Weekends Were Made for What?

In order to cre­ate a feel­ing of esprit de corps, busi­ness man­agers employ a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent tech­niques. I can remem­ber attend­ing a ses­sion of MacHack, the Mac­in­tosh Pro­gram­mer Retreat at a motel in Michi­gan many years ago where I attended a ses­sion held by one of the Project Man­agers for OS X (or was it OS 9?) regard­ing how they achieved the man­age­ment of such a com­plex and impor­tant soft­ware project. The bouncy woman wear­ing jeans and a T-Shirt offered rem­i­nis­cences like: “I remem­ber that next we did ‘Peanut But­ter Sand­wich Day’ on that Thurs­day, fol­lowed by “Hot Fudge Sun­dae Day” on the fol­low­ing Fri­day…” The rest of the talk was much like this, with all sorts of cute and eccen­tric activ­i­ties that were added to the gru­el­ing work sched­ule to add some breaks, loosen up the work­force, and keep things play­ful and light-hearted, even as tem­pers were grow­ing short (and dead­lines were grow­ing near). Her talk was far more about an approach to human psy­chol­ogy than busi­ness the­ory or resource management.

At this IBM office, the vis­it­ing man­ager for the cur­rent project I’m work­ing on has a mil­i­tary back­ground. Her idea of ‘ral­ly­ing the troops’ (or in civil­ian terms, moti­vate employ­ees in the face of an impor­tant dead­line) are three words: “Co-location, co-location and co-location”. What this means, is that she thinks the best way to get a project done faster (or bet­ter) is to lit­er­ally put every­one in the same room, or nearly every­one, at any rate. For the most part, the peo­ple work­ing on my end of the project, the ‘Infor­ma­tion Archi­tects’ haven’t had the same require­ments to work in the crowded (yet curi­ously, extremely cold) cafe­te­ria. The result may have been some more effi­cient com­mu­ni­ca­tions and knowledge-sharing (as she explained), but with it came the high rate of absen­teeism from colds and flu, which ran through the build­ing as fast as a kinder­garten. This co-location (think co-habitation but just for work) has now, with the upcom­ing hol­i­day sea­son, trans­lated to ‘Everybody’s work­ing on the week­end.’ Yes, on Dec 1^st and 2^nd , the entire project team (all 200 or so of us) will be here at the office. That includes the Infor­ma­tion Archi­tects, along with all of the Busi­ness Ana­lysts, Pro­gram­mers, HTML Pro­gram­mers, Data­base Admin­is­tra­tors, Testers and var­i­ous other peo­ple on the project. Never mind that for us Infor­ma­tion Archi­tects, there’s very lit­tle for us to do. After all, our major role in draw­ing up the wire­frames of the user inter­face for the project was months ago. It would be like a build­ing archi­tect being asked to hang around while the con­trac­tors work on the elec­tri­cal wiring, or per­haps even the car­pet­ing of the build­ing. But that’s the way things work in her man­ual, so that’s what we must do. Aye aye, captain.

So, I’ll be here on the week­end. Will I sit at my desk, wait­ing for a call from the pro­gram­mers in the cafe­te­ria about what default value a field should have, or how a par­tic­u­lar but­ton is enabled or dis­abled depend­ing on the value of some other drop-down menu…? Or, will I be writ­ing in this blog? We’ll just have to see.