed before deployment, the configurations are flexible logics that can be easily changed at deployment time or even at runtime.

Configurations can take many forms. XML files or database tables are two most popular ways.

We used to do a lot of “coding” or programming and do little configurations. But, recently, things seem reversed. Not only have we moved more and more logics into configurations, but also we have started to consider “configurations” part of programming.

Spring’s Injection of Control is a good example. The relationship between business logic objects are embedded in the Spring configuration files. So are Struts and many other popular software frameworks.

The line between codes and configurations seems blurred. Business logics can be easily swapped between codes (“hard code”) and configurations. The trade off is between stability vs. flexibility and maintainability vs. traceability.

Customization Packaged Software

Configuration programming came to the extreme in packaged software like SAP or Oracle 11i.

The only thing necessary to make the packaged software work for a specific scenario (client) is to make some changes in the configurations, a process dubbed as “customization”.

That’s something very different than the traditional “coding”. But, as we move towards a more specialized software development industry, customizing and assembling packaged software modules may be the best way to develop software now and in the future.

Visual Programming

Another hit comes from the promise, “Anybody can become programmer.” This sales pitch has long been popular in the Software Development Tools industry. The idea is that the tools vendor will manage all the underline hard wiring and provide the developers a very simple user interface to define the business logics.

Microsoft has been a pioneer on that one. Their Visual Basic turned the programming into drawing diagrams and writing minimum amount of codes. Obviously, .Net is going through the same path for development, only further.

The major J2EE vendors, like IBM WebSphere and WebLogic, are also catching up this trend. Each developed a sophisticate IDE that grant the developers the capability of “quickly constructing new process-based applications using drag-and-drop development tools to visually coordinate the interactions”.

In the hot arena of “Business Process Management” and “SOA”, we also see this trend. Complex business processed are designed in “drawings” in the GUI and then output to BPEL language.

Look Into Future

Thirty years later, we may experience a totally different type of software development, just like what we are doing now is unimaginable for the programmers working with the punch cards decades ago.

We will spend less and less time coding and more and more time in thinking through the business processes and business logics. Once we draw the logics or write the formula on paper (real or electrical one), our job is done. The rest are all automated by third party tools or packaged software.

At that time, we may all bear the title of Business Analyst rather than Software Developers. Personally, I have no problem with that.

Happy New Year!

I guess a lot of people are very happy to see the year 2008 passed by, just like myself. What a dramatic year! First we witnessed the house value dropping and foreclosures in the neighborhood, then the crisis of the subprime mortgage. Soon, the bad news crawled all over the financial sector. Investment banks, insurance companies, commercial banks, even big names like Bear Stearns and Leman Brothers burned down into ashes overnight. The darkness, like cancer, continued to spread into other industries, such as automobile and even high-tech. The stock market crashed. The unemployment rate soared. The words we heard most in the past several months are “great depression” and “bail-out”, not what we usually heard even in a bear market.

And the worst part, it’s not over yet. Although debating among each other, the economists agreed the economy won’t recover until the later half of 2009. And that’s from the most optimistic point of view.

With all the negative news, it’s very easy to feel depressed or stressed out in this unpleasant time.

Kind of like feeling depressed in the winter in the northeastern United States (where I am living), chilly, heavy wind blow, cloudy sky, crooked tree branches and yellow grass, no sign of life.

But, wait! We still got Christmas in winter time! Even the darkest nights were lightened up by the holiday lights!

Where can we find hopes and opportunities in the depressing days like now? Here are four directions to look:

History

Whenever we feel it’s the end of the world, we can read about the history. Most likely, the history will tell us the challenges we are facing now is hardly as big as the ones faced by our fathers and grandfathers.

If they can survive the Great Depression, the World War I and II, the Oil and Energy Crisis, and the Vietnam War, why we cannot survive this one? After all, we already got over with the dot-com bubble, in 2001. (List of Recessions in the United States)

The average recession will last 17 months, so we have reason to be optimistic about 2009.

Success Examples

Even in the hardest times, there are winners.

Dale Carnegie attracted thousands of peoples to his self-improvement training courses in the 30s, right in the middle of the Great Depression. Why? Because people were desperate to hear about how to become successful at their lowest points in life!

Another good example is Barack Obama, our president-elect. If Bush did a better job in his second term, if the Iraq war ended gracefully, and if the economy wasn’t so bad, we probably will wait longer for our first African-American president.

The hardest times have the best opportunity for ones know how to grasp it.

Change

Ancient Chinese believed the “new” will be born out of the “old”. When one force goes to its extreme, the reverse force is already born inside.

Take a simple example. Look at the high oil price we were facing at the beginning of year 2008. Everybody hated to see the price of gas continues to soar. Every time to the gas station feels like being robbed. But, there is a reason behind it.

We all knew that oil is not limitless in world reserve. Some scientist forecasted that we are going to running out of oil in several decades. But, since the oil is so cheap in world market (yes it’s still pretty cheap considering how rare a resource it is), there is not enough incentive to start looking for alternative energies. (source)

It’s the high oil price that eventually put the energy on the center of the agenda for the government. We heard that both president candidates talked seriously about energy in the campaign. After elected, Obama soon appointed a Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Chu his energy secretary to carry out his campaign promises, “New Energy for America”.

What we can learn from this is the greatest challenge calls for the biggest change. Or in other words, dramatic changes can only be born out of the hard times.

Nobody will even think about change in sunny days. Why fix it when it’s not broken? People seldom have the vision to change the course until they hit the hard wall. But once they hit the wall, it’s much easier to persuade them to switch course than before.

Here come the opportunities. Be the leaders and advocates of CHANGES! That’s exactly what Obama did and why he succeeded in the hard times in November, 2008.

What changes are needed by the businesses in bad economic conditions like this?

It’s as simple as do more with less.

If you can provide an idea, a service or a product to increase the market share, profitability and productivity while cutting the cost, you will be the winner in hard times like now.

Here are just some of the common ideas:

Improve Productivity:

• Process Re-engineering
• Automate manual processes
• Upgrade the tools

Cut Cost:

• Outsource non-critical operations
• Re-negotiate the contracts with employees and suppliers

All those changes will be easier to carry out in hard times than in good times because people reset their expectations in doom days.

Opportunities are abundant now if you know where to look.

Self-Improvement

Unfortunately, some of us have already been heavily affected by the doomed economy, e.g. lost the job, lost half of the investment, lost the house, etc.

Why didn’t lights shine upon us?

Well, first we need to accept.

Suffering is unavoidable. Otherwise, it’s won’t be called “hard times”. The sooner we “accept” the fact, the faster we can pull ourselves out of it.

To accept, we need to understand.

Why this misfortune happened to me? Think in terms, “What did I do wrong?”, not in terms “This is all somebody else’s fault”. If we think it’s others’ fault, we will find ourselves powerless and helpless. Since we are not responsible, there is nothing we can do to change our current situation.

On the contrary, if we are determined our destiny is in our own hands, we can take control and get ourselves out of this hole we fall into. We can learn from the mistakes and start improving ourselves.

This is the best time to start deep thinking. In good times, we are too busy or too proud to think. We just follow the trend, believing everything will be fine. Now, we have time and motive to think deeply about our life, our priorities, our goals and the future strategies.

When we think everything through and have a plan for the future, we can move on to carry the plan out. Once the plan is accomplished, we are surely improved, if not totally reborn. We will have better jobs, better home, better investment portfolios, in summary, a better self, if we learn from our mistakes.

“Arise from ashes”. That’s the gift from the disaster.

Year 2009 is here, with dreams and hopes.

It’s time to raise our heads and look for the lights shining upon us. The dawn is coming for all of us who can learn from the history and the successful examples to bring changes into our work and lives, with the help of the darkness.

Have a happy and prosperous new year!

Wish every one a healthy, peaceful and happy new year!

May all our dreams come true in the coming new year!