This is where there’s good design, and then there’s meaningful design. iRise is an enterprise-class tool where enterprise-class is not relevant. Another measure of it’s applicability or qualification as 2.0-relevant is what I call the Google-training-metric. How much training do you need for Google-search? iRise takes a week. That’s just to learn the tool — then you need to figure out what standards you want to apply for your own environment so that they’re repeatable and you’re not reinventing everything from scratch with each project.

No — iRise is not relevant here. While I absolutely respect them for what they have done, and I’m typically keen on enterprise plans, the only time iRise would make sense is if you were automating an entire enterprise — ALL of it — that’s writing your own version of SAP and the like — then it would be worth the investment.

Thanks,
Randy

Let’s simply start there: I hereby give you all permission (by the wave of my fairy wand) to bring your whole selves to work and to find ways to tap your own individual passions via your daily work.

Try it. Will it be easy? Is exercising easy? This is you, exercising your total, tremendous potential.

Let me know how your experiment goes.

First, amazing write-up. Truly one-of-a-kind. Examining thing from a different perspective is always a very interesting model to follow when looking for better solutions (what we call post-mortem in corporate-speak – right?)

In the spirit of looking for a different POV — how about taking a different approach. I am quite certain, because I know a lot of them and read some other interviews, that if you approach any person in that team and ask them why they do what they do you will get a look as if you just asked them whether you can date their mother. Then, they will sit you down and explain to you that it is not a job, it is a passion – a lifestyle. They chose to do this because sitting in a room for 6 hours drawing fishies with pen and paper (or a computer in 3D) is what they want to do, who they are, and what they hope to do until they moment they die — and they will die with a smile.

Now, and here is the interesting perspective, find that person in an implementation project.

That is why that works, and why ours don’t. Passion projects mean you commit to doing it, you don’t look to see whether there is a review-time approaching and you have to justify your position, or whether you can do a little bit less and still get away with it and spend the weekend away from the office, or similar behaviors. True, we may never find that person in our projects — but without them the model you describe is, IMO, not possible.

Just sayin’