At Zmags we recently completed a move from a traditional hosting provider to a cloud hosting provider. The move was a pure business decision and was founded on quite elaborate analysis and considerations.
The evaluation process and an upcoming speaking engagement at Cap Gemini got me thinking about motivations for moving into the cloud. As it turned out, the factors that motivated us could be split into two buckets. One bucket containing defensive and one containing offensive business advantages. Somewhat like the hygiene factors of the two factor theory, the defensive business advantages are the features that have to be present in any hosting offering to keep customers on-board.
These factors include
· Stability / Availability
· Maintainability
· Security
· Reasonable cost
Although it isn’t always the case, the defensive factors should be present at any serious hosting provider and they need to be as they are the factors that will keep your environment coasting along without too much hassle. They are to the SaaS provider what a hammer is to a carpenter; a good stable tool that you can count on to bring bread to the table. Obviously, the basic tools of the carpenter aren’t decisive factors in building a million dollar housing enterprise, they need to be there but to really offer clients value for money (and thus grow the business) the offensive factors are needed. They are the factors that give you distinct competitive advantages. In SaaS it is often a distinct competitive advantage to be able to churn out more features faster but that also means being able to serve the influx of new customers that these new features rake in.
For us the decisive offensive factors where the ability to scale extremely fast and to be able to have an abstraction from the raw iron underneath our application. Cloud hosting provides us with the ability to continuously adjust our computing capacity to the needs of our customers which is a huge advantage to us because it saves us money and to our customers because it allows them to complete their work even faster. In addition we no longer have to worry about running specific applications on “one of the beefy servers”, we run it on the appropriate instance and if it isn’t available it can be started within a few minutes.
The next big advantage for us will come as we migrate our build farm and our test and staging environment to the cloud. By doing so we can achieve faster build process, better and more accurate testing and thus higher development velocity.
These factors mean that our hosting facility is completely aligned with the business and is able to expand at the increasing pace of the company.
We have barely scratched the surface of the potential of cloud computing and the offensive factors but we have already achieved huge (and recognized) advantages for our clients. In the future awaits substantial improvements and a more fun development cycle were we will be able to churn out features even faster and keep up with the pace of our customers.
Showing posts with label herzberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label herzberg. Show all posts
Monday, April 12, 2010
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Why scrum works??
The evidence indicating that Scrum is a more productive methodology is overwhelming. Companies report substantial growth in productivity and quality when transitioning from waterfall to agile. I am myself a strong proponent of Scrum and use it on a daily basis but I find the root causes of the experienced performance increases blurred.
A plethora of explanations for the effectiveness of Scrum have been offered, the most conspicuous of which is that the procedures, the planning and the artifacts in the Scrum framework constitute a more effective method of execution and that this is the primary contributing factor. Smaller teams doing their own planning and given tools for tracking progress is by this argument more effective than large teams in bureaucratic project formation.
The Hawthorne effect or combinations of the Hawthorne and the Placebo effect has been suggested as explanations for the recorded productivity increases. While the Hawthorne effect is usually quite short lived one could argue that the continuous improving and thus changing nature of the process could prolong or even perpetualise the effect.
If Placebo where to account for the productivity increases the argument would probably be that it is general knowledge that implementing Scrum is usually associated with a productivity increase and also that the implementation process and scrum master training is often littered with success stories told or written by industry experts. The implication being that if implementation does not result in substantial productivity increases, the Scrum is not done “Correct” and Scrum will, as a curious side effect, by logic convention always be successful . This should place strong expectations on the organization implementing scrum and could help making the success prophecies self-fulfilling.
In my opinion, Scrum is not driven by means of Placebo or Hawthorne although I do believe both effects attribute to the success of the methodology. Neither do I think that the methodology is the main contributing factor. My favorite is that the main reason Scrum results in performance increases is the immense positive effect it has on employee motivation. Herzbergs two factor theory claims that some factors, if present, contribute to job satisfaction while the absence of others lead to dissatisfaction. That is, a few basic things (hygiene factors) like fair salary and supervision will cause demotivation when not present but will not by themselves motivate employees while other factors (motivators) such as achievement, responsibility and personal growth will motivate employees. Given that the hygiene factors should be present in most modern well driven companies (even those using waterfall) any motivation based performance gains must be sought in the motivators. I find that the strong overlap between the values of the agile manifesto and Herzbergs motivators are extremely indicative as to the root cause of the experienced performance improvements.
To the best of my knowledge there is no strong research substantiating or quantifying the contributions of the many theories to the reported productivity improvements and I find this quite unsettling. We are faced with a brilliant framework that seems to work but we have no clear understanding of why.
We need this knowledge. Firstly because the scrum cake may not be fully baked yet, adding more chocolate chips may improve the outcome, but we don’t understand which ingredients result in the great taste so we are flying blind. Secondly, because Scrum and Agile are methodologies based on learning and empirical knowledge we should not accept basing it on assumptions.
It should be possible to design experiments that would allow for the quantification of at least some of the contributing factors and I believe that the next improvements of Agile requires this more specific knowledge of the contributing factors. I also think that this knowledge will help to further expand the use of Agile methodologies.
A plethora of explanations for the effectiveness of Scrum have been offered, the most conspicuous of which is that the procedures, the planning and the artifacts in the Scrum framework constitute a more effective method of execution and that this is the primary contributing factor. Smaller teams doing their own planning and given tools for tracking progress is by this argument more effective than large teams in bureaucratic project formation.
The Hawthorne effect or combinations of the Hawthorne and the Placebo effect has been suggested as explanations for the recorded productivity increases. While the Hawthorne effect is usually quite short lived one could argue that the continuous improving and thus changing nature of the process could prolong or even perpetualise the effect.
If Placebo where to account for the productivity increases the argument would probably be that it is general knowledge that implementing Scrum is usually associated with a productivity increase and also that the implementation process and scrum master training is often littered with success stories told or written by industry experts. The implication being that if implementation does not result in substantial productivity increases, the Scrum is not done “Correct” and Scrum will, as a curious side effect, by logic convention always be successful . This should place strong expectations on the organization implementing scrum and could help making the success prophecies self-fulfilling.
In my opinion, Scrum is not driven by means of Placebo or Hawthorne although I do believe both effects attribute to the success of the methodology. Neither do I think that the methodology is the main contributing factor. My favorite is that the main reason Scrum results in performance increases is the immense positive effect it has on employee motivation. Herzbergs two factor theory claims that some factors, if present, contribute to job satisfaction while the absence of others lead to dissatisfaction. That is, a few basic things (hygiene factors) like fair salary and supervision will cause demotivation when not present but will not by themselves motivate employees while other factors (motivators) such as achievement, responsibility and personal growth will motivate employees. Given that the hygiene factors should be present in most modern well driven companies (even those using waterfall) any motivation based performance gains must be sought in the motivators. I find that the strong overlap between the values of the agile manifesto and Herzbergs motivators are extremely indicative as to the root cause of the experienced performance improvements.
To the best of my knowledge there is no strong research substantiating or quantifying the contributions of the many theories to the reported productivity improvements and I find this quite unsettling. We are faced with a brilliant framework that seems to work but we have no clear understanding of why.
We need this knowledge. Firstly because the scrum cake may not be fully baked yet, adding more chocolate chips may improve the outcome, but we don’t understand which ingredients result in the great taste so we are flying blind. Secondly, because Scrum and Agile are methodologies based on learning and empirical knowledge we should not accept basing it on assumptions.
It should be possible to design experiments that would allow for the quantification of at least some of the contributing factors and I believe that the next improvements of Agile requires this more specific knowledge of the contributing factors. I also think that this knowledge will help to further expand the use of Agile methodologies.
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