Now you're just being practical

The phrase 'being practical' gets banded about so many times it's ridiculous. Especially when things tend to look difficult, complex, time-consuming or just plainly a lot, this phrase gets thrown onto the table as a substitute for actually doing work, or actually taking hard decisions.

I propose we take the phrase back, and use it in its intended case... taking a common sense-stance, when none seemed appropriate.

The folly of having a sportscar in Holland

Driving a sports car is one of my favorite things to do. Big growling engine, exhilarating speed, and everyone around you looking jealous. Too bad those cars are hugely expensive.

Not too mention that owning one proves to be more of a headache than you realize. You can't just park it anywhere... well, you could, but you would spend a ton on fixing scratches and bumps. I couldn't just leave the car anywhere without it getting broken into. The gas prices are ridiculous, and if you would drive one economically, that would defeat the purpose of having sports car in the first place.

You can't drive a sports car really fast in Holland either. There are few roads that you can really drive fast on, and even if you can, you would have to bob and weave between all the traffic. Just pushing the pedal a little bit, puts you somewhere to the back of a truck.

And if you consider renting instead of owning... well, it's pretty much like paying for sex. You know the car has been driven around before, you pay an insubordinate amount of cash for thirty minutes, and when you're done, you're left broken by the car's stiffness.

Is it still called iterative, when you're treating it like a project

People have gotten used to working in projects, with a defined start and a definitive end. You would start off by deciding what to do, how to do it, and then plan accordingly. At the end of the project the results would be known, and given to the client. The client would then be happy... hopefully.

However it is more likely that as the project progresses, you will find that the desired results will not be met. Or that the client has changed his mind, or that the market environment has changed. Anyway it means your project has to face a tough schedule to still make the original deadline.

The promise of iterative project frameworks is that you will be able to act earlier on such changes. You have a mandate to change course and replan each iteration, because the project is scheduled as such.

And still these kinds of projects (or at least projects which are presumed to be of this kind) can fail to the very same problems iterative frameworks are supposed to solve. I've found these failures to have some common characteristics:

• Iterations are handled as if they were small, individual projects. Instead of having one big problem, people make several small ones. That in itself is not an issue, but...
• No feedback and no interaction between iterations means that a failure in one iteration reverberates in subsequent ones. There's no learning curve, because each iteration is self-contained.
• The client of a project is hardly involved in the iteration at all. Just at the very end. It places higher importance on the end of each iteration to meet its requirements each and every single time. What you end up with, is just a series of deadlines of similar status as if you would have one big deadline at the end of a non-iterative project.
• The organization, the company that the project is contained in, is not flexible enough to deal with the changes after each iteration. Sometimes people, tools, hardware and software need to shift each time. If the acquisition cycle for these is longer than the iteration itself, an iterative project framework will always fail.

As far as I can see people have difficulties understanding projects in the first place, let alone shifting mindsets to iterative working. It is a definite sea change, and people would just rather fall back into things they know (or think they know). That's why people make the same mistakes all over again, even when they think they're trying something new.

White out - In case your Facebook status is not good enough

It's the same old story. Boy meets girl. Girl teases boy. Boy and girl play around. Boy and girl say they like each other. Boy and girl go steady. Girl asks boy to stay the night. Boy sneaks out in the morning the first few times. Girl buys more expensive lingerie. Boy stays around longer. Girl finds a home for the two to live in. Boy and girl go to the bank to secure a mortgage. Boy and girl sign for a mortgage. Boy and girl live together in the house they bought together. Boy and girl start irritating each other. Boy and girl start fights. Boy doesn't come home anymore. Girl and boy break up. Girl whites out boy's name from the doorsign.

Standards

So we finally get around to getting universal chargers for mobile phones. However what do we do in the meantime with the old phones then? Are they going to offer me a universal adapter on the phone, which by the way won't be universal? Or should I get a new phone completely?

I do hope Apple joins the club, or will everybody hop on the iPhone/iPod charger trail?

Typical example of good idea, worse implementation.

Naivete, or the art of trust and respect

Having grown up in the city I always lock up my home, my car, my bike, OCD-style. I'm not always open armed to strangers and beggars. I even expect people around me to act the same.

Now when I move to more rural areas, people actually are nicer, and more open, and more welcoming to strangers. I even find it weird when they do so, without demanding or expecting something in return.

But when they move to the city, they really can't afford to act like home. If they do, they get robbed, stabbed, ripped off, thrown out and kicked to the kerb. However, they are not in the wrong. Their way is the right way. It just doesn't work anymore in a different environment, where values have gone south... or west... somewhere else than back home, out in the country.

Sad really. For us.