The Learning Journey

This is serious.

The United Nations’ World Food Program has been hit so hard by skyrocketing grain prices that it may be forced to cut off some food aid to the world’s poorest countries, while the United States is planning to turn record quantities of corn into automotive fuel.

Cereal grain import prices for the world’s poorest countries are expected to rise 35% for the second consecutive year in 2008, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Droughts and floods have reduced grain stocks, and demand is rising in part because better living standards in developing countries are bringing a change in diet — Indians and Chinese are eating more meat, so more grain is needed for livestock feed. And ethanol is making a bad situation worse. The U.S. is the world’s top corn exporter, and about a quarter of last year’s crop went to ethanol. Food prices, meanwhile, have increased so much that the World Food Program says it will have to raise $500 million more just to carry out its scheduled operations.

via LA Times, via reddit

Update: The NY Times is publishing about the same issue.

How would it be like if our sales-person shared a few hours of his time acting as an observer on implementing a user story with one of the developers? What if our HR manager set aside a part of her Monday to watch a developer troubleshooting an application or setting up a deployment script?

If software development is at the core of a business (or even if it’s a support function), I would expect that such scheme can help shed a light on how the service is being delivered. It would make it easier for business people to understand what it means when a propeller-head say that “Story X would take Y days to implement” or that “a new release will be deployed to the production server”.

I can understand (and appreciate) that each party has his own value to add to the supply chain. But, sometimes that internal supply chain is taken for granted, and as days go by, everyone starts swimming in his own pond, forgetting that it takes a team effort to deliver quality service.

I’m not sure if such schemes (Business/Developer Pairing) are implemented, but, I would expect it being part of an operations management practice.

Anyone out there?

These images have been glued to my brain since I first saw them. A masterpiece by Jeff Patton that rang lots of bells.

via Obie Fernandez.

via FocusShift

Via reddit, and from there to the best quote I read in a while:”Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.” - Joel Spolskey. The quote is highly interpretive, but, to a great extent it bears the truth.