I’ve said elsewhere that I used to be an intelligence analyst in a risk mitigation company based in their Lloyds of London office (and occasionally in Baghdad, Aberdeen and Dubai).
This role was where I first became a Product Owner (for an intelligence portal).
A Cool Delivery Framework
It was also where I first stumbled across eXtreme Programming (XP) and bastardised some of the concepts for my own intelligence team, without actually knowing what it was or why it was effective.
The techniques in the framework just seemed cool. But then it also turned out that they worked for quite a lot of our analytical report writing.
Along my Agile journey since then I’ve always been thinking about the application of Agile concepts to intelligence analysis and similar fields – basically any domain where you have to synthesise complex information quickly. Remember that writing is code and code is writing, so there are lots of crossovers and applicable approaches.
Dabbling with the concepts of a Definition of Done and even Pair Programming, a handy guide that stayed always close to hand in my analytical career was the Economist Style Guide.
An Authority on Clarity
The Economist is a London-based current affairs and news publication, providing in-depth analysis on global developments since 1843. As well as being an excellent source of information, the outlet also published its own internal writing guide as a standard book for others to benefit from.
We adopted the guidelines for ourselves in the intelligence department. Like coding standards, it helped keep everyone aligned on their shared expectations.
Instead of a codebase to maintain collectively, we had a library of reports to curate.
Instead of technical debt, we had investigative debt, but the style guide saved us from accumulating any sort of editorial debt. Like a Definition of Done, it was a set of conditions that each report needed to adhere to before it could be released to the customers.
The concepts, metaphorically at least, are transferable.
Built-in Standards
In Extreme Programming, Kent Beck talks about quality. He noticed that intentionally increasing it (with more comprehensive testing frameworks and agreed coding standards for example) at the start of a project actually sped up delivery. Evidently the same principle applies to writing.
With agreed standards, the proof reading and editing process is faster. The report gets emailed out sooner. Our customers got updated before their competitors or before various threats got the better of them.
It has been many years since I worked in that office, but I still try to adhere to the guide. It is therefore with a mixture of horror and humour that I have witnessed my own departure from the rules.
The Big C
According to the book, random capitalisation is one of the cardinal sins. We would regularly correct President to president if it wasn’t a title, or implement constitution, national, government, north, south, east or west ad infinitum.
But these days I frequently find myself capitalising various terms like Daily Scrum, Product Owner, User Story (and I already used Definition of Done above) etc.
It doesn’t feel right, but I continue anyway.
I believe that there is an online debate about the correct usage of capilisation in the world of agility, and indeed some people have even argued that the entirety of Agile should be capitalised as AGILE, which seems unnecessarily bombastic.
Otherwise, perhaps this is part of my own editorial shu-ha-ri journey. My reason for capitalising these words is to demonstrate that they are defined terms, and that they probably deserve a page on this site to explain them.
Ultimately though, capital letter or not: you understand what I mean.
All in all, the Economist Style Guide is a wonderful set of coding standards for writing, and if you’re interested in how Agile practices can be applied to the domain of the written word, I’m going to explore the concept further in my future posts.
Please share your thoughts, questions, style guide bugbears or grammar nazi points in the comments below!
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