Saturday, June 02, 2012

Lean Software and Systems Conference 2012 Day Three

I recently attended the 2012 edition of the Lean Software and Systems Conference. Here's my summary of the third day.

Yochai Benkler - The Penguin and the Leviathan: Cooperative Human Systems Design

I expect he drew from themes from his book, The Penguin and the Leviathan:
Don Reinertsen - Decentralising Control: How Aligned Initiative Conquers Uncertainty

Essentially themes from one of the chapters of The Principles of Product Development Flow:
  • "There's a whole lot of interesting things happening between 0 and 1."
  • "Uncertainty does not inherently demand decentralization."
  • When should we decentralise?
    • We have higher capability at a local level
    • We have diseconomies of scale
    • Response time is critical
      • Perishable opportunities
      • Expanding problems
    • We need a wide range of behavioural responses that are highly dependent of local conditions
  • Tolerating unorthodox approaches improves organisational resilience
  • Centralise the decision rules / logic; decentralise the decision-making
  • Firefighters don't "firefight"
  • Lateral communication is more important than hierarchical communication
  • In Lanchester Strategy terms, the US Marines assume that they will always be using the strategies of the weak
  • What should we decentralise?
    • Decision authority
    • The resources to execute those decisions
    • The information needed to make decisions
    • Skilled decision makers at the places where we want decisions to be made
  • "Most managers give the same decision making opportunities to subordinates as parents letting children 'drive' from the backseat"
Doctrine vs Policies and Rules
Jim Benson - The Dark Side: How Cognitive Bias, Behavioural Economics, and Tribal Forces Help and Hinder Lean Initiatives

  • This made me think of Don Norman's user model vs designer's model vs system image concept where the kanban board is the user model / designer model while reality is the system image
  • "Build the kanban you want to be. Build your Gandhi kanban."
  • "Expect the expected" reminds me of what 5S and Standard Work is about

Yuval Yeret - Avoiding Continuous Stagnation: What Can We Do to Make Continuous Improvement More Appealing to Management?

  • A problem with big changes is improvement burnout
Are you holding a retrospective?
Mack McKinney - Understanding the Actual Customer Need Through ConOps


Apparently Mack almost crashed his plane taking a video for this presentation!

As far as I understand it, ConOps (aka Concept of Operations) is a document that describes the purpose of a DoD system from the perspective of the intended users.  My gut feel is that the whole DoD acquisition process is fundamentally broken and at most ConOps is a coping mechanism.  DoD programs are taking longer and longer and costing more and more in an environment that is demanding shorter and shorter cycle times.  I proposed a miracle question to Mack about what he'd do if he had the opportunity to re-design the whole process from scratch mainly to highlight that the situation requires a somewhat radical change from the status quo.

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