Agile lessons learned #5 : Waiting for a superman

As far as he could remember Marc always dreamed of being a pilot. After a few years of service as a bush pilot in the northern most par of the country, he finally got a break working for a regional transporter. In April that year, his engine was due for it’s 3500 hour overhaul. Pat, the senior technician at Aviair Regional Airlines performed the overhaul, a routine job for him by then.

As the FAA later found out, Pat got pressure from management to do the overhauls faster than usual as they really needed to get those planes off the ground during the harsh financial times of the enterprise. This caused him to leave a pressure hose on that was requiring change but that would also have required ordering a new piece and further delays. Unfortunately for Marc, the part gave up mid-flight three weeks later while flying above mountains. He now had to decide whether he would crash in a farmer’s field or in a country road nearby. Marc made a quick decision and decided to head towards the fields.

He managed to pull off a textbook belly landing in a field that was way rougher than anticipated. When the emergency crew got on the site of the crash they found Marc unconscious and half-disfigured. Had he been a lesser pilot, all 13 of his passengers would have died that day.

Later that year, Marc got decorated for his heroic actions, as he saluted his former coworkers in the assistance for a last time. He saw this as his farewell, the accident having impaired his eye sight beyond possible repair, leaving him unable to get medical clearance and thus revoking his pilot’s license.

As the news of his heroic act got around, Marc started to be asked to give speeches about it across the country. Marc was not seeking publicity although he appreciated all the warm feedback he got, he always politely turned the offers down.

One day, he got a call from Peter, a friend of his that was now a project manager at FreeFall inc. After the usual salutations, Peter got around asking Marc for a motivational speech. In his mind he thought, if people met Marc there was no way they would not be positively influenced by him.

“It might even bring out a hero or two out of my employees you know, the project really is in disarray.” Said Peter
“Well I don’t know much about software development actually.  But why do you need heroes ?”
“Well everything is wrong. I really need someone to take the lead and fix our major issues. We have quality issues like you wouldn’t believe.” Said Peter, with his voice getting more desperate.
“OK. Why do you need heroes? ”
“Because we have quality issues…I already told you that.”
“Ok. So you wouldn’t need heroes if you had no quality issues right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well the only reason I’m unfortunately perceived as a hero is that I managed to do my job properly when someone was forced to slack the quality of his work ”
“I was doing my job properly for years prior to my accident, but you never heard of me in the news did you?”
“Of course not but…”
“Now, if their was no quality problem, your staff would only have to do their job and everything would be business as usual right ?”
“Well yeah.”
“Anything you could do to help the quality of the software your guys are building right now ?”
“Well the guys were talking about getting more time to do more unit testing and automated builds the other day, maybe I should give these guys a talk.”
“Who knows, might save you from having to deal with super heroes. Grown men wearing tights usually don’t go over well in office meetings ”
“Point taken, thanks Marc.”

- Nicholas Lemay