IBM gives Services staff until 2019 to get agile IBM has told its Services workers to get agile – as in the development practice, not as in yoga – by the end of the year. Internal documents seen by The Register inform IBMers of a new program called: "New ways of working - Agile Values and Practices." This latest effort calls for all Big Blue services staff to quickly …
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"IBM has spent years telling the world that its Notes suite is as fine a collaboration environment as there is to be found anywhere"
I had to "suffer" Notes for several years and it would be nigh on impossible to force me to return. Outlook/Exchange have their faults but at least they are extremely usable.
Notes/Domino feels like a 1980s rebuff , it lack ergonomics, the interface is prehistoric, those tiles, how I hate those damned tiles..... It feels clunky, as if is was thrown together at the last moment...
It should be killed of before it continues to provide further embarrassment for IBM.
I would rather they reworked OS4 and put a serious contender to Windows on the market.
In the absence of the Web, Lotus Notes was a very capable collaboration tool. Back in '97 my (then) employer automated all sorts of tedious tasks that still need emails and paper at my (current) employer living the Outlook dream in 2018.
But as email system Notes felt clunky, and as a web server it felt outclassed, and with the advent of a million different thing-as-a-service it deserves an honourable funeral.
A quick google suggests 'ceremony' is just an extremely stupid word for a meeting. So a standup is a 'ceremony'. You don't actually have to go up in front of a scrum master and have him dunk you in the river as you pledge your eternal soul to the Dark Lord K'Anban.
Still. What the fuck is wrong with these people?
So IBM is ditching email ?,
How will the spam all the employees with the endless barrage of aren't we great emails that consume the 120Mb quota and kill productivity as you wade through them dailly. How will they notify the few remaining staff that they are in-scope for yet another Resource Action, oh and by the way Ginny's package is up another 30% this year.
Oh, perhaps they will drag everybody into local ceremonies to force feed them yet another management bullshit video, wasting days of every productive employees life for no benefit.
jeez, there was endless cack forwarded to me via Notes. Usually a management cascade, and the scrolling to the bottom through several fw: fyi layers would often reveal that someone I didn't know had taken over a role I didn't know existed and the former occupier who I never communicated with was moving onto a role that sounded made up.
How will the spam all the employees with the endless barrage of aren't we great emails that consume the 120Mb quota and kill productivity as you wade through them daily?
You've clearly never used Slack. It is more than up to the task of killing what little productivity one could achieve in a Big Blue environment.
I used Slack in Big Blue. It was brilliant -- you could bother a single person through Notes, Sametime, Slack, and telephone almost simultaneously. You get extra points if you criticize a person for not responding on all 4 channels. Add in a few holdouts using IRC, and you really had a lovely mess.
It's simples for Services teams:
- close all your tickets within SLA's (no action required, so no real change)
- continue to provide over-engineered, exceptionally expensive "solutions" to customers requirements possible to avoid customers requesting solutions we can't deliver. Be "agile" in your responses by scheduling multiple meetings with the customer to gather requirements "rapidly" while continuing to deliver responses in 6+ months.
- continue to deliver our high standard of customer service by responding in a non-committal manner to any customer request. Remember to forward any potential contractual issues to senior management to allow our lawyers to respond as quickly as possible. Our lawyers have followed the agile methodology for many years, sometimes responding before issues have even been identified.
- do all the self-assessed training (exceptional colleagues can complete the training almost instantly...)
- be Agile :)
- act totally surprised while your customers continue to express frustration at the inability
- get "resource actioned" if you're actually capable of doing anything to assist customers.
There is a book by Jerry Kaplan about his experiences as CEO of Go corporation, who tried to do a Pen operating system. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Startup-Silicon-Adventure-Jerry-Kaplan/dp/0140257314
It was very much the classic Silicon Valley start-up before they became fashionable (in that it tore through a ton of money and then tanked) and it is quite well written.
Anyway, at one point ***SPOILER*** they are given a choice by a big customer to go with HP or IBM and choose IBM. This inevitably causes the issues you would expect, but at one point IBM try to shaft Go and to get the customer to use, wait for it, Pen OS/2.
The term 'Pen OS/2' always makes me chuckle every time I remember it.
While some of the new entrants to the crypto currency market place look a little "short term" and "not based on anything other than hope", surely investors would realise that the only thing they might get out of IBM is the financial equivalent of haemorrhoids.
Or is Blue Dollars IBM's latest solution to redundancy payments?
Exec One: "How can we fire programmers on a whim and get cheaper people in without a long ramp-up time?"
Exec Two: "I just read something about Agile, it looks like a great way to dump and load."
Exec One: "Great, let's make it a company initiative and pretend it's for those nitwits' benefit. Then we'll can them."
This is symptomatic of a larger problem...fear of missing out by companies is forcing them to send in the management consultants and force-feed a "digital transformation" initiative on them. On the surface, it looks like another ITIL -- just buy a ticketing and change management system off the shelf and Bob's your uncle.
What everyone is missing is that to do it right, you need a total culture change. I've only understood this in the past few months (and yes, I'm very late to the party, thanks for noticing.) I work at a non-IBM IT services company that's doing something similar, but IMO has a greater chance of actually succeeding. For me, being in systems engineering, the big hurdle has been the --WALL OF TOOLS-- that cloud the actual change that has to happen under the hood. Telling someone that they can't manually make a change, and instead have to feed it through a meat-grinder of CI/CD stuff, who has directly worked with systems their whole career, is a big mind-shift. The Devs have been in control of DevOps for the most part, and so everything is designed to make infrastructure go away. IT services people understand infrastructure and most don't do much software development beyond automating tasks. Meeting in the middle appears to be the key for systems people.
The problem is that the culture change is pretty radical. IBM will have a very hard time, as would any company relying on resources nine time zones away who are pretty disinterested. The reason an "ideal" DevOps system works so well is because the ideal system is a 10-person startup, all in the same office, all understanding every aspect of the operation, and all working over 90 hours a week cranking out fixes and features. It's much harder to implement when your resources are all over the place, and in some cases you don't control them. It sounds like they're just trying to use this as an excuse to get rid of anyone still left in a high-cost country.
By coincidence, received an email today with a reference to the following conference
Apparently, they are looking for a new name for the conference.
How about "Agile or Bust! Sponsored by IBM"
(a nod to the 1969 film "Monte Carlo or Bust!")
This will end in an epic failure. Agile, correctly done, is a philosophy and related approach to solving problems. It has been around for ages in many organizations who practice collaborate working with colleagues in other areas as needed coupled with cross functional meetings as needed to solve problems, etc. Agile as Itsy Bitsy Morons is doing it is a rigid practice that does not address the underlying corporate problems. The philosophy of Agile does not require formal Agile training or scrum masters (an idiotic term), it requires a mind set and a willingness to discuss issues and problems with your colleagues to solve problems.
An aside, does being a retired rugby lock mean I am a scrum master?
If our idiot leaders spent half as much time actually working for a living rather than 'brainstorming' this lunacy, IBM would be a far better place to work.
Every week its some new initiative you have to adopt, or some pointless mandatory compliance exercise.
I'm guessing its just another poorly disguised attempt to get the workforce so pissed off they just leave of their own accord, thus saving IBM their measly statutory minimum redundancy payments.
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