Leadership By Numbers

Stephan Wissel of Tao Consulting in Singapore has a professional blog in which has describes a problem he finds unique to Domino:

. . . Notes and Domino are cursed. Since you can get something going very fast and Domino is rather forgiving with whatever you do, you end up with a lot of messy code. And then people say "Notes sucks". I would say: "Not training your staff sucks". I think IBM has to play some catch up to make better Notes training en vogue again.

In a few paragraphs, he has captured some of the anti-patterns common to Domino application management: no training provided, no documentation standards, no process for maintainable code, and a culture that revels in lots of hacks. I'm sure anyone who develops with Lotus Domino will find themselves on common ground in reading over Wissel's comments.

Because my company is in Washington, DC, a lot of my clients are either contractors or government employees. Many times, I'll be working with both groups on the same project, or providing them with training and Stephan has identified, quite succinctly, most of the major tensions.

I'd be willing to go even further and explain that on many jobs there are contractors from several different, competing, firms—all of whom have no love between them. Whatever problems are lying dormant, waiting to awake during the project cycle, I can assure you that having rivals on the development greatly adds to the tension. I've heard management of more than one IT consulting firm command their developers to “do nothing to make the other contractors look good.” The project always looks a little like the interaction between parents and children: the parents (managers) ask the children (contractors) to work together. The kids bicker and squabble, doing their best to sabotage the efforts of their peers while smiling engagingly at their parents. It's just life.

Realistically, what can one expect to do? Be honest. Which is easy advice, and very difficult to attain, because the rewards are so meager. IT management needs to account for these conflicts, the need to establish documentation standards, define code reviews and budget in training.

On, the other hand, the contractors need to face the truth that most jobs don't care about documentation if they are told it slows down the initial deployment by, say, 10%. Should they document, anyway? On the sly? And, when a competing contractor wins over the contract, for a lower price (say, 10%), then who was best served? Contractors do need training, and they need to own the solution. If the job won't pay for it, and if their contractor firm won't pay for it, then they have to pay for it. Just what does that mean? Am I saying to call in sick for a week and take a class? Well, without training the professional IT contractor is sooner or later going to be looking for a new job or even a career.

Finally, what about the vendor? In this example, does IBM/Lotus have a role? Sure, and I think I have an example.

As a developer, I view the single most important feature in Domino V7 to be the inclusion of Web Services. In Web Services, I can finally integrate the logic of Domino application into any other platform and its application. Web Services is the Rosetta Stone by which all other applications can interact with the internal code of Lotus Domino. Unfortunately, even though Domino provides a new design element for Web Services it requires the creation of a class in either LotusScript or Java.

Funny thing about LotusScript classes, there is a dearth of documentation on how to create them and no class browser is included in the IDE. Java works well, but most Domino developers are still using LotusScript. This means, that to effectively deploy the force of Domino Web Services, the application developer must understand some fairly sophisticated aspects about their program language.

So, where can developers find out about how IBM Domino uses Web Services? Is there anything in the on-line help? Very little. How about something in one of the five Yellow Books on Domino V7 application development? Very little. Anything in the authorized training curriculum? Very little.

Your best hope for mastering the implementation of Domino Web Services is a draft Redbook, some DeveloperWorks articles, and a plethora of blog entries by independent Domino developers.

So, is IBM/Lotus authorized training “en vogue” or not?