Reports/week 3

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Report for Feb 24 - 28

Summary:
    Development on the storm team ground to a halt this week do to a week-long series of meetings that pulled from every part of the company. I personally was not part of these meetings, which allowed me to see the effect this process had on the rest of the company.
Details:
    The company just went through a new process called POV (point of view) interviews. They are run as follows. Over the course of a few weeks, key members in every aspect of an organization have a series of extended phone interviews with current customers. Each interview is expected to take about 2 hours. Each person who is part of the POV team will do 3-4 of these POV interviews with customers. Each of those people then have the responsibility to compile the things that they heard and learned into a single entity. This entity is called an iPOV (not owned by Apple) and can be a document, a presentation or even just a well-thought out series of points. The next step in the process is to gather every person who conducted POV interviews into a single room. Each person then takes their turn presenting their iPOV. Once everyone has gotten their turn, a grand melee ensues in which some kind of a consensus is supposed to be reached. I cannot verify that one was reached or not, but those I spoke with said that quite a few good things came out of the POV process.
    From my perspective, the POV process was not the optimal use of time for many of the people involved. Over half of all developers at The RedX were in these meetings, and they were all of the senior developers. This meant that I personally spent a week with no help trying to fix a bug that was perhaps the most difficult thing I have encountered in my time as a programmer. Help would have been greatly appreciated. In addition, every single development team fell behind on their deadlines due to the interruption. One thing that I saw was a type of flow interruption on a much larger scale. Normally it takes maybe 15 - 20 minutes to sink into flow after some small distraction. After the 3 days of meetings, it took nearly a full day for anyone in any of the teams to get anything done. All the senior developers had to get caught up on what had happened with their projects while they were gone, which took up their time and the time of us less senior developers. Those of us in the meetings were naturally curious about what had happened, and so there was some time spent disseminating that information. Add to that all the emails and backlogged things that build up for a developer over the course of a few days, and the three days of meetings cost a week of development time. I am not in any position to judge the value of the information gained from this process, but what I do see is that it was done at the worst possible time for the developers. The core idea behind POV interviews is to learn what customers want, to find out what our next product needs to be. That is crucially valuable information. However, that information is not going to do anything for our current development. Storm is still the same. The product has not changed. Previous feedback from customers already confirmed that this is something that will be incredibly well received if we do it right. We know what to do, this process didn't change that, and it did take a week out of an already tight schedule. For this reason I would recommend that if the POV process is to be repeated at The RedX again, it is done in a quarter where the developers are in maintenance mode rather than development mode. If that is not possible, then the developers should not participate or an extra week should be added to any deadlines to account for the lost time.