Another successful @media conference comes to a close and as usual interesting things were said and hopefully everyone learned something. As usual I have a few more things on my must find time to play with list. More on those if they happen.
But one part of the conference I felt needed addressing straight away was the first days panel. The Hot Topics panels bring together a few of the days speakers to answer questions posed by the audience. This year each day had it’s own panel discussion, with the first days session having a design theme. So far so good, and before I getting going I have to say I think Jeffrey Veen did a sterling job of prodding and prompting the session along. The rest of the panel composed of Andy Clarke, Dan Rubin, Bronwyn Jones and Indi Young.
The panel fielded a few interesting questions (and The Beatles in-joke was highly entertaining) but the whole thing took an odd turn part way through – odd in the sense that everything suddenly became very anti-developer.
Andy Clarke seemed to be the ring leader here saying things like (I’m paraphrasing here) “I hate daily stand-ups, we should do Agile”. Dan Rubin was involved too, seemingly saying all developers prefer the rigid nine to five because they’re logical people, while designers want to be able to work whenever they choose. This and other comments caused a few good friends and web developers on the front row to literally shake their fists in anger. The audience got involved too, cheering the anti-developer or anti-engineer statements on. In my mind damage had just been done to out our industry.
Buidling web sites or applications is a pretty multidisciplinary exercise, and in any team environment good communication is often the difference between executing well and failing badly. Conferences like @media are a great place to come together with people from different disciplines and similar jobs in different organisations and share stories. I’m not saying either Dan or Andy haven’t had bad experiences with developers or stand-ups. I’m not saying bad individuals or bad process don’t exist (I have scars from both). I’m saying that generalising these experiences and then promoting them to impressionable designers is dangerous.
I have the good fortune of working with a great designer, Alex Lee, at GCap at the moment. He’s involved in our stand-up meetings every morning and without him there we would waste untold amounts of time and effort. If he turned up on monday and said “I’m not going to come to stand-ups anymore, Andy Clarke says they aren’t cool”. We have a massive problem. My fear is this is exactly what’s going to happen somewhere tomorrow.
I’m something of a hybrid; I’ve run the whole gamut of design and development activities during my career to-date (I’ve even touched on project management) and have worked in small and medium sized agencies, as an independent freelancer and now in a decent sized in-house team. All of these roles pose different communication challenges which require different solutions. What works for three people in a distributed team doesn’t work for fifteen people working in-house. Some types and sizes of team work best with stand-ups, others work best being in the same small room together. Sometimes you need a centralised audit trail of everything that has happened on a project, other times it’s overkill. Somethings everyone has to be working on the project at the same time, at other times as long as tasks get done it really doesn’t matter.
I’m not saying I like all of those working conditions – I’m saying that if you understand where they work best you can work in the environment that suits you. Andy Clarke runs a boutique agency doing high quality work, working with a very small team where individual flexibility and minimal process is definitely the best approach. I now work in a cross disciplinary team of maybe sixty people and it’s a different ball game completely.
This isn’t an attack on Andy, or Dan, or even an anti-designer rant. The web is a young industry filled with young people. We’re learning as we go and stealing what we can from other disciplines. Also not that many of us really like the idea of project management, never mind the reality. Agile methods like Scrumm are hot at the moment but that’s not to say we won’t find something that better suites our discipline in the future. Iterative development, while often annoying to designers, appears to be producing better results. If designers, and developers, want to change how we work together for the better, then get interested in project management and lets have a discussion in public. If you want to complain about individual experiences then that’s why you have a blog.
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Tagged rant, Scrumm
