Editor: Philippe KruchtenUniversity of British Columbia [email protected]
Silver Bullets:No Secret Ingredients
Joe Marasco
THERE’S NO GREAT secret to software de-velopment. Put a team of the right people in place, surround them with a healthy orga-nizational culture, manage them well, and collectively they’ll fi gure out how to be suc-cessful. As all good managers know how to manage well, the only issues that remain are the defi nitions of “right people” and “healthy organizational culture.”
A survey of the literature reveals the prob-lem: everyone has their lists, which range from what to look for in recruiting candi-dates to the attributes required in forming your team’s ethos. It’s diffi cult to argue with anything on any of these lists—they’re unas-sailable and politically correct—and therein lies the problem. They’re too long. Not only will you never fulfi ll the implied desiderata in any one candidate or culture, but the lack of prioritization clouds a fundamental issue: when you have 10 equally important items, you can’t focus on any of them.
The Problem It’s easy to throw lots of ingredients into a pot; the more diffi cult task of distillation requires that you turn up the heat. Let’s fo-cus on just three attributes each in recruiting people and building a team culture, because that exercise forces tough decisions about what you absolutely can’t do without.
Let’s begin by defi ning the problem do-main as the project. A project is defi ned as a time-bounded effort undertaken by a team of people. All projects have three aspects:
• What are we trying to do?• Why are we doing it?• How do we plan to get it done?
The most stable ingredient over the project’s
life cycle is the why. We often modify the what as we come to better understand the problem space. And we almost always fi ddle with the how before we’re done; we learn as we go and often implement things differently than we fi rst planned.
Who, where, and when are consequences of the what, why, and how, and follow natu-rally and logically once we distill the latter. But without understanding the what, why, and how, we can’t move on to recruiting and culture.
Projects come in all sizes, and the criteria we seek apply to everything from a mile to a marathon. Sprints are over so fast that gen-eralizations don’t apply to them. For shorter and simpler projects, the people dimension tends to dominate; when projects become longer and more complex, and the team size grows, the cultural factors tend to infl uence the outcome to a greater extent.
The People DimensionProjects have a short-term focus, and we re-cruit for skills much more heavily with that in mind. Long-term recruiting places more emphasis on learning ability and communi-cation; any set of specifi c skills will become obsolete with the passage of time and get re-placed by a new set, over and over again.
Here’s my short list for recruiting project team candidates. Remember, the challenge is to limit it to only three items:
• intelligence, because good judgment is vi-tal in fi guring out the what;
• motivation, because the why drive is both crucial to success and internal; and
• skills, because they embody the
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competency—the how—to get the job done.
Are there other valuable assets? Sure, but the must-have characteristics are key. I maintain that without these three, you’re in trouble. You can ad-dress a minor skills deficit, but it adds cost and inefficiency.
These three fit together nicely. Ac-quired skills are the result of intelligence applied over time; intelligence implies the potential to continue to develop new skills as the need for them arises; moti-vation is the fuel that drives the process.
A frequent quibble comes up at this point: sometimes intelligent people ex-hibit poor judgment. I agree that there appear to be cases of very bright people who make bad decisions; they’re a liabil-ity on teams. But I consider good judg-ment to be a component of intelligence, so I recruit for intelligence rather than explicitly looking for judgment. I make a similar argument for communication skills: it’s no accident that intelligent people are usually superior communica-tors, both as teachers and learners.
Not every candidate will excel in all three dimensions, but it’s crucial that candidates don’t have big issues with any of them.
Coupling the People to the ProblemA mapping begins to emerge:
• what → intelligence → the brain (analytic);
• why → motivation → the soul (af-fective); and
• how → skills → the sword (prag-matic implementation).
The art of putting together great teams is to meld people with complementary strengths. In the American Revolution, Ben Franklin best epitomized the brain, Thomas Jefferson the soul, and George
Washington the sword. Together they were a powerful combination, each brilliant in his specialty and certainly more than adequate in the other two. Yet it is difficult to imagine any one of them having nearly as much success in one of the other roles.
Coupling the Culture to BothBut what about the cultural cradle that surrounds a nascent team? You have to bind them together and align them to the mission at hand. Once again, I limit my list to only three items:
• customer focus, to turn the vision into a truly useful what;
• integrity, to create a high-trust en-vironment and ensure fidelity to the why; and
• results orientation, to make sure that the how is delivered.
These three criteria often take people by surprise. Customer focus is often lack-ing when teams become too internally directed. Without constant attention to what the product consumer requires, you risk even the best teams missing the mark—they might offer something interesting and unique, but it won’t be what customers want.
Integrity also comes as a bit of a shock, as many believe it’s an individual attribute, not an organizational one. In fact, it’s both, and it’s most important that it reside in the organizational cul-ture. Low-integrity people are driven out of high-integrity organizations, but, unfortunately, the converse is also true. Without a culture that stresses integrity as fundamental, it’s impossible to have a high-trust environment, and so much depends on trust that we can’t succeed without the integrity that fosters it.
A results orientation means getting down in the dirt and getting it done. Good intentions and valiant efforts often precede great results, but in no case are they acceptable substitutes for them. The successful organization val-
ues whatever it takes to get to the finish line. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the end justifies the means; that would trump the integrity card, which we won’t allow. But it does mean that we put results ahead of process; we know that from time to time, we might have to bend, or even break, a rule or two to achieve the objective.
A useful cross-check on your recruit-ing process is to assess whether the can-didate is a good “cultural fit” for the or-ganization. Outliers who aren’t usually turn out to be high maintenance, despite their otherwise positive characteristics.
Putting It All TogetherTo continue with our mapping, we can now superimpose cultural norms on top of our previous picture:
• what → intelligence → customer focus → the brain (analytic);
• why → motivation → integrity → the soul (affective); and
• how → skills → results orienta-tion → the sword (pragmatic implementation).
This means that the what will ulti-mately be determined by focusing on your customers and applying the team’s collective intelligence to figure out the product or service that can best satisfy them along all relevant dimensions. The brain is the appropriate metaphor here. The why is sustained by both mo-tivation and integrity. These two fac-tors both drive and preserve the intent of the project. The soul captures the emotional content of these elements. Finally, the how is all about the imple-mentation, and it’s mostly the province of skills and results orientation. Logisti-cal details are buried here, and without results orientation, the project never gets finished. The sword serves as the symbol of winning in the heat of battle.
This mapping is comprehensive, co-herent, and aesthetically pleasing. Fig-ure 1 may serve as a one-page reminder.
continued from p. 104
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A lthough my use of three lists of three items each certainly isn’t perfect, it was designed
to fit a specific context. You might have other things that you feel are essential, but you might try constraining your lists to three items to find your own personal truth:
• What are the three things that de-
fine the problem space?• What are the three qualifications
for team candidates?• What are the three elements of the
culture that foster success?
Let me know what you come up with.
You can view a five-minute pre-sentation about these ideas at
JOE MARASCO retired as a senior vice president and business-unit manager for Rational Software in 2003 after 17 years of service. From 2005 to 2008, he was president and CEO of Ravenflow, a software start-up addressing requirements definition using natural language processing. He is the author of The Software Development Edge: Essays on Managing Successful Projects (Addison-Wesley, 2005).
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Recruiting: what individuals bring• Intelligence, because making good decisions about the “what” requires keen judgment• Motivation, because it fuels the “why” and inspires others to go above and beyond the call of duty• Skills, because they embody the competency required to get the “how” done
Cultural context: what the organization provides• Customer focus, to crystallize the “what,” taking it from a vision to something useful• Integrity, to foster a high-trust environment and keep the “why” at the forefront• Results orientation, to successfully deliver the “how” by meeting or exceeding expectations for all criteria
Characteristicsof high-potential
candidates
Characteristicsof high-
performancecultures
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Achieving the impossible: turning dreams into reality
FIGURE 1. Successful projects result when teams combine the personal characteristics of intelligence, motivation, and skills with the
organizational assets of customer focus, integrity, and results orientation.
