Ricky & Stick - Foreward
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by David Carney
Several years ago, I had the good fortune to take a brief vacation from my normal chores of writing technical papers about software. I left the realm of data, executive summaries, issues, and findings, and spent several enjoyable days writing a short, rather tongue-in-cheek essay about the dangers and challenges of using commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) software in government systems. The essay was written as a pastiche of Mao-Tse Tung's famous "Little Red Book" and my hope for the essay was simply that it would amuse a few people. I was thoroughly unprepared for how deeply it resonated in the DoD community. The Red Book has been reprinted numerous times, and I am still gratified to receive email from people for whom its "quotations," in the form of spurious Chinese aphorisms, are considerably more meaningful than any of my dry technical reports about the challenges of using commercial software.
It is always dangerous to try to repeat good fortune. However, I was recently asked to offer a few suggestions that address some high-level topics related to software acquisition. The request was for "something short and to the point," that would prepare beginning program managers for the delights that await when they find themselves stuck between demanding users, angry PEOs, and frustrated software engineers.
Perhaps against my better judgment, I chose to use an approach similar to the Red Book in writing this little book. While I have tried to keep the present volume from looking too much like a new version of the Red Book, there are some obvious similarities. It has (I hope) a certain humorous quality. Like the Red Book, it is premised on the idea that a brief, metaphoric approach can often convey more than verbose papers that are technically worthy, but anesthetically dull. And it is also patterned after well-known models, the most familiar of which was a comic strip fixture during the 1980s and 90s.
I decided that these little stories should be "fables," each of which includes a "moral" relevant to software, to acquisition, or to government programs. Possibly the most important point (and yet another similarity to the Red Book) is that these fables are based on real-world experiences: all of the situations in this book are inspired by programs that are known to me. Those programs encountered—and often foundered on—issues familiar to any observer of DoD acquisition: requirements, testing, integration, maintenance, commercial products, laws, mandates, funding, schedules, and, of course, bureaucracy. From observations of these programs, I selected some of the most representative as candidates for my anecdotal descriptive method.
Aside from their topics, a common thread among these fables is that, for the Program Manager working in the complex and chaotic reality of government acquisition, the need is to keep sight of a few simple, fundamental realities. These realities are all too easy to dismiss as mere common sense, which they are. But in the frantic weeks before Milestone B, when the world seems to be coming apart at the seams, it is amazing how easy it is to let such common sense fly out the window. At that point, a besieged Program Manager, no matter the level of experience, can sometimes make decisions that appear reasonable in the pressure cooker of the SPO, but in retrospect seem hare-brained. It is precisely at that point that the Program Manager needs a lifeline to basic principles and calm rationality.
There are many topics that his book could address: common sense is in need on many fronts. From the large number of possibilities, I chose the following:
- Testing and Modeling
- Estimation and Metrics
- Requirements
- Integration and Interoperability
- Deployment
- Business processes
These are nothing more than starting points, of course, since they all blur, and it is impossible to keep a discussion of any of these topics from wandering into some of the others. I beg the reader's indulgence in this matter, since I wanted, in the spirit of fables going as far back as Aesop, to use each fable merely as an entry point for discussion and reflection. Thus, many of these fables will have multiple interpretations. This is not, I think, a fatal flaw: if the adventures of my hapless heroes provide a number of useful metaphors for the woes faced by Program Managers, so much the better. In the same vein, there is a certain redundancy in many of these tales that is not accidental. Familiar problems, even if seen many times before, can appear novel and strange when they pop up in unfamiliar contexts, and so telling the same story in different ways may have some value.
I began these ramblings talking about good fortune, and I have gone on too long. But it must be said that an additional pleasure for me was the enormous good fortune to collaborate with David Biber, whose brilliance and invention gave life, personality, and character to Ricky and Stick. He took my rather bland prose descriptions and made them so real that, by now, these likable rascals have truly become alive in my mind, and their exploits seem more like memories than fiction. His contribution to this work is inestimable.
Finally, I have tried to keep this work short. This was partly a pragmatic concern. A reader of the Red Book once complimented me that I had written it "so that it could be read on the flight from Washington up to Boston." Since that reader has recently been transferred back to the Pentagon, I hope that this little book will at least keep his attention on the return flight from Logan down to Reagan.
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