Tradition Vs Innovation – Story of an Ancient War
If you notice, you may observe that most of our nonintellectual discussions and conflicts are wars between tradition and innovation. Here you may find a person trying to convince others that one should stick with the legacies: experienced, practices, and patterns – not necessarily using the spoken words, but some contextual jargon; while the other person is contradicting. If only innovation and creativity can make a difference. Or in other words, you learn as you go. The same quarrel exists in our software engineering field, at least in our local industry as I see.
1. The Fundamentalist Craftsmen or Blind Followers
There are people who have strong belief in old practices. They always have the same number of documents, same life-cycle, identical design, and unbelievably a single strategy for every project. The most surprising point for me is that even the failure is unable to make them believe that there’s something wrong. Instead of trying to make some improvements and searching for the shortcoming in their practices and strategy, they start believing that failure is a norm, or it’s not failure at all. For instance, you’ll hear them saying “Clients never get satisfied” or “Losing deadlines is a norm in our industry”.
Examples -make things easier
In a software project, the offshore back-office development team shares the documents reside in their local repository with the the on-site front-office team to let them update the documents. In absence of their access on offline documents the local team shares the documents via email with the remote team. Obviously they get frequent version conflicts in documents and when it happens, they arrange a meeting and manually resolve the conflicts in the documents. For months, they suffer with this problem but avoid change in their practice e.g. having an online document repository instead of shareing the documents on email. The term coined here is Brute Force approach as Steve McConnell called it
2. The Innovator – or scientist, we can say
Away from the above category, the innovators are what most of our new graduates comprise of. They start with buzzwords like Web 2.0, cloud computing and believe that legacy practices are obsolete and that the senior folks are not creative at all. They drive their projects for learning, ignoring the ground realities they neglect the cost and risk of change and avoid exploiting legacies: patterns and practices. Since they believe that they make things better than they are, it’s possible if you see them writing their own DB connection pooling in technologies having built-in connection pooling or writing their own classes from scratch instead of extending the existing one. They often try to make simple things state-of-the-art and having insufficient knowledge and experience they get lost in the middle. The term coined here is “Silver Bullet” as Steve McConnell says.
3. Engineering Mindset: the most needful
The moderate mindset - or engineering mindset as I say- tends to utilize and exploit the experience, invested by the lots of great minds avoiding useless reinventions but never shy to address the issues with in the particular scenario, if it doesn’t fit with. The mindset says that understand your objective whether it’s build-to-learn or learn-to-build. It says that to be honest and successful, an engineer shouldn’t behave like a scientist who build and destroy just for learning. And it says that there’s always room for improvement since it’s a going concern but it’s not the ultimate goal of an engineer instead it’s to deliver the most optimal and economical.
A single practice may have different out comes when followed with or without reason. So, if a practice is being followed by majority, most probably there are reasons, try to find them, dont’ shy asking other followers if you couldn’t, but if nobody else knows, you have at least one reason to avoid it. Better to have your own with reasons instead of following blindly.
Being an engineer, I do not believe that I am right all the way, considering that I’ve limited amount of skills, knowledge, experience. Your comments and disagreements will be anticipated hoping they’ll help us having a balanced mindset.
By: Catalyst
About the Author:
1. The Fundamentalist Craftsmen or Blind Followers
There are people who have strong belief in old practices. They always have the same number of documents, same life-cycle, identical design, and unbelievably a single strategy for every project. The most surprising point for me is that even the failure is unable to make them believe that there’s something wrong. Instead of trying to make some improvements and searching for the shortcoming in their practices and strategy, they start believing that failure is a norm, or it’s not failure at all. For instance, you’ll hear them saying “Clients never get satisfied” or “Losing deadlines is a norm in our industry”.
Examples -make things easier
In a software project, the offshore back-office development team shares the documents reside in their local repository with the the on-site front-office team to let them update the documents. In absence of their access on offline documents the local team shares the documents via email with the remote team. Obviously they get frequent version conflicts in documents and when it happens, they arrange a meeting and manually resolve the conflicts in the documents. For months, they suffer with this problem but avoid change in their practice e.g. having an online document repository instead of shareing the documents on email. The term coined here is Brute Force approach as Steve McConnell called it
2. The Innovator – or scientist, we can say
Away from the above category, the innovators are what most of our new graduates comprise of. They start with buzzwords like Web 2.0, cloud computing and believe that legacy practices are obsolete and that the senior folks are not creative at all. They drive their projects for learning, ignoring the ground realities they neglect the cost and risk of change and avoid exploiting legacies: patterns and practices. Since they believe that they make things better than they are, it’s possible if you see them writing their own DB connection pooling in technologies having built-in connection pooling or writing their own classes from scratch instead of extending the existing one. They often try to make simple things state-of-the-art and having insufficient knowledge and experience they get lost in the middle. The term coined here is “Silver Bullet” as Steve McConnell says.
3. Engineering Mindset: the most needful
The moderate mindset - or engineering mindset as I say- tends to utilize and exploit the experience, invested by the lots of great minds avoiding useless reinventions but never shy to address the issues with in the particular scenario, if it doesn’t fit with. The mindset says that understand your objective whether it’s build-to-learn or learn-to-build. It says that to be honest and successful, an engineer shouldn’t behave like a scientist who build and destroy just for learning. And it says that there’s always room for improvement since it’s a going concern but it’s not the ultimate goal of an engineer instead it’s to deliver the most optimal and economical.
A single practice may have different out comes when followed with or without reason. So, if a practice is being followed by majority, most probably there are reasons, try to find them, dont’ shy asking other followers if you couldn’t, but if nobody else knows, you have at least one reason to avoid it. Better to have your own with reasons instead of following blindly.
Being an engineer, I do not believe that I am right all the way, considering that I’ve limited amount of skills, knowledge, experience. Your comments and disagreements will be anticipated hoping they’ll help us having a balanced mindset.
By: Catalyst
About the Author:
Ahmed is a Senior Software Engineer / Tech. Lead at Avanza Solutions. He has eight years of experience in software engineering profession.
The Creative Business, an overview within I.T. and Innovation
June 22, 2009 by admin
Filed under Online Business
Every business, whether it has a core IT function or deliverable or not seeks to achieve and strengthen their own market differentiator. But how do we create the behaviour that will ensure that we truly achieve what we believe we can?
It follows that every business, especially in the current climate, needs to innovate. Do you rely on the Developers, the analysts or the Directors to be creative? No – it should be a core behaviour right through your business – however big, or however small it is.
So how do we get our people ‘unleashed’ in this area?
Thinking – Challenge the norm – Innovate
There is a school of thought that says that creativity, something most people regard as a talent you either have or you don’t, is actually a skill like any other. It can be trained in the same way as you condition the brain to excel in any other skill. So if you can train IT skills, you can train creative thinking?
The key ingredient in getting people to innovate and be creative is to take away the barriers that naturally prevent it in a normal business environment. For example, you might expect the following thought process in almost any business.
1. Why should I try to be creative? I might fail. I will have to persuade others to get on side. Better that I just keep my head down.
2. Things are going ok, why change it? And if things get bad, then no one will want my crazy ideas with all their uncertainties. Better I keep my head down.
3. If I go public on that idea I had, it might not be 100%. Better I keep my head down.
4. The only great ideas get backed up by fact and logic in the end, so logic should come up with the good ideas – where’s the need for me to be creative? Better I keep my head down.
Great ideas don’t come from the sky in a flash of creative genius, they come from the confidence to challenge the norm – with the authority of knowledge and experience.
So what’s the short answer?
Have the confidence to be creative yourself and have the confidence to allow your people to be creative.
Confidence is the key. Successful innovation comes when people have the confidence to challenge, the confidence to know from experience that new ideas are possible and better ways can be found.
The norm is most people do what you want them to do – what they think they are paid to do. The minority, a few rebels, don’t. It is expected that the challenge to the norm will come from the rebels, so the rest, the majority, don’t challenge by nature.
Make creativity and challenge a norm in your team, not the sole jurisdiction of the rebels. Make it an expectation of behaviour – finish every team meeting with an opportunity to air new ideas. Give your team the confidence to have them. Most importantly, expect your team to have them. If they do not, then the job is not being done – that is a shortfall in performance.
Eventually you get a new ‘norm’ – the Creative, innovative business or team you have set out to create
By: Grant
About the Author:
It follows that every business, especially in the current climate, needs to innovate. Do you rely on the Developers, the analysts or the Directors to be creative? No – it should be a core behaviour right through your business – however big, or however small it is.
So how do we get our people ‘unleashed’ in this area?
Thinking – Challenge the norm – Innovate
There is a school of thought that says that creativity, something most people regard as a talent you either have or you don’t, is actually a skill like any other. It can be trained in the same way as you condition the brain to excel in any other skill. So if you can train IT skills, you can train creative thinking?
The key ingredient in getting people to innovate and be creative is to take away the barriers that naturally prevent it in a normal business environment. For example, you might expect the following thought process in almost any business.
1. Why should I try to be creative? I might fail. I will have to persuade others to get on side. Better that I just keep my head down.
2. Things are going ok, why change it? And if things get bad, then no one will want my crazy ideas with all their uncertainties. Better I keep my head down.
3. If I go public on that idea I had, it might not be 100%. Better I keep my head down.
4. The only great ideas get backed up by fact and logic in the end, so logic should come up with the good ideas – where’s the need for me to be creative? Better I keep my head down.
Great ideas don’t come from the sky in a flash of creative genius, they come from the confidence to challenge the norm – with the authority of knowledge and experience.
So what’s the short answer?
Have the confidence to be creative yourself and have the confidence to allow your people to be creative.
Confidence is the key. Successful innovation comes when people have the confidence to challenge, the confidence to know from experience that new ideas are possible and better ways can be found.
The norm is most people do what you want them to do – what they think they are paid to do. The minority, a few rebels, don’t. It is expected that the challenge to the norm will come from the rebels, so the rest, the majority, don’t challenge by nature.
Make creativity and challenge a norm in your team, not the sole jurisdiction of the rebels. Make it an expectation of behaviour – finish every team meeting with an opportunity to air new ideas. Give your team the confidence to have them. Most importantly, expect your team to have them. If they do not, then the job is not being done – that is a shortfall in performance.
Eventually you get a new ‘norm’ – the Creative, innovative business or team you have set out to create
By: Grant
About the Author:
Article by: InfoShack
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