Or consider this variation: the troubled project manager walks into my office, tells me he hasn’t done anything extreme yet, but wonders if I’ll tell him that it’s okay to shoot the obnoxious member of his project team right between the eyes, and then defend him if senior management becomes unhappy about the situation. What should I tell the project manager?

Admittedly, these are extreme situations, and it’s entirely hypothetical. Maybe it happens in a war zone, but it certainly doesn’t happen in a normal IT project environment. In any case, it’s never happened to me. But the fundamental question still remains: where do you draw the line if/when serious ethical conflicts arise?

While the term “confessor priest” may be useful for the discussions in this series of blog postings, it’s important to remember that the consultants who play this role are not priests, in any official sense of the word. Nor are they journalists, with the legal option of protecting their “confidential sources.” It’s highly unlikely that they are psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, or anything else that would allow them to claim that statements from their project-manager “sinners” were confidential.

It’s one thing to negotiate a consulting agreement with an IT organization, in which the “confessor priest” states that his conversations with the project-manager “sinners” are confidential. And it’s one thing to refuse a demand to divulge those confidential details to a senior executive in the IT organization. Indeed, the consultant who takes on the role of “confessor priest” should be prepared to resign immediately if pressed on this issue. But if you’re questioned by the police, or the FBI, or a lawyer in a courtroom, it’s a different matter altogether; while I’m not qualified to offer legal advice, I’m pretty confident that the confessor-priest will have to answer questions, and reveal confidences, in situations like this.

So it’s important for the project-manager “sinners” who are thinking of asking for help to know that the “confessor priest” cannot help them if they have broken the law, or violated regulatory procedures and restrictions — especially when it comes to capital crimes, felonies, and things of that sort. Obviously, most project managers don’t run around murdering the members of their project team … but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that a project manager could misrepresent an expenditure on an expense account or a procurement request, in order to provide some much-needed personal relief (e.g., a weekend of R&R at the beach) for an overworked member of his project team, which would be automatically rejected if requested through official channels.

The real issue typically involves “administrative” rules, and bureaucratic restrictions that kill productivity, frustrate the project team, and dampen morale to the point where the members of the project team have no energy or enthusiasm for their project. For example, one of the project team members wants to work at home from his laptop for a couple days, because his wife and kids are sick with the flu. One of the programmers wants to disable the company-installed Muzak system, because it’s driving him crazy having to listen to Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby crooning over the PA system all day long. One of the network engineers desperately wants to take a day off in the middle of the week — against company rules — to attend a Rolling Stones farewell concert in a city 300 miles away, but says that he’ll make up for it by working both Saturday and Sunday.

These examples may or may not sound realistic, and they may or may not seem like issues worth making a fuss about. But there are issues worth making a fuss about, and the list of possibilities is endless. After he has agreed to such a request, the project manager may develop a guilty conscience, and may shuffle into the confessor-priest’s office and ask whether he has, in fact, committed a mortal sin.

The confessor-priest has to rely on his own experience, judgment, common sense, and gut instincts about what’s practical, what’s fair, and what “crosses the line” into areas that cannot be condoned or forgiven. Given the same situation, two different confessor-priests might make two different decisions; after all, we’re not talking about a formal religion, and there is no “Bible” to tell us exactly what we should do in every circumstance.

In my case, for example, I’m a firm believer in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to overlooking infractions of minor administrative/bureaucratic rules; but if asked a direct and specific question about such an infraction, I won’t lie to a senior executive in order to protect a project-manager “sinner.” At the same time, if I thought I was going to be interrogated by senior management about every possible infraction that might or might not have been committed, I wouldn’t take the assignment in the first place; or I would resign from the assignment as soon as it became clear that such a “corporate culture” was in place.

Again, everyone will have different opinions, assumptions, expectations, and behaviors when it comes to such ethical issues. It’s something for both the potential confessor-priest and the project-management sinners to think about before the issues arise … because, sooner or later, they will arise.

On to another aspect of the IT project confessional tomorrow…

 But after a week of watching a gut-wrenching roller-coaster ride on the New York stock market, and reading various gloom-and-doom predictions of bad economic times ahead, I thought it would be more appropriate to replace that talk with a presentation on “Death-March 3: Software Processes in the New Hard Times”:

If you click on either icon, you’ll download a 12.2-megabyte PDF file that actually contains both presentations. So you can look at either one of them, depending on whether you’re feeling optimistic or pessimistic. Enjoy … or don’t.  

Here’s a summary of the additions, changes, and corrections that I made in V54; for convenience, you’ll also find that they appear in red in the PDF materials, so you can see what has changed since V52 and V53:

1. On page 70, I added Google Maps to the list of Ajax examples.
2. On page 84, I added Google App Engine to the list of interesting products from Google.
3. On page 85, I provided a new (working) link and details about Zimbra.
4. On page 87, I added a link to IBM’s new “Bluehouse” product.
5. On pages 89-90, I added two new pages of details on the iPhone 3g.
6. On page 91, I provided additional details on CIsco’s acquisition of Five Across.
7. On page 132, I added a bullet point with a link to Nicholas Carr’s article on “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“

I probably won’t do any more updates for another week or two, but this should keep you busy for a while. Enjoy…

Here’s a summary of the additions, changes, and corrections that I made in V53; for convenience, you’ll also find that they appear in red in the PDF materials, so you can see what has changed since V52:

1. On page 6, I noted that the Michael Wesch “The Machine Is (Us)ing Us” video has now been viewed 5.6 million times, as of Jun 8, 2008.
2. On page 8, I added a bullet point indicating that while the “long tail” is not one of the main “Web 2.0 tools,” it is a “related concept”
3. On page 15, in the discussion of “risks of Web 2.0″ platform, I noted that the comparison between the Keynote/PDF version of this presentation, against the Google Apps version, was so bad that I recently deleted the Google Apps version altogether.
4. On page 17, I added a note to indicate that the chart showing usage of various technologies — including the Internet and Web 2.0 — was taken from a 2006 survey that had been cited on the previous page.
5. On page 20, I updated the Twitter example with a screen shot from my Twitter home page as of this morning.
6. On page 24, I updated the count of Twitter users to 1,811,515 as of Jun 8, 2008. I also added a new bullet point citing a Business Week article indicating that Obama and Clinton each had approximately 30,000 Twitter followers during their primary campaigns, but Obama used his more effectively.
7. On page 26, I changed the first bullet point to indicate that Zappos is a shoe-selling company, not a shoe-manufacturing company.
8. On pages 29-30, I updated the Dopplr example with screen shots from my Dopplr home page as of this morning, which shows that I’m in Rome, along with various other details about who’s in Rome, who’s in my home town of New York, etc.
9. On page 35, I added a couple of sub-bullet points about MySpace, indicating (a) that it’s larger than every other nation except China, India, the U.S., and Indonesia; and (b) that I had written a blog posting about this issue, titled “A United Nations Seat for Myspace?“
10. On page 37, I updated a note about Obama’s “Yes, We Can” video, indicating that as of Jun 8, 2008 it has now been viewed 8.0 million times.
11. On page 75, I added a citation to a blog posting entitled “Did Rails Sink Twitter?“
12. On page 80, I updated the first bullet point to indicate that the book Web 20 Design Patterns is no longer “forthcoming”; it has now been published.
13. On page 85, I updated a bullet point to indicate that, as of Jun 8, 2008, it was still unclear whether Yahoo would continue as an independent company, be acquired by Microsoft, or consummate some kind of marketing/advertising arrangement with Google.
14. On page 87, which discusses IBM’s activities in the Web 2.0 world, I added a note that IBM now has a Vice President of Social Engineering.
15. On page 88, I added a “placeholder” bullet point for the iPhone 2.0 that is scheduled to be announced/released on June 9th; and I also modified a bullet point to reflect my belief that Apple’s distribution of iPhone software apps via iTunes will represent an interesting example of the “long tail” concept.
16. On page 123, which discusses technology trends, I added a note to the bullet point asking whether computers might someday exceed human intelligence — noting that the June 2008 IEEE Spectrum journal has a special report, entitled “The Rapture of the Geeks: separating science from fiction in the technological singularity”
17. On page 127, I added a bullet point indicating that senior executives’ acceptance/non-acceptance of social networks & Web 2.0 will become a more and more significant differentiator; I also included a citation to a recent Wall Street Journal interview with Clay Shirky.
18. On page 130, I added a bullet point with a citation to another paper discussing the use of Web 2.0 in educational environments.
19. On page 134, I added a bullet point with the publishing details of Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations.

I don’t know how (or if) the other speakers’ presentations will be available; but if you’d like to download the 1.9MB PDF version of my presentation, click here, or on the image below…

To put my vintage-2008 impressions in perspective, I should also mention that I’m a child of the Cold War, and never expected that I would ever visit Russia during my lifetime. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I was certainly aware of Sputnik and the military might of the Soviet Union; and I watched in fascination as the Soviet empire disintegrated into roughly a dozen separate republics and transformed itself into a capitalist economy. But the knowledge was all academic, and removed from my day-to-day experience — just as the news that most Americans read today about events in Baghdad and Tehran is more abstract than real.

But putting all that aside, here are my two basic impressions of the country: first, St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) is a beautiful city whose history and wide streets and historic palaces and art-filled museums (including the Hermitage, with over 3 million items of art) made me smile with pleasure. And second, Moscow is a huge, throbbing, aggressive, traffice-jammed, breathtakingly expensive powerhouse of a city, with 14 million inhabitants who seem ready to compete with New York and London and Tokyo and Shanghai and Bangalore and every other center of power around the globe. As such, the contrast between St. Petersburg and Moscow was roughly similar to the contrast an American sees between Boston and New York.

But Moscow actually reminded me somewhat more of Las Vegas than New York: much of the downtown area was garish and brightly lit, with casinos doing their best to lure patrons in for gambling; well, perhaps it was a little like Times Square in New York City. Of course, Times Square isn’t a good representation of the entire spectrum of neighborhoods and regions of New York City (especially when one thinks of Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx and Staten Island); and in a similar fashion, I eventually traveled through various other parts of Moscow that seemed more residential and settled.

The “expensive” aspect of Moscow was an interesting anomaly: a Westerner staying in a first-class hotel can expect to spend $200 for an average bottle of California wine, and even more for French wine. Breakfast for two in our hotel room was a hundred dollars, and a small can of diet-Coke in the mini-bar was $15. But “average” Russians obviously don’t spend that kind of money, and I could even see the contrast while visiting an icon of American culture: lunch for two at McDonald’s was a little under $9. (There are now a couple dozen McDonald’s restaurants in Moscow, and they seem jammed at all hours of the day: when I was there, there were 20 separate lines of people, and each line was at least 10 people long.)

In between the low-cost fast-food economy, and the rarefied world of Bentleys and Mercedes and hundred-dollar bottles of wine (note: the Wikipedia article on Moscow claims that it is the home to the largest number of billionaires in the world), I assume there’s a middle-class society, with middle-class salaries and expenses — though someone did tell me (seriously, I think) that there is no middle class in Russia — and that people are either very poor or very rich. A week’s visit isn’t long enough to get any real sense of proportion about such issues; and even if I could have understood the social/economic demographics of Moscow and St. Petersburg, I have no idea if it represents the rest of this enormous country.

Indeed, I got a brief impression that Moscow and St. Petersburg might well be isolated enclaves, unlike the rest of the country, during a 5-hour train ride between the two cities. The train was punctual and efficient and comfortable, though it seemed a little more drab than the Amtrak Acela that whisks people back and forth between New York and Washington; but what really struck me was the drab nature of the countryside as we rolled along the relatively flat, wooded terrain. After passing through grim suburbs outside St. Petersburg, and then cemeteries and construction sites, most of what I saw (aside from birch forests and stands of pine trees) consisted of small villages along the train track, with tiny wooden homes covered with corrugate-iron roofs. It reminded me very much of the small towns and villages in the interior of Alaska, though I never got off the train to actually see what any of these villages was really like.

Aside from the garish, high-priced nature of Moscow, one of the other unforgettable impressions was the traffic: massive gridlock and traffic jams everywhere, at almost every hour of the day or night (except at 4 AM, when we headed from downtown to Domededovo Airport for our flight home). In many cases, traffic is literally at a standstill for long periods of time; and parking in the downtown area seems utterly chaotic. As a result, many people depend instead on the Moscow metro for local travel; in 2007, it was the most heavily-used metro system in the world, exceeding both Tokyo and New York.

My impressions of Russian culture and people are somewhat haphazard, and quite possibly inaccurate; but I’ll pass them along for whatever they’re worth. First, I was impressed by the complete absence of trash and litter in both Moscow and St. Petersburg. Perhaps this is because I arrived in Russia after spending a couple days in Bangalore, India — which is quite filthy by comparison. But New York is filthy, too, by comparison: in Moscow and St. Petersburg, I saw no trash, no newspapers blowing along the street, no food-wrappers, no plastic cups. Also: most of the men were relatively unattractive and poorly dressed. By contrast, the women were tall, thin, attractive, stylishly dressed in miniskirts or tight jeans, and consistently wearing high-heeled shoes even in places where it made no sense (it seemed almost impossible, for example, to walk across the cobblestones in Red Square in high-heeled shoes; but women did so without hesitating).

The stylish women, by the way, as well as the frumpily-dressed men, were uniformly young — either in their early twenties, or even younger. I did see a few “babushka” women begging for coins in various places, but I didn’t see any old men; perhaps that’s because the average life expectancy for Russian men is only 56 years. Because of a combination of low birth rates, high abortion rates, alcoholism, stress, and various other health problems, the population of Russia has been declining — in absolute terms — for the past several years, and is not expected to stabilize until approximately 2020.

Also, I found it interesting that almost nobody hesitated to offer a wide range of criticisms and cynical comments about Vladimir Putin, though I couldn’t help noticing lots of plain-clothes police throughout Moscow, with sunglasses and dark-tinted official cars. On the other hand, no one offered any criticisms — or even showed any interest — in the politics or actions of George Bush. For that matter, nobody showed any curiosity about the current U.S. presidential campaign, sports, movies, music, or any other aspect of American culture; and I only saw (or heard) one American tourist during the entire trip (but lots of American, British, and European business people in the hotels where I stayed).

So much for the culture of Moscow and St. Petersburg. What about the computer industry, which was my official justification for visiting the country? Again, my visit was too short to form any in-depth conclusions, and I didn’t have a chance to visit any IT organizations or Silicon-Valley-style software shops. But here are the quick impressions I got from meeting and chatting with a couple hundred people in five different presentations that I gave during my visit:

1. Everyone seems well-read, and well-informed about current developments in software engineering, project management, and computer science. They’re hungry for knowledge, and they’re willing to do their homework.
2. For example, virtually everyone in my audiences was familiar with the concept of “function points” as a language-independent metric for measuring the size of a computer program.
3. Also, I was surprised by the number of people in my presentations who said their software organization had received an SEI-CMM “Capability Maturity Model” assessment, and even more surprised by the number of people who said their IT organization had achieved level-3, level-4, or even level-5. It’s not as high as one might expect in India, but significantly higher than what I’ve seen in the U.S.
4. On the other hand, I didn’t see much evidence of tool usage. An informal survey, for example, indicated that far less than five percent of the people in my presentations were using software estimating tools based on models like COCOMO; in the U.S., the figure is typically closer to ten percent.
5. The English literacy rate was much higher than I expected. When I give presentations in most parts of Europe, Asia, or South America, at least half of the audience listens to simultaneous interpreters via headphones; in Russia, roughly 75% listened to me in English, without translation.
6. I saw two Macintoshes in the audience; I’m not sure whether that’s good, bad, or irrelevant — but I found it interesting.
7. There is a very large and active group in Moscow discussing and debating agile software development; I was encouraged by this, and was again impressed by how well-read and well-informed people were on this topic.
8. I learned that while it’s amusing for Americans to joke about being banished to Siberia for various forms of misbehavior, it doesn’t make any sense to Russians in the software industry. The largest city in Siberia, Novosobirsk, is home to a thriving software outsourcing industry, and many Russians consider it a pleasant place to live.
9. Notwithstanding the success of outsourcing firms in Novosobirsk, St. Petersburg, and Moscow, I did not get the impression that Russia is likely to mount a serious competitive challenge to the outsourcing industry of India or China. Historically, Russian programmers have succeeded with outsourcing, especially for customers in Europe; but their salaries have increased dramatically in recent years (partly because of the inflation associated with the oil industry), and the labor rates are now almost comparable with Europe and the U.S. Aside from that, the population of Russia in January 2008 was a mere 142 million; that pales in comparison to the one billion inhabitants of India and the 1.3 billion inhabitants of China.

So … that’s what I saw, and what I learned, during my whirlwind visit to Russia. My wife and I took a couple hundred photographs during the trip, and we’re organizing them into a coherent collection (and removing most of the redundant pictures of Lenin’s Tomb and St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square). Once we’ve finished, we’ll upload everything into an album on my Flickr archives; check back from time to time to see if they’re there…