Tabatha's software development takeover

My partner was watching Tabatha's Salon Takeover and whilst I initially dismissed it as yet more reality TV dross I began to see an uncanny relevance on the dysfunctions in a hair salon & in a software development shop. IT is a lot more professional and complex than a gaggle of coiffures whinging about hair colouring, right?

The show follows a tried and tested format which goes like this.

"Let me show you whats been going on."

The first thing Tabatha does is sit down with the beleaguered salon owner & show them what has been going in their salon during the day.  To us the viewer, it seems incredible that the owner needs to be shown the incidents as they happened directly under their noses - they work in the same place as the renegade stylists, why have they not picked up on it?  

Usually, a couple of things become evident:

1. Lack of passion - the owner has checked out long ago & is now just going through the motions. Even if they are 3 months away from bankruptcy. 
2. Isolation - the owner has their own little work area. They are physically not able to see what is going on around them. And they want it that way.

In his book Joy Inc.,  long time dev manager, Richard Sheridan, goes through exactly the same stage. "I would take long drives through the back country roads in order to arrive as late as possible, then spend half my day playing FreeCell with my screen turned away from the door. I had stopped caring."

How did Richard get his groove back? XP - not Windows XP (hopefully no-ones that desperate) but eXtreme Programming from Kent Beck. Richard literally & metaphorically tore down the walls of his IT department, introducing paired programming to foster greater collaboration, team work & a shared ownership.

"At the end of the week some of you will be working here, some of you may not..."

Back to the show, Tabatha would meet the staff by calling them all out to the front, lined up where she would pretty much give them both barrels from the feedback cannon.  I've had this happen to be me after a rather lousy software launch. The dev manager decided only then get his hands dirty & have a look at the quality of the code we were creating. He lined us up and gave us a dressing down on the amount of rookie errors he had spotted in there - such as not handling nulls after calling the database. It was all basic stuff & it was horrible to see it all laid out like that but here's the thing: he was right! At the time I was a new .Net developer so I glad for the feedback, I'd never had it viscerally pointed out to me. My colleagues on the other hand were not so happy, in fact they were pissed off. It was almost as if the attitude was "who was he to criticise us?!" & I put this down to a few things, the way the feedback was delivered, the attitude of the devs & the fact that feedback was so rare, we weren't used to handling it. As Tabatha says "...at the end of the week some of you will still be working here, some of you will not" - at my place redundancies were announced shortly after that launch. Maybe if we had been a little more upfront & honest about where our code was, that could have been avoided - who knows?

"What is this? This. Is. DISGUSTING."

Tabatha has the owner take her on a tour of the salon - this usually does not go well for the owner as more often than not, Tabatha will stick her finger in a plughole & pull out a disgusting mass of hair. The owners usually come out of it feeling pretty embarrassed of the lack of hygiene & care. There can be a sense of "...it's not my job to clean" coming from the stylists & receptionists, zero team mentality. 

Hygiene in IT departments isn't usually a problem...

Ok forget that - but what I really mean is the underlying attitude, if a stylist can't be bothered to clean their area what else are they neglecting? Usually sloppy work & a lack of customer service follows.

Yeh? So what? Ever shown a codebase to a new starter and had to explain the hacks, idiosyncrasies & plain weird stuff to them because the code has 'evolved' over time from it's original form. No? Lucky you.

Uncle Bob Martin talks about the Boy Scout rule (Martin Fowler gives it more IT'sey name: Opportunistic Refactoring) - so leave the code base better than when you found it. Tidy that crap up! With tools like IntelliJ or ReSharper it's a breeze to do. "If everyone on the team is doing this, they make small regular contributions to code base health every day" - Fowler. 

"What are you're retail rates, referrals and walk-ins?"

In one episode Tabatha was quizzing the owner on various business metrics like how many walk-in's, referrals and amount retail sales she generates & I was howling with laughter as the clueless owner looked totally confused. HOW COULD YOU NOT KNOW THESE THINGS?! 

The next day I had a telecon with external suppliers who asked me how many visits our website got, the number of sales calls & conversions to sales. I didn't have any answers for him - I had to go ask, what a plum. 

In the Time magazines story "Code Red" - about the crack Silicon Valley team who rescued the ObamaCare website - what was the first thing they did? They wrote a dashboard to get some situational awareness, this is IT-speak for "lets find out what the hell's going on". From an agile point of view, this is what visualising the work should give us too. If you map your 'value stream' on a Kanban board, you can see where your bottlenecks are, where the project is being held up waiting & allow you to mitigate those issues. If tasks are being held up in test, invest in more automation or get dev / BA's doing a bit of testing to help out. How you handle it is up to you but at least you know about it.

"She's got 3 months experience & clearly she's struggling..."

It turns out that a stylist doesn't know every hair style when they come out of beauty school. And get this, apparently fashion changes too! Tabatha does encounter a lot of stylists who are lacking in experience but have been thrust out onto the salon floor with a chair of their own. Poor quality work kills the lifeblood of the business & there's no-one there to check it. Usually the owner is too wrapped up in their own thing to notice. 

Tabatha identifies the stragglers & depending on their attitude will install a mentor (a lead stylist to take the reigns) and make sure a program of education is set up.

When I worked for a Japanese company there was the concept of Senpai &
Kohai, new starters were allocated a mentor to help them learn the ropes. This is a fascinating  model but it was never started in the UK offshoot - I guess some concepts didn't make the jump over which is a shame in this case.

Another Japanese term which is big in Agile circles is Kaizen. Essentially, getting better at what you do, continually no matter how small the improvement. Tabatha usually singles out a stylist who has the right attitude or exceptional skill level & promotes them to Lead Stylist. They would then have the responsibility of training up the juniors & pursuing 'education' for the team, as she calls it. Just like IT people can go on training courses for the latest doohicky, stylists can attend training at colleges & specialist schools to learn the latest techniques & keep up with trends. We can lose sight of that, we get stuck in a rut and "that's how I / we have always done it" becomes the bywords for lazy work. 

Management sets the culture

Leaders lead, bad leaders lead badly. Bad practices and attitudes will be normalised and will set the culture for the place. 

See Alisha here - an owner of a supposedly up market salon. Due to a personal tragedy which she never handled properly, her attitude to her staff deteriorated to the point that most days usually ended up in a shouting match across the salon over the customers heads. Plus their standards had slipped, with garbage work being the norm. The experience for the patron is horrendous & most never return. 

One of, if not the,  top reasons agile transformations change is because of culture, according to the State of Agile survey. Culture is driven from the top. I remember asking a CEO about his thoughts about the agile change his organisation was going through & he responded "I don't know about those things" & to "ask the CIO about it". Right there, I new it would fail. 

Also in IT we have the concept of Conway's Law - which, jokingly, makes the assertion that the structure of the codebase mirrors the organisation which created it. So if you have an organisation which is slow & ponderous to make decisions, expect large batch size releases which are a nightmare to deploy. Silo your teams? Expect communication issues across boundaries & unexpected side effects to changes in your code. Team full of .Net devs? Expect the solution to be .Net even if something else could've been more relevant. 

She's a BITCH and people love her for her honesty. Now, where can I get myself a decent hair cut.....