Seibels Bruce Reviews

Pros

Seibels decided at the end of January 2009 to stop using the Leaning Birch software toolkit, since its inability to handle complexity caused very slow and difficult development. Senior management showed a genuine humility in pulling the plug on a project that they had approved over the vehement objections of their senior development staff. (If senior management had been interested primarily in saving face, they would have attempted to keep limping along anyway.) It's full steam ahead on the new .NET policy management system.

Seibels remains reasonably profitable despite the recent economic downturn, which means that employee morale remains good. They are able to invest in growth opportunities.

Both the iSeries and .NET development wings now report to a single manager. This has improved the collaboration between the 2 sides of the dev organization.

Cons

The company is still very slow-moving with regard to software development process improvements. A .NET manager brought in from Microsoft only lasted 6 weeks; his zeal encountered strong resistance. IT management is not completely inflexible, though; if you make a good case for a change, and offer a well thought out plan to experiment with it, you *might* get it approved.

Advice to Senior Management

Senior management has been open to technological advances over the past 25 years; it's time to be more open to process innovations that the industry has adopted over the past 25 years as well.

Pros

1. Your co-workers will be friendly. You will meet a lot of colleagues who have been at the company for 10, 20, sometimes 25+ years, and they will treat you like a long-lost cousin.
2. Management understands that employees are people who have a real and sometimes complicated life outside of the cubicle.
3. The president of the company, Mike Culbertson, is a really sharp guy with good business sense. He operates with 100% integrity and treats everyone well.
4. There has been an influx of talent in the IT ranks recently. The junior developers are really bright and advancing fast. Some business analysts are very impressive in their ability to understand how to work with customers and the rest of the IT org to get systems developed. Chris Glasser has a good handle on software architecture.
5. Seibels IT is willing to invest in technological advancement. They have started paying for developers to attend conferences or other training events, and they have some budget and inclination to adopt new technologies in the Microsoft .NET arena.

Cons

1. There is strong resistance in the IT area against innovation in the software development process. Managers complain about quality problems and missed deadlines, but if you propose something like new QA tools or agile methodologies, those same managers will tell you that "the culture is not ready." Why is the culture accepted as a given, if it is not producing entirely satisfactory results?
2. The development of a new policy management system is going in a bizarre direction. Instead of "First, let's kill all the lawyers" (Shakespeare), it's underlying tenet could be phrased as "First let's kill all the developers." The fundamental conceit of the Leaning Birch toolkit which is being used is that the typical business analyst should be able to develop the system, with occasional assistance from a programmer. It's an intriguing idea that unfortunately ignores the reality of how complex systems must evolve. There's no way that a toolkit developed over an 18-month period by one guy in his basement, with 4 man-years of junior developer assistance, is going to be able to provide the means to handle complexity that the Microsoft .NET toolset--the product of tens of thousands of man-years of effort--can provide. And when you're writing software, you are dealing with complexity every moment of every workday.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop wasting money on the Leaning Birch toolset. Invest instead in process improvements, particularly agile methodologies which would be well-suited to Seibels' informal style.