Daniel Irvine

Nightmare! Earlier this week at work, I wasted a good few hours attempting to draw a diagram. “Wasted” because, shock horror, it wasn’t a very successful attempt. The awful truth is that I can’t draw to save my life.

I’d love to blame the tools, but since I’m trying to be a better workman, I won’t do that. The tool in question is Microsoft PowerPoint. The scene is my lounge: me with my trusty laptop, alongside a strong pot of coffee for moral support. The task is this:

Explain your six-month product vision to your team, your boss and your customers. Leave no one confused, and everyone enlightened.

Let me go back a bit and fill in some of the back-story. The software product my team develops is great and all, but it has a knack for leaving our users in tears. There are various “product features” (yep, you guessed it, I’m using that term loosely) that hinder our users in their day-to-day jobs. So, I’m hosting a conference call for some of our disgruntled users, and during this call I’ll describe how we plan to fix it all.

Feature, n. A bug that has been documented.

Because of the scale of the task, it struck me that a diagram was the way to tackle it. If I were to do it in speech, I’d want to cover:

• The current problems we’re facing
• The proposed changes to the architecture
• Reasons why it simplifies the product
• Some blurb about how this is the right approach to take. In other words, plead for approval.

Now I’m sure this can all be said in a diagram, but I sure as hell haven’t figured out how. I needed a sort of process diagram, showing the various nouns and connecting them with verbs—a user submits a request to the build server which kicks off this automation task that reports to a database—but when I started it just looked crap. A bit like this.

An epic failure of a PowerPoint diagram

The concise diagram I had in my head ended up as a series of soulless boxes and arrows, all very bland and yes, I’m too ashamed to show you the end result.

Am I the only one with this problem? I’d like to think not. On the day of the conference call, two things happened:

1. I decided against using the presentation and just talked instead.
2. I questioned my teammates if any of them could teach me how to make awesome PowerPoint diagrams.

One of the answers I got was you can’t; just stick with text. The other answer I got was do it the old-fashioned way, with a paper and a pen. That struck me and a damn good idea: one quick visit to Waterstone’s and I’ve now got this sitting beside me:

What fun awaits?

I haven’t made an attempt yet to draw anything, but I’ll keep you posted…

Yesterday our team ended the week with an outdoor retrospective. June has started off with awesome sunshine and warmth here in London, so getting out of the office seemed like the right thing to do. There’s not much to love in the office anyway, so who wouldn’t want to escape to the fresh air? Come to think of it, I should work “from home” more often and then head to the park with my laptop…

Anyway: back to the original point. We found a wide bench and gathered round, some standing, some sitting. It was all very haphazard and quite beanbaggy. As it turned out, the outdoor setting and relaxed atmosphere made the meeting pretty productive. We’d had a fairly hectic iteration; debates were heated, the pace relentless and design shortcuts the norm. By the end a lot of nerves were frayed. I think it’s fair to say that we all expected a tense and painful retrospective. But in the event, no one lost their cool, and the tempo of the discussion stayed fairly constant and lively. We rattled through a whole spectrum of issues and not once did it turn personal.

Can we draw any conclusions from this? I’m fairly convinced that the setting played an important role. For sure, tension dissipated because the area was without walls. Having nature around us kept things in perspective: it’s not all a life-and-death situation. It’s only software!