Business school sucks at preparing people to be managers at companies that operate in the technology sector. I graduated from the Fisher College of Business in June of 2008 - it is a great school where we used the “case method” and did graduate-level course work in a lot of classes. The cases focused on traditional manufacturing - the type of manufacturing you see at GM - the type of manufacturing that is dying…fast.
The Assembly Line is Dead
There is no assembly line when you’re designing and building software. That process model is dead. Developing applications is an iterative process, there is a natural flow, and there is a lot of work that can be done on all levels at the same time.
When you get “business people” managing “web people” you have a conflict. They constantly want to fit the development cycle into their preconceived ideas of formal processes - they think there must be logical steps, they think time frames must be definite. Designing and developing software is nothing like sending a car down the assembly line. The two aren’t even close to parallel.
And so we have an issue. A classic impasse. Management wants process. Developers want to build something that works. Designers want to spend time thinking about use cases. What do we do?
Until business schools start educating people better, the only option is better communication from both sides. Having gone to business school I understand the need for process and accountability, but I also understand that building software is not a game of absolutes. For every feature, there are bugs, every bug takes time. Software is never done. Design is never done. Everyone has to understand this.
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touché
Well, as your former professor (lecturer) at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business teaching you search engine marketing analytics, I couldn’t agree with you more about what you’ve said here. I was not one of the favorite marketing professors as you know in terms of lecturers, but this is a challenge to teach in a large university environment. Perhaps the greater challenge is to change the way we teach at such a large facility. What we teach, and how we teach others to think, and in a controlled environment is difficult for me personally. I believe we should teach others to think in a live environment where things change, because that forces you to think of solutions that are not case studies or applied formulas that work everytime. In the real world, conflicts occur, and solutions are not as easy as one would hope to come by.
In terms of marketing versus management versus technology departments - this is a constant conflict that can be overcome. Vanessa Fox of SearchEngineLand, formerly of Google, and also of NinebyBlue has a day long session about how webmasters need to work with marketing management so they can communicate.
I have developed two applications, and numerous websites and have learned to see both sides. Remember, that while bugs take time to find, to test, and to fix - management must be able to pay the bills in some way with the product that you produce. While not a fun job, management has to ensure that work is profitable, and sometimes quality is sacrificed when you rush. At the same time, they must put pressure on the technology team to produce a quality product within a reasonable amount of time.
On the other side, as Vanessa talked about in her Tweets from the SMX conference in Santa Clara, marketing management must set priorities and outline the tasks in an organized form. And sometimes we do not understand the challenges and time it takes to test in a proper environment. We want to sell, and we may not understand the amount of time it takes to develop or test or roll out something new.
But the good thing - is that your ability to relate to management, and to communicate effectively with your tech team - is a massive quality - and to understand analytics at the same time - you are a wonderful asset to your team in SFO.
In a CRP working with special needs consumers an assembly line will always be used with a certain segment of that population. That industry is in desperate need of software updating to move away from the Rain Forest killing paper trail followed everyday. Especially with the funding coming along to groups like NISH. Just a thought.
(Disclaimer: I work with Ben)
Good entry here by Ben. My background was reasonably simmilar to his: studied graduate-level business and other pre-MBA courses while in college, then spent a few years working at a management consulting firm.
When it came time to enter the startup realm, a lot of those “best practices” went out the window. Some of them were useful, though, and I think that the best managers are the ones who can translate their ‘traditional’ way of doing things into a 21st century mold.
We were able to do that at Bleacher Report, and the results are (hopefully) visible.