Is the NG still active?

In the absence of being able to gather around a whiteboard, or meet face to face - yes.

Good grief...

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote

| > In the absence of being able to gather around a whiteboard, or meet | > face to face - yes. | > | Good grief... |

And all this time you thought reality was theoretical. Whaddaya know about that? :)

I still consider it the most rational model to adopt that reality is theoretical, yes. Or the one most people live in. On the subject of white boards, by astonishment was in the pure snowflakeness of the man who cant do without a whiteboard.

Whiteboards or blackboards or chalkboards have of course been *very* long standing tools in education, discussion, explanation, problem solving and who knows what other kinds of collaborations & communications.

Of course, if you hate people or people hate you, it's hard to collaborate with whatever tool.

Agreed, and very useful they are to. When we designed the Radio 3 Music Planning system in 1980. This used easily the most complex database I've worked on, because, apart from including complete catalogues of composers and their works, and of performers and orchestras, it supported all aspects of music program production as well as keeping track of the fees paid to performers and repeat fees (payable if a piece was rebroadcast) and of any resulting free-for-repeat items. It goes without saying that the system had to be easy to use by the small team in the planning office but it also had a larger population of casual users, e.g. producers who needed to make sure that their next project didn't use the same performers playing the same works as anything else planned close to their target date.

The first thing we did was to teach the non-IT team members, a senior member of the user dept and the project manager, how to read a Data Structure Diagram. We then all spent the next three weeks defining what the system would have to do and adjusting the database schema to handle these requirements. At the end of that, we had a data structure that we all agreed could do what was needed, a comprehensive list of required functions and a good idea of how to organise programming: both the online element and printed reports.

This worked out well: we froze the whiteboard as it was at that point and, slightly to my surprise, it was still an exact match on the database schema of the completed system when that went live. Yes, we did check that.

As a result, I've been a fan of whiteboards as a design tool ever since.

In case you're wondering, the system ran on an ICL 2966, was written in COBOL, and used IDMSX as its database. We never counted code lines, but the music catalogue in the database contained over 40,000 musical works, many of which had at least 3-4 parts (operas and song cycles have tens of parts) and a surprising number of works have several versions written by the composer as well as a whole slew of adaptations and re-orchestrations written by other people.

In my company 99% of the communications was done by email and a bit of phoning. Face to face wastes time, and was very seldom undertaken, and certainly didn't need any physical drawing surface. If you have access to something like whatsapp, you can take pictures of any drawings you need to share.

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote

| On the subject of white boards, by astonishment was in the pure | snowflakeness of the man who cant do without a whiteboard. | I haven't needed such a thing since high school, but some people don't have that luxury.

I noticed a news tidbit the other day where Bill Gates was asked how he would respond if a Microsoft job interviewer asked why they should hire him. Part of his answer was that he's a team player. I very much doubt that. Maybe he meant team captain. But it struck me that the idea of being a "team player" (AKA willing to be a lackey who takes orders) has become an almost universal euphemism in employment ads these days. So I imagine most people probably have to put up with whiteboard meetings, and now Zoom pep rallies, so the boss can see that you're doing the Walmart Wiggle.

Oh I can do without a whiteboard or screen sharing but some things become orders of magnitude more efficient with them (this is after all why they are used) and that matters to me and the people I work with because the set of things I do in my job intersects with the set of things made more efficient by venerable collaboration tools such as whiteboards or in their absence some workable alternative.

You clearly don't do the same kind of work as I do.

Maybe a euphemism, but its very different from what I understand by 'team'.

So what do I understand by 'team'? In most of the places I've worked since the late '70s, teams/groups/projects, call them what you will, had a boss but his job was primarily to stop intra-group squabbles and, much more rarely, to keep everybody heading for the same goal. In many of these, the boss was not the designer, but in all of them ideas and suggestions were encouraged by both boss and designer/design team and in none of then was a suggestion slapped down though it might be refused with reasons. That's what I understand by 'team work'.

That's a pretty good description IMHO.

That sounds like the way it should work. Unfortunately, it's not always the way it comes out in practice. I experienced a management invasion where the new bosses constantly preached the virtues of teamwork, while systematically destroying the smoothly-operating teams that had been in place for 10 years.

A poster went around:

Together Everyone Achieves More

I came up with my own version:

Tied up in Endless Aggravating Meetings

My wife is currently going through the same hell elsewhere.

I was lucky: spent 15 years in Logica while it was still a thing.

Were they all MBA's or salesmen by any chance? If they were, that would explain it perfectly.

Salesmen make terrible managers and there should be a permanent open season on MBAs.

Our first warning was when a consultant walked into our office and said, "OK, now here's the plan..." Why should he ask us how things worked? All we had been doing was keeping the place running for 10 years.

I know, there are good consultants out there. But I've cleaned up enough messes left by bad ones that I consider them guilty until proven innocent.

At a previous company I learned how important it is to keep the salesmen on a tight leash. This outfit didn't. On one project we ate a man-year trying to keep a salesman's promises. I swore that if it happened again I'd be gone. Not only did it happen again, it was the same salesman who did it. (He left halfway through that one.)

I agree with that assessment with one addition: the team leader (more accurate than ?boss?) also has the responsibility to provide ?air support? to keep higher level management from disrupting the team?s operation. ;-)

I loved leading or participating in a real team, which, in my experience requires some practice to achieve mutual respect, becoming a team. The most effective and delightful teams I?ve had the pleasure to participate in or lead have been highly interdisciplinary, with 6-12 members.

I draw a strong contrast with a committee, which often resorts to voting to make decisions.

Committees produce ?lowest common denominator? designs, while teams achieve creative, innovative designs that exhibit synergy across the several disciplines of the participants.

The observation that ?All of us are smarter than any of us? is definitely applicable to a team.

I recall a Dilbert cartoon which stated that the IQ of a committee is determined by dividing the IQ of the lowest IQ member by the number of people on the committee. ;-)

operation.

Yes, agreed. A good team leader does that so seamlessly that team members don't notice it happening.

Another nice-to-have that Logica did was to set up the core team (leader, designer, and programming manager if it was a decent sized project) as soon as the request to tender had been accepted, so the team itself was responsible for costing the project and negotiating deadlines. That also worked very well.

Definitely!

Agreed.

Seems about right.

General principle of consulting, customer must be doing something wrong or they would not have called you in so change things - the bigger the

The term I've heard is "shit shield".

I was once lucky enough to work in a shop whose manager had a vocabulary which included a seldom-used word: "No." He would use it regularly in response to silly user requests.

"A committee is a lifeform with six or more legs and no brain."