I Love Banks

Deviating a little bit from the agile topics, Im writing this post to tell a little story about my relationship with a certain british bank, and how well they use IT for the client’s benefit.

I dont want to tell the bank’s name, because the purpose is not to create bad advertising or something like that, so for the moment I will just call this institution the bank of the citi.

So, beginning the story, last month I was surprised by having been charged interests in my credit card bill, despite having the feeling that I had payed in the right day. I sent my bank a message, which was replied:

our payment due date was 27th October 2008 and your payment was made on the 29th October 2008. Because the payment was late you have been charged the late fee and the interest.

Ok, but I still thought I’d payed in the right day, so I checked my account info and verified it. Second message to the bank of the citi:

my account info show the transaction was made on the 27th.

27/10 TRANSFER 538813

Why it is just considered in the 29th?

And then comes the surprise (in form of a reply):

When making a debit card payment to your credit card the timescales are up to two working days for it to clear onto your account.
If you require anything else please don’t hesitate to contact me again.

Then I thought: What?? And kept trying to understand how possibly it could take 2 working days to transfer some money electronically to the same bank.

Since I was in a good mood and the attendant had offered me his help, I decided to send another message:

I think the only question I have is how come it takes 2 days to do an electronic transfer, but probably it won’t solve my problem.

And here comes the answer:

It takes two working days for a debit card payment to clear onto accounts as it has to go through clearing and then be allocated to the correct account.

Oh, now I understand… It’s not a simple operation, like transfer the money. You actually have to subtract the money from one account, clear it (whatever this means), and then transfer it to the other one.

For some days after this whole conversation occurred, I tried to think how someone managed to build some software that needs 2 working days to perform one operation.

I thought that maybe there’s one batch job that gets the money from my account (which runs at midnight at D+1) and another one that gets this money and adds it to the other account (midnight at D+2), or  both operations happen at D+1, but then they need 24 hours to verify if the transaction was correctly performed, or there’s actually a person that goes to the safe where my account is, counts the money, and then goes to some other building where the bank account is, opens the safe and stores the money there… actually, no, this would be much faster than 2 days.

Focus on the Right Point

This post came from a pub discussion with Liz, and actually originated from this thought I’ve been having for some time, an came back in one of my recent readings (not to say also in one of my recent projects)…

I participate in some agile mailing lists, and one question that frequently happens is what I should do about people not showing up/showing up late for the stand-ups in the morning. And normally this comes with statements like: “I’ve tried it all already: waiting, not waiting, punishing late arrivers, making them buy ice cream, etc… and nothing works”

And this situation came again to me mind while reading Ricardo Semler‘s book, Voce Esta Louco! (not published in english so far, but it means You Are Crazy!), when he describes how flexible time was introduced in his company.

To give some context, Ricardo runs Semco, a brazilian company which has business units in a lot of different areas, from shipbuilding to hotel management, but is best known for the industrial democracy that its owner has been implementing since the 80′s.

This particular situation he describes occurred when Semco, in the 80′s, was going to allow production line employees to have flexible work hours, and as expected, most of the top managers were totally against the idea, since it violated a basic principle: for a production line to work, everybody has to be there at the same time.

And ricardo’s answer for that was (free translation):

It’s obvious: if the employees are not working at the same time, the production line stops. We know it, but the adults that work in the production line also know it. And why would they put their productivity and their jobs at risk? If they are not worried about how the production line is, producing or not, then we have a much bigger problem, and the sooner we know it, the better.

And that’s what happened, one day before the program started, the employees gathered and decided what time they would start to work.

But what does this have to do with daily standups? Well, the whole example was to indtroduce the same answer I always give to these questions: if your team doesn’t show up for the standups, you shouldn’t worry about why they are late, but ask yourself why they don’t care. That’s your problem.