Random Stuff

Had a chat with Alan today, sounds like work is doing some good stuff - with their pizza round tables. Interesting that the CEO wants us to move towards having IP, which means products, which means staff programmers. And these staff programmers would be developing code for consultants who are out in the field. I'm not too sure how well that's going to work. Unless the product is really well tested, and documented it's likely to be a white elephant - like the project I worked on previously, which suffered from that problem.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a few of the staff members from the company we used to work for pushing the product idea to the side, as it really didn't work effectively. The product team eventually developed into a company of it's own, which was terrible. Unfortunately it's quite hard to product-ize something specific for a J2EE consultancy team, given the variety in the work that we take on. Obviously, we are pushing products from our business partner, which leads you down a dangerous path, in terms of keeping agile in relation to client needs.

Personally, I would suggest that we decided on a 'Developer Toolset', with a known set of best known open source projects (Hibernate, Jasper, Struts, Spring, Display Tag Libs, Ant, Maven, etc etc), in which we have a bunch of training, and a reference site implementing all the projects. This would make life a lot easier. So, you could envisage having a new start, with a clean laptop installation - then install Eclipse (or WSAD, or whatever IDE is standard), with the reference implementation of all of our developer tools - and have the ability to then send the developer out to actually do some consulting work straight off the bat.

This would allow people to work efficiently in a known tool set, we have access to/create our own training courses (which we could sell to clients!), plus we could sell the 'Centre of Excellence' idea much more strongly also. If we had a quarterly review of the tool set, along with consultants submitting a 1 pager on any new tool/versions that come along, this could be checked, and then added/discarded in a well organised manner.

How this would work in practice, it's a bit hard to say. We did have a great deal of difficulty in getting a developer tool set organised for a group of 15, let alone 100 consultants. Everyone has a big personality, and this means everyone has the favourite/best known tools to do specific jobs.

I might have a chat with our chief architect when I'm at the monthly meeting tomorrow night.