Elephant in the room

Some of us have a very real and worrying ailment that blights our working lives, elephant in the room blindness—or to give it its medical name, Pachyderm in situ vision impairedness. Those inflicted are aware of a big problem or issue that is in their way, impeding their progress, efficiency, and willingness to engage and draining their morale. What do these poor souls normally do? They normally choose to either simply accept it or worse still, ignore it—depending on the size of the problem. Those that don't bury their heads in the sand, so to speak, then find ingenious ways to work around, circumvent, or avoid said problem by making very localized changes to how they work. Sometimes, at the detriment to others. In fact, they normally invest a lot of effort, time, and money in building these ingenious solutions and then convince themselves and their leadership that this is the best thing to do.

To stretch this metaphor a little more—please bear with me, there is a point to this—I would like to turn to the world of art. The artist Banksy exhibited a piece of living artwork as part of his 2006 Barely Legal exhibition in Los Angeles. This living artwork was in the form of an adult Indian elephant standing in a makeshift living room with floral print on the walls. The elephant was also painted head to toe with the same floral pattern. The piece was entitled—as luck would have it—elephant in the room. It seems ludicrous at first and you can clearly see that there is a massive 12,000 lb. elephant standing there; while it has been painted to blend in with its surroundings, it is still a massive elephant stood there in plain sight. This brings me to my point, the problems and issues within a software delivery process are just like the elephant and it is just as ludicrous that we simply ignore—or accept without question—their existence.

Through the remainder of this chapter, we'll go through some ways to help highlight the existence of the elephant in the room and, more importantly, how to ensure as many people as possible can also see it and realize that it's not something to be avoided, worked around, or ignored.

Before you start removing the figurative floral pattern from the figurative elephant, there's still some legwork you need to do.