Surgeon vs Jack of all trades (was Re: [Sigia-l] My Toolbox is full...now what?

[Listera]

Andrew Boyd:

> And you are strong enough that you never get caught up in feature/scope
> creep? 

Nope. I'm usually hired precisely to stop that. As I always say, design is a
discipline of triage, of saying no, of exclusion. If a feature request is
warranted, of course. But someone's going to absolutely justify it before I
spend any strategy/design time on it.

> Additional hitherto-unplanned design reviews at the request of
> client management or within your own company? Task stacking/additional
> work being piled upon you?  :)

As I explained in a previous post, contractually, there's one and only one
person from the company I deal with. That person has to be senior enough to
authorize work and sign off. That's usually one of the first things
stipulated in the contract. It's insane to do it any other way. So I don't
respond to design review requests from anybody else, period. That doesn't
mean I'm unaware of other stakeholders' concerns, but I don't take
direction/requests from others.
 
> I suppose a good analogy would be a surgeon, operating on a particular
> area of the body with no distractions, vs. the jack of all trades here
> to fix the flyscreen on the front door who is then asked to stop the
> bathroom tap dripping and paint the rear deck. From the sound of it, you
> see your self as the surgeon-analogue, whereas (I'm guessing here) there
> are a lot of us that get deadline/task boundaries blurred by additional
> requests.

Yes, when I'm in the middle of heart surgery I turn down all requests for
liposuction. Just because the patient will be under anesthesia is no reason
to get distracted.

Because I've been doing this for a long time, I usually can detect and thus
work on design patterns. The vast of majority of apps out there are easily
80% pattern-based, 15% app specific and, if you're lucky, 5% unique. So if
you open a 'request' door I could probably tell you in short order what's in
that room.

> Deadlines get rubbery sometimes, but not through us
> misunderstanding the initial project spec/scope.

Fair enough. The line between chaos and efficient management of expectations
and project direction is indeed a thin one. This is another reason why a
senior contractor (with allegiance not to company personalities and legacy
concerns but to the project and design) is a better arbiter given his
experience with similar situations in different settings.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba