The Great British Server Build Factory

One project had a 'Build Factory' - the client would send the specification to our team and server after server would be built and installed for them. They wanted hundreds and hundreds of servers so the profit margin would be great. Except its not really a factory. People are not co-located and talking to each other. If there is a problem then the assembly line is not halted until the issue is fixed and they will carry on. There was no officious man with a clip board checking quality. Instead there was the ghoulish combination of offshore resources, onshore project managers, tracker spreadsheets and optimistic forecasts for the factory.

Several months later there is a new word that is used. 'Remediation'. Most of the servers have issues. Each server will have different issues so there are no systematic problems. A separate team has to work through all the servers and identify the defects and fix them.

In a discussion about the build factory one PM said 'we did get the defects down from 10-20 a server to 2 or 3 a server'. That's interesting. Is that what you want to tell the client. If you buy a car with 2 or 3 known defects when it is brand new is that acceptable or a piece of hospital equipment.?' The dream of the Build Factory had taken its toll on him.

His boss was more concerned that the factory was not productive enough. 'They promised me 20 a day but they manage only 20 a week', he complained. 'But if we are producing shoddy goods do we really want to produce it twice as quick or should we try and find out what our quality problems are so we don't need to recruit a team to fix problems. With better quality these additional people could be building even more servers'

A lot of the conversation was how ideas such as SIAM had institutionalised silos in the organisation whereas you would have people with cross-over skills and you would encourage the Unix person to know a bit about Windows and the Windows guy to know about SQL. Even the contractors we were pulling in were not able to hit the ground running.

As a joke I proosed we rebranded the 'Build Factory' as 'The Great British Server Build' and set up a marquee in the car park and have the teams create a new server each day - a SQL server, an Oracle Server, a Cluster and they could be judged by the client and the PM on how well they met the specification.

It would have been cheaper, cleaner and quicker to do it that way. Perhaps the team would have developed some ownership of their work and learned to work as a team. Instead they are dragging themselves across a set of hardware that they keep thinking they have got rid of and have to update the software as it has taken more than 6 months before they were originally created.