What are you going to do?
by Dave Tufts - June 1, 2007 / 5:31pm View more articles
If you take somebody like Michael Jordan, and if you said to him, "Michael, at a certain point when you are running down the [court] and the ball comes to you, what are you going to do?" he would look at you as if you were crazy.
There are a thousand things he could do: he could move almost anywhere or he could pass or he could shoot or he could dribble. He wouldn't even have a clue because he would have to see what was happening.
– Lee Friedlander, talking about how a photographer never knows what he's going to get when he sets out to shoot.
The basketball player referenced above has a plan and a goal. He's practiced and done a fair amount of scouting and research, yet he doesn't really know what he's going to do until he's in a specific situation.
Like the basketball player, or a good photographer, the agile web developer possesses the skill and confidence to react to external forces. They lack stubbornness and are willing to not only change their course, but change course and immediately see the best route to the end goal – even if that end goal just changed.
Comments have been turned off on this blog.
Read something more recent.
RSS
3 Comments
Certainly we can think of dozens of examples of projects that ended up somewhere different then we thought they would, through no fault of anyone involved. Clients' priorities can suddenly change, some unforeseen requirement for integration with some business process can pop up, or the schedule can get pushed one way or the other. Yeah, we need to remain agile to respond to our clients' needs, and not be stubborn when they change.
That said, sometimes our job is to push back, stick to the plan, and deliver the project on time and budget. We've seen clients get caught up in indecision or second guessing a carefully crafted strategy halfway through execution. Sometimes a quick trip through the goals and strategy we developed at the outset is all that's needed to re-ground the project. Sometimes not :-).
I think it's the nature of anything that can truthfully be called 'development'. I liken it to a trip across a sea in a boat. The client is hiring us to help them across to their destination. We may not be able to say with a straight face exactly how we're going to get it done, and we may not be all that certain of exactly where the destination is, but we're committing to doing it with them. Notice I didn't say 'for them'. It requires trust and a small leap of faith on both of our parts to set out together like that, and we're going to make up some stuff on the fly.
Frankly that's half the fun of what we do isn't it?
I'm gonna go mow my lawn. Happy Saturday.