www.pegasus.lse.ac.uk

Agility, Improvisation, or Enacted Emergence?

Dr Yingqin Zheng, Dr Will Venters, Dr Tony Cornford

This research was undertaken as part of PegasusEPSRC: Grant No: EP/D049954/1www.pegasus.lse.ac.uk

10 Dec 2007 ICIS, Montreal

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Introduction

Pegasus Project – Exploring practices of GridPP: the UK particle physics Grid

Agile systems development?

Methodology as faked? Fiction? Amethodical?

Organisational improvisation

Improvisation Paradoxes

Enacted Emergence?

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Organizational Improvisation

Metaphors Jazz (Weick 1992, 1999; Barrett 1998, Hatch 1999) Improvisational Theatre (Crossan, 1998)

Cunha (1999): “the conception of action as it unfolds, by an organisation and/or its members drawing on available material, cognitive, affective and social resources”

Convergence in time of conception and execution Bricolage – finding solutions from available rather than optimal

resources

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Improvisation Paradoxes

SituatedImprovisation

environmental turbulence task uncertainty

unplanned-for occurrences task complexity drop your tools

visions

(Moorman and Miner, 1998, Ciborra, 1996); (Dahlbom and Mathiassen, 1993)(Miner et al., 2001) (Hutchins, 1995, Weick and Roberts, 1993)(Weick, 1993a)(Hatch, 1999, Mintzberg and McHugh, 1985,

Hutchins, 1991, Weick, 1993b)

Structured Chaos

organized anarchyPersistent structures

collateral structureexperimental culture

aesthetic of imperfectiona sense of urgency

(Cohen et al., 1972)(Lanzara, 1999)(Cunha et al., 1999)(Cunha et al., 1999)(Weick, 1999) (Crossan, 1998, Hutchins, 1991,Mirvis,1998)

Planned Agility

convergence of planning & execution

plan to improvise mixing the pre-composed &

the spontaneousmagnetic fieldsartful planning

(Moorman and Miner, 1998)

(Miner et al., 2001)(Weick, 1998)

(Weick, 1993a)(Baskerville, 2006)

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Improvisation-Paradoxes Cont.

Reflective Spontaneity

retrospective sense-making

ex post interpretation transient constructs

emergent order

(Weick, 1993b)

(Lanzara, 1999) (Lanzara, 1999)(Miner et al 2001)

Collective Individuality(Mirvis, 1998)

facilitative leadership trust and kinship

fluid communication influence and persuasion

hanging out

(Crossan, 1998) (Crossan, 1998, Weick, 1993a) (Orlikowski, 1996, Miner et al., 2001)(Hatch, 1999)(Barrett, 1998)

Anxious Confidence

(Mirvis, 1998)

moodsindividual skills &

creativity formative context

organizational memory

(Ciborra, 2002)(Hutchins, 1991, Moorman and Miner, 1998, Orlikowski, 1996) (Ciborra and Lanzara, 1994) (Moorman and Miner, 1998)

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Particle Physicists and Grids

Currently constructing the worlds most powerful particle accelerator… the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

Searching for Higgs Boson – “1 person in 1000 worlds, or a needle in 20 million haystacks”

12-14 million gigabytes per year.

100,000 CPUs.

40PB disk, 40PB tape.

“Worlds biggest Grid“

CD stack with1 year LHC data(~ 20 km)

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Background Context

Building the LHC Computing Grid (LCG):

Highly distributed, complex and poorly defined systems development task.

Cutting edge hardware and software used.

New software standards being negotiated.

Middleware and support software being developed in a range of languages.

Grid must be distributed and proceed at different paces because of funding.

Particle physics has a long tradition of such large scale global collaborations (Traweek 1988).

GridPP (UK Contribution to LCG) To a significant degree agile…

Collaboration of 230 people in 19 UK universities, RAL and CERN.

Decisions are made democratically and consensually, and implemented

by influence and persuasion.

Network rather than hierarchy

Virtual, federated, overlapping and inter-connected.

Virtual meetings, wikis, blogs, mailinglists

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Research Findings

Situated Improvisation

EGEE, LCG, e-science, funding, hardware, software…

Structured Chaos No top down authority; extensive management structure/communicative channels; competing technical solutions

Planned Agility “day to day we keep putting one foot in front of the other … and different people, depending on their role in the project, are more oriented towards the ultimate goal or more oriented towards the little concrete footsteps that need to be taken...”

Reflective Spontaneity

-pragmatic, “getting the job done”, fire-fighting

-monitoring, accounting, sense-making

Collective Individuality

-freedom to improvise and innovate

-shared goal, trust, facilitative leadership, “hanging out”

Anxious Confidence -pressure from LHC switch on; “Yes it will work.”

-history of cutting-edge computing and large collaborations

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Enacted Emergence

Enactment (Weick 1977) “people invent organizations and their environments and these

inventions reside in ideas that participants have superimposed on any stream of experience (ibid. p. 196)”.

Emergence Temporally emergent qualities Interactions of existing elements In a historical context

The evolutionary approach of system development (Dahlbom and Mathiassen 1993)

Enactment of sensemaking

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Enacted Emergence

EnvironmentComplexity, uncertainties, visions,

pressure, risks

Historyorganizational memory of improvisation,

history of innovation,

Chaos

trial and error, improvisation, bricolage

Order

continuity, stability, resilience

Individualscompetent, confident, creative, committed,

pragmatic

Collectiveshared goal, trust, hanging out, emotional bond, facilitative leadership, aesthetic of

imperfection

Planningbroad direction, retrospective sense-

makingsensemaking

Unfoldingdemocratic debates, spontaneous actions,

natural selection

Practicestinkering, innovation, invention

Structurecollateral, de-layered, democratic,

communicative

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Contributions

Improvisation paradoxes Agility should embody a deliberate or natural mixture

of structure and improvisation, order and changes, intentionality and flexibility, spontaneity and reflexivity, collectivity and individuality

Agile systems development “in the wild” Embeddedness of agility Large group performance is possible when the

ambience is right. Science vs art

Enacted Emergence Duality between structure and agency