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Hi. I'm Jon Jagger, director of software at Kosli.
I built cyber-dojo, the place teams practice programming.
All industries, manufacturing and service, are subject to the same principles of management.
Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the production process.
Today, 19 foreman out of 20 were never on the job that they supervise.
Fear amongst salaried workers may be attributed in large part to the annual rating of performance.
Absenteeism is largely a function of supervision. If people feel important to a job, they will come to work.
He that would run his company on visible figures alone will in time have neither company nor figures.
There has never been a definitive study of quality in the dental profession; nor is there likely to be one. Partly because they tend to work alone, dentists resist the idea of being evaluated, or even observed, by others.
Where there is fear, there will be wrong figures.
It is well known that rework piles up: no one wishes to tackle it.
This company had been sending a letter to every driver at every mistake. It made no difference whether this was the one mistake of the year for this driver, or the 15th: the letter was exactly the same. What does the driver who has received 15 warnings, all alike, think of the management?
Defects cause lateness.
The more defects code has the more time and effort it takes to get it to done. This seems a self-evident truth. But beware! The Causation Fallacy says it is not easy to know what is cause and what is effect. If a feature misses its deadline pressure often builds to ensure it doesn't miss the next deadline. And under pressure people don't think faster. Extra pressure usually increases the likelihood of defects. This suggests
Lateness causes defects.
So do defects cause lateness, or does lateness cause defects? Or do they rotate around each other like partners on a dance floor?
A team is doing Scrum with 3 week sprints. Suppose at the end of a sprint they've got nothing to done. What should they do? There's a strong temptation to ask for more time. To make this sprint a 4 week sprint. Most of the work in progress is 90% done, they say. Another week and things will have got to done, they say. It seems reasonable.
Trying to run systems beyond their capacity is not a good idea. In this situation Scrum's fixed-duration time-box constraint has served it's purpose admirably. The problem is not the choice of 3 weeks. Changing 3 weeks into 4 weeks is not addressing the problem. The problem is the team planned to pull in an amount of work and get it to done in 3 weeks. But they're not yet in control of their process - they don't know what their capacity is. They pulled in more than 3 weeks worth of work. Probably a lot more. But we just don't know!
In The Toyota Way, Jeffrey Liker writes:
Taiichi Ohno considered the fundamental waste to be overproduction, since it causes most of the other wastes.
Without visibility, control is not possible.
If you can't see, you can't steer.
Culture makes its presence known through patterns that persist over time.
One of the most sensitive measures of the cultural pattern of any organization is how quickly it finds and removes problems.
Building a culture takes years of applying a consistent approach with consistent principles.
A process change will always involve a cultural change.
Because culture embodies perception and action together, changing culture is difficult and prone to backsliding.
Culture makes language, then language makes culture.
Culture is what we do when we do not consciously decide what to do.
Consultants who see culture change as something distinct from the work and, as a corollary, something that can be the subject of an intervention, miss the point. When you change the way work is designed and managed, and make those who do the work the central part of the intervention, the culture changes dramatically as a consequence.
One aspect of almost every culture is the belief in the utter superiority of that culture.
Culture change is free [because] it's a product of the system.
Culture is changing faster than it has ever changed before...what once took many generations of gradual development is now attempted by a single individual.
Successful change can only come about in the context of a clear understanding of what may never change, what the organization stands for... the organization's culture... If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change. When there is no defining vision, the only way the organization can define itself is its stasis.
As Freud and his followers observed, our own culture tends to stress that which can be controlled and to deny that which cannot.
Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.
An often noted characteristic of culture change is that an idea or a practice will hold on very persistently, apparently resisting all efforts to move it, and then, suddenly, without notice, it will collapse.
Knowledge is power.
Francis Bacon
Hunger is the best source.
Hunger is the best sauce.
I was speaking to Olaf Lewitz at the awesome Oslo coach camp last week. We were discussing why drinking coffee doesn't create the same social dynamic as smoking cigarettes. I chatted with Geir Amdal too and quite by chance he mentioned he's given up smoking. And how approaching a work colleague and asking if they want to go outside for a smoke is not the same as asking if they want to go outside for a talk.
Then I remembered something Olve Maudal said to me recently. He said that kids being allowed to eat sweets on Sundays was not really about kids being allowed to eat sweets on Sundays at all. It was really about kids not being allowed to eat sweets on any day except Sunday. Similarly, apparently in the USA when you're driving along you sometimes see a big sign at the side of the road saying "Litter here" and then another sign a mile or so later saying "Stop littering". These signs are also not really about littering. They're about not littering in the places outside the designated littering zones.
There's a crucial difference between smoking and drinking coffee. Smokers tend to smoke in groups in designated areas because smoking is not allowed except in those areas. Coffee is different. Drinking coffee is, by default, allowed everywhere. When you want a coffee you walk to the coffee machine and make a cup of coffee. There's often no one else at the coffee machine so you take your cup of coffee back to your work desk. It is precisely this take-it-back-to-your-desk default which is why there is only rarely someone else at the coffee machine. It is a self-fulfilling dynamic.
If you want to encourage more social interaction between your team members here's what you might do:
Whenever we see an intense need for communications it is typically a sign that the system has been incorrectly partitioned.
A complex system can often be built faster when there are stable steps along the way. This is what Nobel laureate Herbert Simon called "stable intermediate forms" in his book The Sciences of Artificial.
We cannot predict the behaviour of a system simply by understanding the behaviour of its components.
There are more possible interactions in a system of 150 components than there are atoms in the universe.
The act of partioning the system is extremely important, because it creates interfaces… these interfaces are both the primary source of value within a system and the primary source of complexity.
The nonlinear behaviour of queueing systems will amplify variability within the system.
We get into an interesting death spiral when we overload our development process. Overloads cause queues; queues, being nonlinear, raise the variability of our process, and variability raises the size of queues.
The weak cross-functional communication of the functional form sacrifices our other economic objectives.
In life, we design most processes for repetitive activities because a process is a way of preserving learning that occurs when doing an activity. … We need to find some way to preserve what we have learned without discouraging people from doing new things.
We get large queues whenever we have large batch transfers in the process.
There is a strong interaction between the design of our organisation structure, our architecture, and our development process.
If you use the same recipe you get the same bread.