Instead of opening the door, walk through it

Via Mark Graban at Lean Blog,

Kent Blumberg blogs about open door policies that work:

The old-fashioned idea (my door is always open; when you want to talk, c'mon in) was supposed to give people down the line access to you and your ears. The idea was that folks from layers below you would come and clue you in on what was really happening.

I don't think that ever worked for most of us. Most folks didn't have the courage to come in, so we only learned what was on the minds of the plucky few. We were in our environment, not theirs. We couldn't verify what we were hearing by looking, touching, and listening in the first person. And we got fat from all that sitting.

Hunters and farmers

I've been reading Lean Solutions lately so it's quite convenient of Mark Graban at Lean Blog to point to a Jim Womack e-letter on the concept of hunters and farmers while riffing on Seth Godin's poor experience at a Toyota dealership. This paragraph from the e-letter sums it up:

The heart of the problem I think is that Toyota dealers in Japan are co-owned by Toyota. So applying process thinking to the selling and service processes is much easier: The dealer really must listen. In the rest of the world car dealers, for all brands including Toyota, are independent businesses. And, in my experience, most car dealers -- certainly not just Toyota dealers -- are "hunters". They focus on making the sale at an advantageous price and moving on to the next sale. What's needed instead are "farmers" who carefully study their selling and service processes to completely solve every customer's problems through the life of the vehicle.

Simulation and evidence based planning

I first encountered the concept of using Monte Carlo simulation for planning when I read Waltzing with Bears. Joel Spolsky describes a similar approach in his Feature Article in the latest Better Software.

One thing I would change is the use of individual task estimate history as I tend to use team-level estimates.

I really haven't seen many uses of this simulation-based probabilistic approach and I get a lot of resistance from people who want to stick with single value estimates.

Our purpose is to provide superior return for our stakeholders and market leading value for our customers?

Mark Edmondson blogs about why, as an operations consultant, he asks the question: "What's your purpose?"

For a senior executive, purpose is the answer to the question: Why? Why does your company exist? Why do you get up every morning and go to work? Why do you choose to lead this company?

It’s not a good indicator when the answer is some B-school gibberish about stakeholder return and value. As a front line worker, it’s just not inspiring to hear that your leadership team’s purpose is to make the owners richer.

The evidence against individual pay for performance

Via Bob Sutton,

Jeffrey Pfeffer provides testimony about the evidence against individual pay for performance.

Tinkering with pay appears to be easier than fixing organizational cultures and leadership capabilities. It is apparently "fashionable" because it does not seem to require the systemic intervention along multiple dimensions implied in the idea of building high performance work arrangements. But there is no free lunch.

How Toyota Can Save Your Life... At the Hospital

Mark Graban has a manifesto at ChangeThis about applying Lean to health care.

In between the specifics, you get some of the key principles behind Lean: Quality is free, removal of non-value adding activities is the best way to reduce errors and costs, standardise work improved upon by the people actually doing the work, recognise that asking people to "be careful" doesn't work - fix systemic errors instead.

The past is what it is

George Dinwiddie on why Norm Kerth's retrospective Prime Directive is essential.

As we look back on that unchangeable moment, we may still think, “I should have done such-and-such. I knew it at the time, but I didn’t do it. I could have, and I should have.” What good does this do us? It may make us feel bad about ourselves. Or, being the high-achievers that we are, it may steel our resolve to do better in the future. Either way, it doesn’t equip us with the knowledge of how to do better in the future, because it doesn’t uncover the reasons why we didn’t do better in the past.

Evolving the bullet

Via InfoQ,

Tobias Mayer describes his current view of a good starting point for a "Scrum" team beyond what is emphasised in standard Scrum.

To sum up:

• Don't separate the technical and non-technical members of the team
• Shorten iterations (1 month is too long) and focus on end-to-end cycle time
  
• Use smaller tasks instead of task estimation
  
• Make tracking visible in the workspace
  
• Quality engineering practices are not optional
• Process leaders should make themselves unnecessary
  

How to create the perception that everything is okay

Keep all your status in prepared official status reports and other information refrigerators.

Sit far away from stakeholders and definitely stay far away from customers.

Don't hold one-on-one's, you can usually create the illusion of feedback with group meetings since most people will be uncomfortable raising issues. It takes a while for teams to develop trust so if you squash a few people in public as an example, this will take care of the rest. Squashing can be as subtle as a smirk and still be effective.

Don't hold retrospectives until it is too late to do anything. Also, you might want to plant seeds of what you want to hear to key agitators just so they're clear that you're watching. Definitely don't do a safety check. Make sure there is no bias for action, and store any results after sanitising in information refrigerator form. This will support you later when you suggest that the retrospectives aren't worth holding at all.

Effective agitators also know the strategy of indifference. Encourage them to select that strategy for your context. Eventually they'll leave.

Things do need to be okay enough to continue. You won't succeed if absolute failure is about to occur.

Perceptive Pixel demo

The demo at TED was impressive but this is even more so. Check out this video from Jeff Han's Perceptive Pixel:

It's not about my commitment

The daily stand-up is not about my commitment or your commitment. It's about our commitment.

Something is wrong unless you see that none of us have met our commitments unless all of us have met our commitments.

Barcamp Sydney 2007

Barcamp Sydney was on yesterday and I think it went quite well. I was one of the "unorganisers" but unsurprisingly self-organising conferences have a way of organising themselves. Had to help a few people figure out how to operate the lecterns, put up some magic whiteboard, move chairs, collect garbage, etc. and in between get involved in discussions about how it's dangerous to become good at convincing people to do things, do a quick ad-hoc introduction to value stream mapping as applied to software development, tag along Ben's presentation on Lean Software Development, play around with Cylo's 3 Style mouse, listen to Mike and Marty talk about how to start a company, and try with Ben and Rich to help Christy figure out the minimal marketable feature of her startup idea and just ship it.

My reflections...

Being in the particular community that I'm in, I'm assuming a lot of knowledge that it seems people in other communities just don't know about. Lean, Agile, Purple Cow, disruptive technology, Open Space, user testing, etc. I'm thinking it might be useful to do a few presentations of what I'd consider the basics.

As a gamer, I seem to have a developed sensitivity to what I like in a peripheral. Weight, friction, ease of manipulation, etc. It's all subtle and important.

Mike is quite a good and insightful speaker. I think that boy will go far.