Heroes and Villains

It can be all too easy to see the world through dark glasses, especially when you have to deal with large companies that fragment themselves to try to inject energy into their being.

This method of breaking things up usually works in nature because something fills the gaps to prevent a vacuum. It is the controlled movement that creates new structures. The control in nature comes from fluids.

However, in business the gaps that are left are often not filled with anything and the individual elements separate and create self contained units that no longer have a connection between constituent parts of the original organism.

What is more, the vacuum is often filled with, 'not my problem gov, try somewhere else'.

It is so refreshing to come across people who fill this vacuum with real human extensions to badly designed systems rather than excuses for not being able to achieve what the customer needs.

I applaud two such heroes who have gone beyond 'standard' practice to make my life easier, after it had been made miserable by many others in the same organisations.

The first works for AXA Health insurance. Robin Masters is an individual you can trust to fix an issue rather than to pass the buck.

The second is from BT. Graeme Paterson, regained my confidence in British Telecom which has been dwindling based on my attempt to get a good service from them over the last few years.

These people obviously represent many other helpful individuals in these companies. However, the probability is that you are more likely to meet people that do the hours without putting their heart into the job.

But then who is the villain? The person who has no heart in their job or the person that gives people heartless tasks to perform by developing vacuous systems?

The best debugging occurs at the common (Human) language interface

NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming is a strange thing for an IT person to be interested in wouldn't you think?



We all know that we should base all requirements on use cases which are stated in simple english. However, what is simple english? Who wrote the use cases? What did the business person state as the requirement and what else were they thinking at the time besides what they communicated by voice. How was the statement perceived and recorded by the analysit, did they rely only on words or other non verbal activity on and around the business person that should not have been considered in the way that it was?



Elicitation and recording of facts is impacted on by feelings which can change the meaning of words by overloading them with extraneuos data that should have been contained in isolation from the current object of communication.



Take a look at http://www.nlpls.com/articles/metamodel/MetaModelFlashcards.php.



Then go to http://www.nlpls.com/articles/NLPmetaModel.php and learn about Meta Models and the people that have discovered and documented them.