The chicken fence and BDUF

This is my first blog post in over a year - I've been Twittering, Yamming and Facebooking instead. When I logged in I found a draft post from 2008 about our Canada road trip just lying around like a half-eaten pizza, but decided not to finish it - usually wise with pizza of that age too.

So, I've just spent two days in the garden, building an enclosure for Paris, Amy and Martha. We had been using some of this netting from Omlet, but I was fed up with having to climb over it, and it just looks a bit scruffy.

The requirements were simple: it had to be a permanent fence, not too expensive; with a gate in it so that we could get in to retrieve eggs, clean out the Eglu and so on. How hard could it be? I decided on a post and rail fence, with 3" posts and 3" half-round rails with chicken wire fixed on to it to retain the chickens (radical use for chicken wire!). After a little difficulty getting hold of the wood (eventually found at Curtiss Timber who were most helpful) I started to build the fence. To be on the safe side, I designed it to be nearly 20% taller than the netting had been.

It too a little longer than I had expected - a combination of incompetence, lack of some tools and some contraints on the working area - like some of it was in the middle of a rose bush - but eventually it was finished. I proudly displayed it, working door with latch and all, to my family and started to put the tools away. Out of the corner of my eye I saw first Martha, and then Amy fly straight up and perch on my lovely new fence.

After two day work the new fence met all the requirements, except for the primary one of actually keeping the chickens where we wanted them and thereby preventing them from digging up all the bulbs in the garden. My office worker's hands were raw, I was tired and I felt like I'd been beaten up. And the bloody fence didn't work!

What tortuous lesson am I going to draw from this sorry tale? What happened was that the hens saw the new fence as an inviting perch in a way that the old netting never was. Despite being higher than the netting, the new fence was therefore worse at its main function. I've seen this happen so often in business, where the shiny new system fails to deliver the expected benefits. It underlines the importance of taking a small step at a time and validating as you go that you are getting the value you expected. Big-bang deployments, especially those developed using a a waterfall process like my fence, almost never deliver the desired result.