Bridge over the river Why?
“Why can't you just tell me that you're going to build a bridge, it starts from here, it ends here. It's gonna take this long and it's gonna cost this much” – a minister [name redacted]
This is an anecdote from a civil servant [name redacted] during one of my research interviews.
School kids can turn this picture into a delivery plan: coffer dams and piling, steel and it’s delivery, boats, camps, workers’ shuttles, rivets, brick arches, testing and commissioning.
And they could understand the timelines, costs and estimates if explained to them. Bridges are hard to do but easy to understand.
Software not so much – the short-sighted building the large and fragile – the engineering is fuzzy at best: brittle and scarcely perceptible glass. Only the user interface stands out – two pairs of rails floating over the Forth.
Building a invisible software bridge over the Forth to Fife, when the existence of both the river and the Kingdom are in doubt, is a different game.
First send a swimmer with a glass thread to pull a glass string to pull a glass rope to pull a glass hawser to pull a chain.
A chain we can see, a user can pull themselves to Fife against the stream. String glass boats along the chain and lay down a line of planks – a working, visible bridge first for a child, them a man, then a man and wheelbarrow. Planks on planks, and cars on trucks and finally trains.
This is why we iterate, not because we want to, but because we must if we want to succeed.
Don’t make the mistake, oh great politician, of thinking that you alone are blind. Your technical specialists are just blasé, we know we can do it, even though we can’t see it.
The only people that can see the glorious whole now, who can taste and touch it, are the salesmen. They can sing you such a tale, if you but sign here, and here and bank details here. You won’t regret it, Fife, the land of milk and honey, is but a hop, skip and jump away.
(You will regret it)