Essays

“On October 5, 1841, two Western Railroad passenger trains collided somewhere between Worchester, Massachusetts and Albany, New York, killing a conductor and a passenger and injuring seventeen passengers.  That disaster marked the beginning of a new management era…."

Imagine that you are responsible for driving a truck across America, along highways, through cities and around detours, dealing with whatever idiosyncrasies that weather and traffic might throw at you.   Now imagine that your job is not to drive the truck, but program a computer to drive the truck for you....

“Everyone knows factory work isn’t creative, right?”  Wrong.  Factory workers at Toyota are more engaged and creative than their corporate counterparts.  Their jobs weren’t creative, their job were to be creative.  The Toyota organization implements a million new ideas a year – three thousand ideas a day....

Is low cost is achieved by focusing on cutting costs? Does standardized work mean that work processes are followed without challenge? Is high utilization is achieved by trying to utilize resources full time? Does everyone in your organization agree on the answers to these questions?

Exhorting workers to estimate more carefully and project mangers to be more diligent in meeting deadlines is not going to remove variation from projects.  We need to change the rules of the game:
Limit work to capacity — Even out the arrival of work — Minimize the number of Things-in-Process — Minimize the size of the Things-in-Process — Establish a regular cadence — Use pull scheduling

Breaking The Quality–Speed Compromise
When an industry imposes a compromise on its customers, the company that breaks the compromise stands to gain a significant competitive advantage.

“Say, Sue,” he said, “great job your team did! I’ve been waiting for the product launch before I bothered you with this, but the appraisal deadline is next week. I need your evaluation of each team member. And if you could, I’d like you to rank the team from who contributed the most down to who contributed the least.”
Article in Better Software Magazine, August 2004

A military officer who was about to retire once said: “The most important thing I did in my career was to teach young leaders that whenever they saw a threat, their first job was to determine the timebox for their response. Their second job was to hold off making a decision until the end of the timebox, so that they could make it based on the best possible data.”

The irony is that the fast-moving company had to slow down to speed up; more discipline led to higher speed....

When we add Lean to Six Sigma, we discover that speed, discipline, and excellence go hand-in-hand.  

“How could a business book keep me up until 2:30 in the morning?” 
True, it was a business novel, so it had engaging characters, a hint of a plot, and actual villains....  

Incremental Funding

For the first iteration, they hired a dozen telephone operators and provided the necessary software for them to take orders.  With no more than an 800 number on their web site and a rudimentary interface to the ordering system, new business was being transacted and profits being made.  

Productivity determines our standard of living. The key to sustaining and increasing wages in the software development industry is year-to-year improvements in software development productivity.

Agile Customer Toolkit

Entire books have been written about many of the XP developer practices; no book has more than 11 pages about customer practices.....
 

Cover Article:  Software Development Magazine, August 2003

Excerpt from Lean Software Development, Chapter 3.

From a Developer's Perspective

C++ Magazine, Fall, 2003

How fast can you reliably and repeatedly satisfy customers?

Software Development Magazine, February, 2004

Measure span of influence, not span of control.

Working Paper

A market economy for software development?

Working Paper

Principles of Lean Thinking 11/07/2002

The Basic Principles of Lean Thinking
1. Add nothing but value.
2. Transfer responsibility to the people who add the value.
3. Let the customer pull value.
4. Optimize across organizations.

OOPSLA Onward! – 2002, November, 2002

Lean Programming 5/2001

The Ten Simple Rules of Lean Programming
1. Eliminate Waste
2. Minimize Paperwork
3. Implement in Small Increments
4. Decide as Late as Possible
5. Decide as Low as Possible
6. Satisfy All Stakeholders
7. Focus on Testing
8. Measure Business Results
9. Optimize Across Organizations
10. Never Stop Improving

Software Development Magazine
Part 1, May, 2001  Part 2, June, 2001

Wicked problems arise when an organization must deal with something new, with change, and when multiple stakeholders have different ideas about how the change should take place.

Software Development Magazine, May, 2002

Righteous Contracts 4/16/2002

Right"eous  a. Doing that which is right; yielding to all their due; just; equitable.   
[Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913]

Ron Morsicato is a veteran developer who writes software for computers that control how devices respond to people.  The device might be a weapon or a medical instrument, but often if Ron’s software goes astray, it can kill people....

Cutter IT Journal, September, 2002

“What are you doing here?”  they asked.  They were construction foremen, superintendents and project managers.  Indeed, what was I doing there?

“In software development, we are told we should manage our projects like construction projects, where a building is designed at the start, cost and schedule are predictable, and customers get what they expect.” 

Silence.  “You’re kidding, right?”  “No, honest, that’s what we’re told.”    Incredulity turns to laughter.....

Lean Design 3/18/2002

Ten Techniques to Eliminate Waste in Design:

1. Design Structure Matrix
2. Cross Functional Teams
3. Concurrent Design / Shared Incomplete Information 
4. Reduced Batch Sizes
5. Pull Scheduling
6. Design Redundancy
7. Deferred Commitment / Least Commitment
8. Set-Based Design / Shared Range of Acceptable Solutions
9. Frequent Synchronization
10. The Simplest ‘Spanning Application’ Possible

“3M’s core competency, in fact, its core business, is the building of businesses.” According to CEO, Jim McNerney.   

Lean Contracts 4/16/2002

There are two ways of looking at a contracting relationship.  One view is that a contract is a way for a company to shed responsibility. The other way is for a company to share responsibility.....

Agile software development practices are often criticized as being suitable only for small, co-located teams of experts working on modest sized projects.  If agile development is truly limited to these perceived boundaries, then it is probably not sustainable....

The bottom line is that the problems that used to be addressed by traditional software processes have changed....  Meanwhile, the agile practices being honed in small projects are just the ones needed in the a large project environment.....

A ‘zero defects mentality’ is a bad thing in the military.  "Demanding such a rigid standard produces timid leaders afraid to make tough decisions in crisis, unwilling to take the risks necessary for success in military operations," Perry said. "This zero defects mindset creates conditions that will lead inevitably to failure …."

“No one has yet figured out how to manage people effectively into battle; they must be led,” 

Leadership is about helping people cope with change, while management is about coping with complexity.  Leaders set direction, managers plan and budget.  Leaders align people, managers organize and staff.  Leaders motivate, managers control. 

The workers on the first Ford assembly line spoke more than 50 languages, and many of them could barely speak English.  It was in this context that Frederick W. Taylor’s book, The Principles of Scientific Management, was published in 1911.

Taylor believed that laborers were uneducated and lazy...

“Too many mangers think that the key problem with product development is the surprises.  They try to eliminate all variability from the process.  [But]  it is the uncertainty that creates the information and the information that crates the value of product development..."

Reflections on Development 12/18//2001

New Product Development has been around for a long time.  Some companies do a great job of it, and we can look at corporate track records and find out which ones do it well.

Around 1800, Eli Whitney proposed manufacturing rifles with interchangeable parts, instead of crafting each rifle individually. 

Two decades ago, Japanese car-makers developed several new manufacturing methods, including 'Just-in-Time'.

Logistics innovations are not accidents.  They are driven by economic forces which demand a paradigm shift to keep an undesirable situation from overwhelming the economy....

PMI Seminars 2000, Houston, September, 2000

What is clear is that the software engineering community has gone to great effort to put the waterfall lifecycle behind it, while continuing to acknowledge that this may be the ideal lifecycle, but it is simply impossible to follow.  Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that a software engineering process which demands a detailed scope definition to be fixed at the beginning of a project is not an ideal process, but is instead a “legacy process”....