Maintenance fault causes cellphone blackout.

December 2010: (via Y)
"The largest Israeli mobile telephony operator (Cellcom) ceased most operations for half a day for most of its 3.3 million customers. There is no full official explanation yet, but reports (Haaretz) and elsewhere said that they were updating the customer database with a new script that provides new services. It is a process that they do every few weeks. They checked the script at the lab and it was fine. So, during the night they uploaded it to the production system. They have a central Database and two backup systems. The spec is to update the production system, if all is fine, to update each of the backups. What they actually did was to update the three systems in parallel, in order to save work and time. The problem was that the script was faulty and all three systems (production and the backups) failed gradually and it was very difficult to restore operations, as no backup was alive ... Sounds like a Chernobyl style exercise, the good thing that this time it was just a telephony system. There are already some legal class actions against Cellcom – two of them claim 1.2B Shekels (around 250M Euro) damages."

Article on Reuters (reuters.com) TEL AVIV, Wed Dec 1, 2010.

Article on PR Newswire www.prnewswire.com NETANYA, Thu Dec 2, 2010.

Software, Systems Development, and Life Cycle Humour

* Anything to do with Dilbert

* A lot of Gary Larson's Far Side.

* Ken Schwaber popularised the idea of chickens and pigs to distinguish between people who are responsible and accountable versus those who have an interest in a project but aren’t necessarily responsible for anything.

“A chicken and a pig are walking down the road. The chicken says to the pig, ‘Do you want to open a restaurant with me?’ The pig considers the question and replies, ‘Yes, I’d like that. What do you want to call the restaurant?’ The chicken replies, ‘Ham and Eggs!’ The pig stops, pauses, and replies, ‘On second thought, I don’t think I want to open a restaurant with you. I’d be committed, but you’d only be involved.’” (Schwaber 2004)

* A "manager's" view of an agile development project. The Downfall of Agile Hitler a must-watch from the Downfall parodies on YouTube. Youtube tells users how to fight The Downfall parody takedown reaction. And a Hitler parody about a take down of Hitler parodies :-) http://bit.ly/acmUtU

* Encountering a new SDLC, methodology, or lifecycle; its terminology, language, practices and norms in different organisations, can feel like waking up on groundhog day. Like Britain and the United States, nations separated by a common language; ' CMMI, RUP, XP, SCRUM, SDLC, DSDM, ISO9001, Spiral, Iterative; they all come down to the same thing, writing software.

* On project management: The newly elected leader of a nation found a note and two sealed letters numbered 1 and 2 left by the recently ousted incumbent. The note said ‘if things get bad open the first letter, if things get bad again open the second letter.’ Six months later things got really bad so the leader opened the first letter, it said “blame me.” The leader blamed the previous leader and the people bought it. Six months later things got even worse and the second letter was opened, it said ‘write two letters.’

References:
Schwaber, K. Agile Project Management with Scrum Microsoft Press, Redmond, Washington, 2004, p. 163.

Bookshelves

Creative Process Workshop 2010

So, this video is intended to give you an impression my thinking behind the design of the creative process workshop (from 2010) and how it worked out. I think it went well, generally fun but - I hope - an experience that illustrated some of the dynamics involved in interaction on teams working on stuff that digs into our creative juices.