Agility, Improvisation,

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Agility, Improvisation, or Enacted
Emergence? Dr Yingqin Zheng, Dr Will Venters,
Dr Tony Cornford
This research was undertaken as part of
Pegasus EPSRC Grant No EP/D049954/1 www.pegasus.
lse.ac.uk 10 Dec 2007 ICIS, Montreal
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Introduction

• Pegasus Project Exploring practices of GridPP
  the UK particle physics Grid
• Agile systems development?
• Methodology as faked? Fiction? Amethodical?
• Organisational improvisation
• ? Improvisation Paradoxes
• ? Enacted Emergence?

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Organizational Improvisation

• Metaphors
• Jazz (Weick 1992, 1999 Barrett 1998, Hatch
  1999)
• Improvisational Theatre (Crossan, 1998)
• Cunha (1999) the conception of action as it
  unfolds, by an organisation and/or its members
  drawing on available material, cognitive,
  affective and social resources
• Convergence in time of conception and execution
• Bricolage finding solutions from available
  rather than optimal resources

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Improvisation Paradoxes
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Improvisation-Paradoxes Cont.
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Particle Physicists and Grids

• Currently constructing the worlds most powerful
  particle accelerator the Large Hadron Collider
  (LHC)
• Searching for Higgs Boson 1 person in 1000
  worlds, or a needle in 20 million haystacks
• 12-14 million gigabytes per year.
• 100,000 CPUs.
• 40PB disk, 40PB tape.
• Worlds biggest Grid

CD stack with 1 year LHC data ( 20 km)
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Background Context

• Building the LHC Computing Grid (LCG)
• Highly distributed, complex and poorly defined
  systems development task.
• Cutting edge hardware and software used.
• New software standards being negotiated.
• Middleware and support software being developed
  in a range of languages.
• Grid must be distributed and proceed at different
  paces because of funding.
• Particle physics has a long tradition of such
  large scale global collaborations (Traweek 1988).

• GridPP (UK Contribution to LCG)
• To a significant degree agile
• Collaboration of 230 people in 19 UK
  universities, RAL and CERN.
• Decisions are made democratically and
  consensually, and implemented by influence and
  persuasion.
• Network rather than hierarchy
• Virtual, federated, overlapping and
  inter-connected.
• Virtual meetings, wikis, blogs, mailinglists

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Research Findings
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Enacted Emergence

• Enactment (Weick 1977)
• people invent organizations and their
  environments and these inventions reside in ideas
  that participants have superimposed on any stream
  of experience (ibid. p. 196).
• Emergence
• Temporally emergent qualities
• Interactions of existing elements
• In a historical context
• The evolutionary approach of system development
  (Dahlbom and Mathiassen 1993)
• Enactment of sensemaking

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Enacted Emergence
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Contributions

• Improvisation paradoxes
• Agility should embody a deliberate or natural
  mixture of structure and improvisation, order and
  changes, intentionality and flexibility,
  spontaneity and reflexivity, collectivity and
  individuality
• Agile systems development in the wild
• Embeddedness of agility
• Large group performance is possible when the
  ambience is right.
• Science vs art
• Enacted Emergence
• Duality between structure and agency