Time to up the team spirit

Time to time up the team spirit - drawing of a group moving ahead and leaving a tired man behind.

Dumfungled: This is a Scottish word that means mentally and physically worn out.

I came across this word recently, and I just had to use it. At this stage of the year, most of us feel dumfungled. The holidays are in sight, but still too far away. I am very dumfungled, especially after three(!) run-ins with SARS this week.

Please record this call

I ranted about e@asyfile a month ago. My urgent escalated enquiry had an official response time of 2-7 days. I got a call back more than 30 days later. I might have freaked out a little.

I didn’t even pretend to want help anymore. The technical team had told the "consultants" to advise people to switch off their anti-virus software and firewall! I hope that someone listens to the recording of my temper tantrum "for quality and control purpose".

A day after I blew my lid, SARS sent out a general survey. Bad timing on their part. I used a lot of UPPERCASE in my answers.

And then the SARS system wrongly issued penalties to provisional tax payers for not submitting returns on time. The call centre consultant said "it wasn’t a mistake", but that the system "didn’t check" the taxpayer’s status.

Let’s blame the system

I was calm for that call. I didn’t point out two obvious things:

  1. That is a mistake. What else do you call it?
  2. The system didn’t do (or not do) it. The programmers did.

It’s easy to blame "the system", as if our systems have reached sci-fi levels of sentience. When AI does reach maturity, those systems are going to be really angry at all the blame.

Programmers are human. They make mistakes. Under pressure they make more mistakes. I can understand an error like this in a small system that a single person develops.

But this is a major system. There must be a team with multiple developers, analysts, testers and managers.

There is no "i" in system

Software development is a team effort. Forget the image of the grubby hacker in his dark cave of hardware. That doesn’t apply to the business systems that we use every day.

The team includes everyone: user, analyst, front-end dev, back-end dev, tester, trainer, manager, call centre support. But team work is about more than dividing the workload. It’s about how everyone on the team shares and encourages and learns.

(From my limited experience, SA government departments fail at any concept of team work. Nepotism doesn’t count.)

A good leader makes a huge difference to a team. But don’t sit back and blame the manager. Every code of ethics for software engineers emphasises team work. Here’s principle 7 of the ACM/IEEE-CS Software Engineering Code:

Software engineers shall be fair to and supportive of their colleagues.

When we’re feeling dumfangled, we need support more than ever. And someone might be quietly having a harder time than others. So let’s try to be better team players for the rest of the year.

Are you feeling dumfangled? Need a bit more team support? Share your opinion.

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