Skunk Works Projects

Great question. Very important question.

Jeffrey Moore (Inside the Tornado, Crossing the Chasm, etc.) wrote that when he lectured around the world, he had one question to ask every customer (including the likes of GE, Motorola, etc.) etc.)

The question was:

"Can you give me just one example of a truly groundbreaking, paradigm-changing innovation that ever came out of your company research or product development process?"

At least at the point where I read the quote, more than one example has been identified . And in most cases, such products or services were conceived, designed, and largely developed by small groups of people who were ignored at best but often actively opposed R&D. D

We are currently in this situation, although admittedly the project will not have high visibility aspects - although each of them will eventually use it.

In preparation for rebuilding most of our enterprise applications, we began developing an application framework that will form the basis for all replacement applications. We already have "desktop projects" and "proof of concept" where everyone knows what we are using to evaluate concepts. However, this time it doesn't matter that we are actively developing the full project.

• Was it successful? ... We haven't rolled out the full framework yet, but since it's modular, chunks have been deployed in legacy apps. Most of them focus on stability and reporting / logging issues. So far, they have exceeded expectations, allowing us to respond faster to problems, as well as eliminate some previously recurring ones.

• Did you find out? ... Well, this project has become one of the scariest secrets I've ever seen. While there are quite a few people who have heard the name of the project thrown a bit, I don't think any of several of my developers and testing team really knew what this was about.

• Have you been punished or rewarded? ... We haven't considered this side yet. If the structure does not create negative consequences, I doubt that we will be punished for this. However, even if this is successful, the reward will be that no one notices anything other than improved apps.

• How did you finance it? ... As mentioned earlier, work time between other projects and inclusion in the "proof of concept" work. I also put my own time into it because it will lay the foundation for how all my developers interact with applications in the future.

• How did you serve him? ... I started with a series of small proofs of concept in a legacy codebase as part of "support" applications. Defect entry and remediation often involved analytical steps as to what could be done to prevent the occurrence or improve the experience in the future. They were eventually retrieved and reorganized in their own collections, which became the beginning of the structure. We are now putting "hidden" projects in our iterations that help bring these ideas to life through my developers, and we are now pulling and refactoring their efforts based on the success of the implementation.

• How long did it take to complete, compared to overground projects? - remains to be determined. Since this is not an official project, it really doesn't cost anything yet. Runtime and Proof-of-Concept are standard included. The fact that we are essentially creating something from now on and not throwing it away is sauce.

• What was the cost compared to overground projects? - Once again, remains to be determined. I believe the initial cost will be relatively small compared to larger projects. Given that this is the basis for hosting widely used extensions and enhancing a developer's ability and quality to work efficiently, it is likely to pay for itself before it is completed due to time savings, better practice, and reduced defects.

• Was it officially accepted? ... The developers accepted the concept. My direct control is pushing. My management colleagues are excited, if not a little confused about what he will do. The measurement will be the success of applications that are built outside the box, which is far from all.

I have built a tool to validate schema changes in the target DB at work. prior to my tool, we did it all by hand with legacy scripts that had to be done by the DBA on the client sites. my tool started tracking the structure of the database to see if certain things would work. I was frustrated that I had to check all of these things or suffer from the errors inevitable when doing things by hand, so I built my validator and here is its history ...

Is it successful?

Yes

Did you find out?

Yes. Part of the aspect of a skunk project is that it has to come out eventually.

Have you been punished or rewarded?

Punished initially - why not work on your core business. But the reward after the advantage became apparent and product errors were reduced. Then it was announced - everyone loves a winner.

How did you finance it?

For the love of coding and making my life easier, so no direct funding required. If part of the leadership did not plan to have a secret project, I do not see how it would be otherwise.

How did you serve him?

I coded myself as a lone developer on a grassy hill with my laptop.

How long did it take to complete versus overground projects?

Not comparable. my skunk efforts have been maybe a year of tinkering. If we set out to do it directly, I couldn't imagine it would take less than two months, but I don't know since that's not how it changed. Downtime to think and plan may have sped it up at the end by comparing planning ahead.

What was the cost compared to overground projects?

Undefined. As I said before, given that I had time to think and plan, he was able to sort out the direction I wanted without the pressure of the schedule / outcome. On a shorter or more resourceful project, we would probably make some mistakes in rushin to get to some M1, M2, etc. Also, if it didn’t work, it would be as if it had never happened since I could have folded the tents and walked quietly into the night.

Was it officially accepted?

My project is a key part of building a product in my work, so I would say it is rooted.

Hmm ... I made one of them today.

We don't have a real backup system. I am currently getting a very nice task of backing up 100GB SVN repos using svn hotcopy and .tar.gz files when trying to manipulate them across two or three NFS shares with limited disk space to access a server with a spare disk. This is at best - that is, when I can worry about overseeing the process for 2 hours.

Since it ended in disaster sooner or later, I did it git svn clone

on the biggest one right on the backup server, then cloned it to my own machine and dumped the working copy of svn that I was using. I purchased about 1 GB of free space on my machine, taking into account the most important backups with some redundancy and reduced the 15 minute one svn st

to 30 seconds git status

. And will I complain about it? Maybe...

All in all, the answers here have been success stories, so I decided to share my recent experience sitting outside of a project like this that didn't go so well.

How did you finance it? How did you serve him?

The project started when my manager identified a potential employee, Fred called him, who had a favorite project in our area. We don't pay well, and they agreed that Fred would be hired and work almost full time on a project that they would eventually present to the business.

So Fred began work on a project known only to Fred's team, but not to management or other parts of the business. Fred is a developer and the work was more or less pure development as well as a contribution to the main open source project.

Is it successful?

Not really. Fred worked on this alone, and I think I would spend 12-18 months on it. The team's progress reports consisted of a description of what he fixed this week. Attempts were sometimes made to get one or two top executives interested in the organization, but they never went anywhere. Fred had to come up with a plan for the completion and deployment of the project so that it could be presented to the organization, but it always seemed that somehow it hadn't been done.

Did you find out?

Word slowly filtered out like Fred and the manager tried to get more people interested in what they were doing.

Eventually we got a restructuring and our new director wanted to know what everyone was working on and the project was revealed to him. However, it didn't seem to explain very well, as the new director asked me (and others on our team, I'm sure) what exactly Fred's project was?

Have you been punished or rewarded?

In the end, the new director froze all funding for the project and Fred was reassigned to work on other projects. This, as far as I know, is the current status.

How long did it take to complete, compared to aboveground projects? Was it officially accepted?

It was not finished and it was not accepted.

What was the cost compared to overground projects?

Allowable cost was Fred's time.

However, there were other costs as well.

Firstly, Fred and his project became a joke in our team, and then in the teams we work with. What is he doing? Why did he do it? Why hasn't there been any progress? Fred's reputation arose. "Project Fred" was a joke for a project that never went anywhere.

Secondly, the possible disclosure of such a long-term but hidden project reflected badly on our manager and expanded throughout our team.

Third, the outrage was growing. Why was this guy working on his pet project when so much real work was done? We are a small but busy team and we could use the developer on any number of other projects.

In the end, I think this project had implications for our team, standing and dynamic. Sometimes I talk to team members when we leave the office. Initially (and at the time) we were very critical of Fred, who can be an annoying guy, and who doesn't criticize very well, and who promised something he couldn't deliver. Most recently, we criticized our boss. It was not a good way to get the project started, and it was obvious from an early time that Fred did not have the skills to do the job on his own, and he would not seek or consult. It was unfair for Fred that he was placed in this position and stayed in it for so long. Recently, I have wondered if I can amplify my fears more drastically. Although we pushed Fred and our manager to what was in the project and where he was going,we did not take it further than our command. Having said that, I cannot imagine a good result, even if we had.

Finally, I would like to say that Fred is a smart guy and the project was not bad. This could be successful (some parts have since come out in competing projects - inferior competitors that actually delivered).

If this project was done on a whiteboard, and Fred worked with a decent project manager and had a good communicator on the team, he could very well have found a champion and delivered something great. Either that, or he could have been killed much earlier.