The end of agile (III)

Part 3: Funk/Acid Jazz

(To listen to this post’s soundtrack, click this link)

Of this virtual insanity, we’re livin’ in
Has got to change, yeah
Things, will never be the same
     – Jamiroquai

When you get divorced, your friends’ wives, or partners, kind of feel sorry for you. They probably sense that the balance of the universe is off and that it’s their duty to fix it, so what they do is introduce you to their friends. That’s the normal thing. But one friend’s wife did something better, I think, something I’ll always be grateful for: she taught me to dance merengue.

In the late nineties, when those of us in our thirties went out partying, what we usually wanted was to dance. There were plenty of places in Santiago to do it, in San Damián, or Las Brujas, even on Suecia and Orrego Luco, or on the outskirts of the city. We were used to equating a night out with dancing, because in the eighties, when we were teenagers, that’s exactly what we did: dance.

Not that I was much of a party animal, but I went out a fair amount after my separation. Much more than I had before. I suppose I wanted to enjoy that forced bachelorhood better, without overthinking it and without so much guilt. Besides, the merengue lessons had to be put to use. But what I liked listening to in those places, even if I didn’t dance to it, were those interesting disco-funk songs they called acid jazz.

This is the return of the space cowboy
Interplanetary, good vibe zone

Acid jazz gets its name because it grew out of Acid House, which was played in the dance clubs of the UK. DJs mixed in rare jazz segments from the 50s or 60s, producing a very particular style. From there other groups emerged that brought in elements of disco and funk. One of the best and most famous exponents of the style is the English band Jamiroquai.

Around then I bought the Traveling Without Moving CD, and it was one of the albums I listened to most when I started working for the Chamber.

In the previous chapter I mentioned that in the second half of 1998 I was transported back in time to 1960, when I joined the Santiago Chamber of Commerce (CCS).

Fortunately my boss, Jorge Rojas, wanted to change that. In those first weeks on the job [we talked about increasing the use of email, whose absence we found inconceivable. We also explained to the secretary that we were used to writing our own documents, not dictating them (it sounds like I’m exaggerating, but I’m not).

Jorge explained his strategy and the changes he wanted to make, and above all he shared his vision for the team I was to lead. We were short on developers. Maintenance of the system for clearing records in the Boletín Comercial, the Chamber’s credit bulletin (a client-server application built on Informix and Visual Basic), was in the hands of two external developers from the vendor that had built the system. We had just one programmer, who played a double role: he programmed and acted as a sort of project manager.

That had to change fast. In the first weeks I started interviewing candidates; the plan was to take full control of the system’s maintenance. That’s how I hired the first woman on my team, simply because she was the best in the selection process. At the start my team was essentially three people: Julio Arróspide, René Oyarzún and Rita Allende, the newly hired development engineer. [With that team I began the digital transformation of the CCS.

It was a time of hard work and professional achievements. But I’d get home and I was alone, and that was a bit sad. If you had visited my small apartment back then you would have found a Mapex drum kit gathering dust, a round glass table, a TV sitting on the box it came in, a bed, and my desk with my PC. In the kitchen, cans of tuna and lemon peels piled up.

As a kid I read that the first sailors who traveled the world, living on a diet based mostly on fish, supplemented it with lemon to avoid scurvy. So there I was, like the sailors of Vespucci, Elcano or Captain Cook, worried about scurvy, because my weekend diet was tuna, tomato and lemon.

Fine, I may be exaggerating, but I need to get across the idea of the tormented hero with the lonely heart, so play along.

I wasn’t going out like before, even though I had more money to spend. I preferred to hop into the IRC chat rooms and talk. IRC back then was what social networks are today, not the den of hackers and sysadmins it has since become.

Although I went to a few parties organized in those days among people from the chat, I chose to spend much of my time talking, through the keyboard, with an intriguing woman...

I must’ve died and gone to heaven
‘Cause it was a quarter past eleven
On a Saturday in 1999
Right across from where I’m standing
On the dance floor she was landing
– Cosmic Girl

And so the last months of 1998 went by, moving forward on projects and work. One weekend Kika, this fascinating woman from the chat, and I decided to talk on the phone. I liked her voice. She was in the countryside, and while her children slept, she was looking at the stars and talking with me. We talked for hours and decided we had to meet in person. We got together on a Friday night in December and went to dinner at a place that no longer exists, called “Agua Na Boca,” on Tobalaba. It was there, the very day we met, that we had our first kiss.

We’ll spend the night together
Wake up and live forever
– Yeah Yeah, All Right

From there we went dancing, at Las Brujas, because as I already told you, that’s what people did back then. That’s where one of my Jamiroquai favorites came on, the song those lines above come from.

We danced all night, and I won’t tell you any more. The details of that first date are our treasure, and besides, they’re not the point of these articles, so don’t be nosy.

The Eisenhower Matrix

Back to my job, because there was a lot to do in those days. So I had to organize my work somehow. That’s how I decided to use a very simple technique which, years later, I learned was called the Eisenhower Matrix.

The matrix is very simple. You have two axes, the urgent and the important. You must always take care of what’s urgent and important. What’s less important but urgent gets delegated; what’s important but not so urgent gets scheduled. And what’s neither urgent nor important you throw out entirely. This very simple technique is very useful.

That’s how I started organizing my team’s work, which freed up time to slip away for lunch with my sweetheart. My team and I had a weekly meeting where we reviewed the projects; the rest was solving problems as they came in, following the “triage” the Eisenhower matrix gives you. You can draw it on a whiteboard and place the tasks with Post-its, or just keep it in a notebook, as I did. Years later I dropped this technique for Kanban, but you know what? This technique is very good! It’s not something we should forget, however old and obsolete it may look today.

And we kept growing as a team, because there were many projects to take on. It was during this expansion that we decided to bring in a brilliant young man Jorge and I had met a few years earlier. That was Julio Quiroz, who came in and took charge of the first web projects we built.

Odd as it may seem, I had no experience developing for the web. I had never done a web project. I remember showing my friend Marco Zúñiga a first web application we had built using CGI. He tore it apart. Marco had already worked on Cybermarket, probably the first online store ever built in Chile.

His comments stung, and I decided that had to change. At the time the CCS had a service called Comex, a product that delivered foreign trade information, used by the CCS’s importer and exporter members. It was a PowerBuilder application that got refreshed by handing out CD-ROMs with the data.

The infrastructure team, led by my colleague Rigoberto Jorquera, had the job of keeping this system up to date and supporting it, which was getting more and more expensive. We decided to take the product to the web. Selling the idea was easy: it cut maintenance costs, and it also positioned the CCS as a provider of internet services, which turned out to be strategic.

We hired more engineers and started building the site. Everything was done in Microsoft ASP. Esteban Segura, who was in charge of member relations and nearly all of the Chamber’s product development, made a point of backing us, helping us run focus groups to validate the product we were building. We tested with a select group of customers, prepared a beta, and launched it. It was a success. As far as I know Comex is still online, though probably very little remains of what we built back then.

It so happened that the CCS’s research department, led by George Lever, began making a name for itself on the subject of the digital economy. The CCS started to become a reference point. Digital economy events were held in the brand-new halls of the new CCS building, across from the Bellas Artes museum, at Monjitas 392. To this day the Chamber promotes e-commerce with initiatives like Cyber Day.

We built a lot of interesting things with my team; among other things I also helped create e-certchile. There are several stories about launches we did back then, where we had to improvise a great deal. But there’s one thing I learned in those days that stuck with me forever: if we committed to a launch date, it did not move. Ever.

So you had to learn to organize yourself around that constraint: the time for building the first delivery of a system is fixed. That’s what we now call a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). It’s something we learned to do naturally: we defined our MVP and worked to hit the delivery date.

I remember a team member once asking me whether I would define a development methodology for the department. I never did. My answer was surely: “we write down everything that needs doing in a list, and we do it”.

So 1998 ended pretty well for me. [Not only did I find love that year, I also had the chance to find the second mentor of my life, Jorge Rojas. I have to say I learned a lot from him. He always went to bat for me. He believed in my abilities and backed me. He was strict, demanding, but in a kind way. He never raised his voice at you; he didn’t need to. ]{style=“letter-spacing: 0.01rem;”}

[He is a leader who inspires a great deal of respect. He was the one who gave me one of the greatest lessons I’ve ever received: “a leader chooses and prepares his successor.” And I think I learned that one very well.

But this is only the beginning of what I learned in those days. There’s much more, but that continues tomorrow.

Notes

The first part is here: https://www.lnds.net/blog/lnds/2019/3/17/el-fin-de-la-agilidad

The second part is at: https://www.lnds.net/blog/lnds/2019/3/18/el-fin-de-la-agilidad

Part 4: https://www.lnds.net/blog/lnds/2019/3/23/el-fin-de-la-agilidad