Corporate Cadence

As your eyes roll back and forth in sync with the swinging pocket watch just a few feet in front of your face, the therapist asks you to picture a tranquil place where harmony and a feeling of security fill your thoughts.  She proposes that you imagine a mythical place where all the product teams in a large products company march to the beat of two week iterations.  Your stress levels immediately start to decrease as the amount of cross-project communication is increased by the coordination of planning sessions, and your fears of matching schedules remind you of the punch cards you once heard about in a book (textbook, not comic book).

The shiny watch is now a blur swiping out two week splotches across your poster-sized yearly planner.  At the end of each iteration, all of the teams show their progress and catch up on any integration issues that may have risen between various products.  You envision the smiles of customers and product managers being entertained as quippy engineers show off their latest achievements.  Schedules and interop risks are minimized as the maximum time between interface revelations changes from months into days.  The unknown has now become the known, and transparency rules the day, regardless of how hard it is to see.

The watch and the therapist are distanced from your mind as reports of massive product launches pop up in the news.  You begin to visualize motivated engineers running (but not quite skipping) through the halls, excited about expanding functionality by simply bonding with other existing products.  Suddenly, these are not pieces that can survive on their own; they are the internal organs of a living creature set on a healthy survival, possibly a unicorn.  The daily builds and concurrent testing prove the heartbeat is as strong as ever.

As the words of a countdown reenter your consciousness, you realize the watch is no longer swinging back and forth.  You leave the therapist’s office heading toward your own office with one objective in mind: discovering the corporate cadence.  You know it’s not a legend and can be obtained, one team at a time or all at once.  The only question left to answer is whether the marching will occur on the uphill or downhill side of the chasm.