Tri Again

A long stretch of a major route into Cambridge is being widened at the moment. To facilitate the work, one of the road junctions near my house was out of action for a long time and only reopened the other day. I didn't quite do a Laurel and Hardy comedy double-take as I walked past it for the first time, but I certainly took a second look. And a photo.

Why? Because the triangle is painted the wrong way round and is, I think now that I've skimmed the regulations, too close to the double-dashed lines across the road as well.

In fact, it seems that the triangle may not even be required but, if it is used, it should look like the left-hand side here:

Of course, we all occasionally mess up the simple job that we've done a million times before because we're on autopilot, or rushing, or doing something else at the same time. Understandable, but embarrassing and difficult to unsee or live down, particularly if there is a significant unwanted side-effect, such as a car crash at this junction.

Some, particularly management in my experience, might point to the fact that there is documented process to follow. The Traffic Signs Manual 2019: Regulatory Signs is clear on distances and orientation, as you can see from the picture above.

However, that document has over 250 pages, is written for regulatory rather than practical puposes, and is only one of eight long chapters, some of which are in multiple parts.

The existence of some kind of doc that describes the desired behaviour in some way for some purpose is no guarantee of that outcome in production.

I see this all the time at work. My current team is responsible for a couple of components, and each has, for historical reasons, a much more complex release process than we would like, with many manual steps.

For sure, we've talked about replacing the whole thing with a single button that we could press and forget (side note: Project Apollo planned to have a Take Me To The Moon button) but perfect is the enemy of good and we don't have capacity to jump straight to that, so we gave way and made incremental improvements like these:

refine the written doc be more more atomic, reduce decision-making, and separate commentary from actions
replace manual steps with scripted ones as time allows
introduce some "circuit breakers" to check for consistency errors
break the monster task into sub-tasks organised as tickets on our board and created for us by Jira automation
introduce a rota so that everyone on the team takes their turn at the release process
encourage fixing the process little-by-little as we go through it

Of course, incidents still do sometimes happen but I'm pleased to say that our company operates blameless post-mortems (somewhat ironically, these are not without their own process problems) which we use to learn from, change things, and tri again.

Images: Traffic Signs Manual, pngwing

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