Supporting Real Change Like You Mean It

I have only seen a few meaningful breakthroughs happen quickly. More often than not, the big changes come when there is simply no choice. More often still, change efforts are defeated before they start.

Some Ways to Kill a Change Project or Process Improvement

• Fail to Give Users Access to the Training or Tools
• Interfere with the Effort, stealing from its Energy and Resources
• Ignore the People Aspects; Dictate Rapport and Trust Instead of Earning Them
• Dictate Overnight Conformity to Drive-by Policy Change
• Strip it Down until its Meaningless
• Fail to get Management Buy-in / Agreement; If You are Management, Ignore Other Stakeholders
• Avoid Any Public Show of Support
• Consistently Find More Important Things To Do
• Use Your Influence to Derail It
• Scatter The People So that Meetings and Collaboration Are Difficult
• Consistently Find Better Things to Do; Treat the Effort as Immaterial
• Marginalize Those Who Could Make It Work
• Choose to Avoid All Change – Because What We Have is Good Enough
• Insist That Others Change – Just Not You or Your Area
• Give Up Nothing: Insist that All The Old Is Maintained In Addition to the New
• Bicker About Next Steps Instead of Moving Forward
• Use the Effort for Political Gain or to Assert Position
• Analyze It into Oblivion
• Run Out the Clock and Blame Someone
• Set It On Fire and Blame Someone
• Avoid Unity – Provide No Clear and Passionate Owner nor any Meaningful Vision

I am typically engaged as a coach, to recommend changes and outline plans/techniques, and to mentor team growth; you might be surprised that we often get paid instead to watch this kind of client activity – waiting for them to finally either align or anihiliate all chances at success. I am thankful that sometimes the line employees can do a lot to improve things in spite of their leaders.

Often enough, I hear managers complain that their consultants or reports simply do not have all the information or the depth/experience to understand. The truth is “over their heads” or “above their pay grade”. Management is rarely so super-human and usually the people understand just fine. Finding reasons to not do things has never been hard. Good managers don’t have to hide behind such rhetoric.

Change is a necessity. I have worked places where every day we expected to change. While it was hectic, it was also amazing. In a competitive world, that has to be the standard. Every day should ask “how can we do better?” If you want to know the taste of triumph, you cannot avoid change. Anything that feels stable – may already be in a rut. Figuring out ways to avoid change – does not set you apart. We have so much of that already.

Change is exciting… If you cannot see it that way, you are operating from fear. If you hired good people, let them show you what’s possible. Who would keep a prize racehorse locked in a barn? Usually there is an awful lot of money left on the table – in the form of untapped potential; The job of management is to leverage their resources, yet how often do we marginalize them?

Obviously, I am not speaking out for the change of cost-cutting… that should be the last trick out of the bag. Short-term thinking is usually a self-fulfilling prophecy. To be so fearful that you won’t risk creating something… to be unwilling to try something new… I am pretty sure this country was built more by pushing the envelope and trying new things. Pioneering is supposed to be work – and it should involve risk. What kind of life is it to limit the possibilities instead of chasing them?

Making InformationWork

Its a recurring statistic that knowledge workers spend approximately 20% of their time seeking or re-creating existing information. I am guessing that sometimes we also just “wing it” because we know it is too much trouble to find something – or we doubt it is available at all.

We typically consider three aspects when focusing on performance improvement – people, process, and tools. I think we like the idea of triangles. Personally I believe Information is a separate fourth consideration.

While we live in the world of information technology(IT), I think we tend to focus on the technology over of the information. But in our workday, we really are not so concerned with the technology behind the answer – we just need answers. Still we talk about technologies as solving our problems – we need a wiki, a knowledge base, a blog, a CRM portal. And we end up with disparate tools that firmly put complexity right back in our lap – we have to update multiple systems, guess where to find things, and wonder if we even have the information somewhere. And if we find something – is it current? Can we trust it?

There are many different kinds of information. Structured and non-structured. Procedural, reference, policy, … links, documents, reports, data…. with different uses, lifecycles, relevance, audiences, priorities, and so on. And so many of our “solutions” make interesting assumptions. We use tags and search to find things – but in the workplace, much should simply be findable without search. Search is a backup plan for “find”. If you know where it is, you should not have to weed through a list of results based on relevance defined by others. You should not have to guess the right search string. The difference between having to search – and going straight to the information – is called a map. To get productive with information in the workplace means having a plan… knowing where things go and how to handle what crosses our desk is really about being pro-active.

We make decisions often about how to communicate. We choose the phone, IM, email, a meeting, or a face-to-face. We do this based on various factors – immediacy, formality, and such. Ultimately similar considerations can help you establish a map that leads to improved information leverage. I think the technologies are interesting, but ultimately how we ease the capture and findability of information determines whether we get solid contribution and re-use. A plethora of tools does not make things easier – it is often instead another disfunction – too many tools become silos themselves and only add to the confusion,

Bringing a coherent information plan to the workplace can yield great rewards. Note that I am not suggesting extra work. In the software development domain, many think we need formal specs and well-defined models… when a quick phone camera “pic” of a whiteboard or a digital audio clip may be enough. Getting code to generate its own documentation can be part of the solution. Just enough, just-in-time mechanisms are often the right answer. A little information on your team members along with contact info helps find the expertise you need in a pinch, without imposing a great deal of formal capture. Using techniques like pair programming, ongoing lunch-and-learn sessions, and self-organizing teams helps distribute knowledge in-process.

The biggest failure we usually have though is not having a plan. We buy a tool and think magic will happen. So many wikis and portals and content management systems are abandoned – like so many other organizational initiatives. But there are basic taxonomies and tricks that apply across organizations, which bring clarity and coherence to this problem domain. There are organizations who actually address this knowledge problem well. But most tools come up short – because the answer is not in the technology. It is in the information – and in us. Most processes are little more than policies or agreements – they form maps. A lean approach to work recognizes information flows in the process, not just the product value itself. Because often enough the information blockage is a productivity blockage also. And the more visible and transparent the better. The secret to the empowered worker – is the flow of information.

Transparency is not Enough

One of the key success factors behind the agile movement was that the workers themselves define how work would be done. The new lexicon of work felt brave and revolutionary, but more than that the workers regained some control of their own daily success. Using the word empowerment is only quaint – actually giving the latitude to take risks, make decisions, experiment, collaborate, and even challenge management is the source of empowerment.

In engineering school, the professors were fond of describing the profession as “problem solving”. Ultimately, workers should have a say in how they do their work and in making their workday better. Knowledge workers, in particular, cannot be relegated to commodity execution. Professionalism is not so much about how we talk or dress, but about our command of the domain and our judgment in the face of complexity. We must let our people extend and be recognized for their depth.

So much of traditional process had outsiders defining and imposing process without close understanding or involvement. The idea of micromanaging is nothing short of an affront to the idea that we can manage our time, our priorities, and basically – ourselves. Naturally our leaders need to be available and often have to make calls we cannot. But those calls are rare. For knowledge workers, more often the role of management is not to direct – but to clear the way ahead and fuel the team.

Think about how we would all feel if our government explained everything but gave us no vote in how the system would work. Certainly there are some who generally would be fine with this – we are busy enough and hope to trust the daily workings to our “statesmen”. But all of us would have issues if the roads started to crumble, if education and commerce faltered, if fairness and justice did not exist, if property ownership was disrupted, or if the needs for existence were in question. The consent of the governed, in fact, is fundamental in how our government works.

The world of work is not so different. Professionals think about careers and self-actualization – not just money. I think that to understand our role as managers, we need to acknowledge the well from which we draw. When you hire very good people and stop short of getting their input and, in fact, moving on their ideas – you gradually erode the trust and respect you will need when it matters. To merely keep them informed is not enough.

More than that, the problem-solving we often embark on as managers should not take place completely behind closed doors. Certainly you cannot have all of your people joining in all the management meetings! But you can suggest that many ideas are taken to the team before implementation. You can take a team member to an occasional management meeting or two. This may make you a bit of a curiosity in management circles. Some would have the chasm between management and line worker preserved and cultivated. But the way you grow your replacement and the strength of your team is by involving them. The more you treat them like partners – versus simple employees – the more you create people who can act confidently and competently in the system. Your ability to delegate more and more to your people actually hinges on this kind of involvement.

Positional authority does not do much good when the team does not respect you. If you have no social capital with your team, they will not back you in tough times. But more than that, when you hire solid people and truly engage them, you can be armed with the breadth of their ideas and experience. Minimize status meetings and one-way communication. Use team meetings for solving problems and creating new opportunity. Celebrate successes quickly and move to how we better handle tomorrow. When is the last time you asked your team “How can we make life better?”

It’s not Really about the Process

Organizational effectiveness was an early interest of mine. For a time in the late 1980s I was studying toward an MBA and the organizational behavior topics and case studies were always the most interesting. Tom Peters was fairly new on the scene, and his ideas provoked a lot of thought.

In the early 1990s I joined a lean hardware company and my process education began. Being firmly a part of a Just-In-Time machine, one learns the feel of productivity and flow. Being 24/7/365 pager accessible and charged with growing capacity of a fast-moving product company, I also learned to protect that flow, and myself in the process. As hard as it was, I learned how to step back from the storm and see how to get ahead of it.

The mid-90s brought new product technology and the web… which also brought the need for revolutionary adaptation. But people really do not do revolution well; we do evolution better, if we change at all. Confronted with a compelling need, we had to reinvent our production engine; it was one of the truly successful re-engineering projects I know of, where an enormous productivity boost accompanied new product breakthroughs. But that success came more from figuring out not just what was needed, but how to evolve what we had in a very short time. We did ask what the ideal looked like – but we then established what was really possible – not technologically but by the system that matters.

The system that matters – is actually the people. Cultures and people have momentum – the tendency to stay at rest or to only keep moving on their current path. If they are not used to change, wholesale change is a nonstarter. So you need to learn how to nudge them. Ultimately it is so much easier to solve most technical problems than it is to change an organization.

The process light went on with my grasp of the production flow and the systems that make it possible. But very quickly it became obvious that the human challenge trumped everything else. Seeing what needs to be done is nothing compared to actually making it happen. And organizations change one person at a time. Sometimes your most formidable detractors become your best allies, but no organization transitions without hiccups. And the psychology of teams and organizations define their capacity for adaptation and breakthrough results. Being a great leader means knowing how to truly reach them and align their efforts. Being a great leader is all about people and vision.

As an engineer, I can imagine systems of levers and cogs… even machines of great sophistication and complexity. I can appreciate an elegant technical solution. But the most beautiful machine does not hold a candle to a team of creative humans, hitting on all cylinders and supporting each other in a common vision. That’s why I choose people over process… our most profound breakthroughs still lay ahead. Some managers might be happy just orchestrating commodity execution, but I am not. Triumph is just under the surface and we should always seek out our greatest potential.

Celebrating the Leader-Manager

Often enough, I come across posts clarifying the difference between leadership and management. Many go further, demonstrating clear disdain for “management”. In fact, one of the major local universities back home was largely promoting its MBA program as a leadership-based program specifically. In their words, the community had well clarified that it had enough “managers”. I have no trouble seeing a difference, of course; but I think we still need both. The trouble largely is that we need these in combination – in single individuals. But there are few good models and the more prevalent bad examples we see commonly form the next generation of practice.

I have had only a few impressive leader/managers. Sometimes I felt sorry for these individuals because they took care of themselves only after servicing a variety of needs; their boss, their reports, the organization and its goals, and all the “administrivia” – these all came before themselves. Some would say that being unable to do this within their regular workday was itself a sign of poor management; Certainly we all have to carve out a life still, but I have few illusions about the demands on the solid leader/manager.

Sometimes our problem is not recognizing the difference between a successful manager and an effective manager. Many would suggest that these are one in the same and that the workplace naturally rewards the effective manager – the one who gets the best results for the company. But our texts in organizational behavior have no trouble separating the two; “successful managers” are the ones who enjoy advancement and bonuses – often enough in spite of less optimal results. Being politically adept and able to work effectively with the management team is a necessary skillset either way – but without good metrics, it is easy to promote the story-teller over the true team leader.

Our MBA programs are geared toward producing executives. The foundations in accounting, marketing, finance, sales, and MIS are a necessary foundation for executive advancement – but these facets of business seem to take precedence over the human aspects. Few MBAs focus on organizational behavior and most move into HR.

Solid formal training and development for line managers is rare, and is usually focused on risk management with only casual attention given to managing individuals and teams, creating leverage and performance, and truly delivering on the intent of the position they hold. Theoretically we sort out the solid individuals by their results, but often enough we reward the short-term, the erudite, and the attractive.

We celebrate the courageous and the charismatic, because we are human. Certainly these are useful skills in moving a team forward. We commonly associate confidence automatically with competence – but this is a very superficial response. Self-image can be high even when competence is not. A smile and simple hope can create a following for a time – but results must follow. Individuals impressive on the surface may have long ago lost the ability to lead their team anywhere. Separating arrogance from confidence is not always easy – until you look to the team behind the leader. If he has lost the trust of the team or created an environment where performance is difficult, the manager may easily need replacing. If he is unable to solve the problems that matter and create systems that yield improvement – or at least safety and sustainability – it is probably time to train or replace. A great manager tries to make things better for his/her team. But first we have to at least understand that THESE are the skills that matter.

As professionals, we surround ourselves with brilliant individuals. In the technical world, it is almost a universal perception that a good manager has to be super-competent as a technical practitioner as well as a solid facilitator and leader; the bar is set high by the team and some managers still presume to present an aire of infallibility. My best managers were strong – but they were also humble. They appreciated and recognized their experts and deferred to the team often. No doubt they had plenty of quick decisions to make and needed sound judgement themselves – but they were good listeners. They spent more time thinking and listening than talking. They created a safe and productive workplace. They celebrated true wins and excellence, but they were ALWAYS focused on problem-solving; they knew their job was to make things better still. They earned respect by respecting the needs of their people and by including them. They did not spend all their time with other managers, because they needed to see what was happening on the ground.

Our business magazines celebrate our top executives and companies, new business models and product ideas, bold financial moves and improvements in tooling. We convince ourselves that most answers live in these aspects of business… but I beg to differ. More money is left on the table in lost human opportunity. Often enough we can trace “problem individuals” to problem managers – managers who created an environment of fear or distrust, or who would not intercede in conditions that create failure. Bad managers are often a primary element in employee meltdown. The manager is entrusted with much responsibility – but still many fail to see past themselves.

Why this post? Partly because I think we, as a nation, need to understand and reclaim our lead in real productivity. Too many jobs have left the companies that originated them because they had not and could not make the case to keep the jobs here. Granted, there were plenty of tax incentives and leverage to be found in the global labor pool; I think our political leaders have a lot to answer for. And every one of us needs to understand that we are not simply entitled to these jobs – that is simple delusion. But great managers would still see their function outsourced as the most fundamental and personal of failures. To be easily replaced in the commodity labor pool means they let their own team value falter or they failed to celebrate their team’s value publicly enough.

We need to understand and celebrate the great manager – and to create a lot more of them. We need to drive the personal reflection and introspection that yields such individuals. We need more individuals who respect the awesome responsibility that line management entails – and stop short on rewarding those who celebrate themselves as superior to the team. If they act this way – they should not have a team. It means supporting the long view and courage… and means looking deeper at who is making the difference. There are individuals moving their teams forward every day – but there are also those who only see their people as stepping stones. Great managers look to enhance not just the company bottom line or their own career, but also to create their team’s opportunity to exceed. And great leader/managers build more great leader/managers, great teams, great individuals, and great results. That is a business foundation we can build on.

The Leverage Imperative

This is not a completely happy post – but I hope  it to be a compelling one. I believe there are fundamental truths here that should affect us all…

Much controversy surrounds how we have moved much of our production capability overseas. Thinking it would be enough to retain the high-paying jobs, the capacity for innovation, the market that matters, and technological lead… we find that these all move easily as well. Our overseas competitors are not slow in stepping to the table and sending the money too quickly overseas does in fact move them quickly forward as competitors. The idea that the United States will own industry and make the rules forever has always been delusion; we simply enjoyed a long enough period of plenty that we allowed ourselves to believe it. National pride cannot be backed up by wishful thinking – hope is not enough.

We have been moving jobs overseas and to other nations for a long time. NAFTA helped. So did the internet. But the simple fact is that the global displacement of labor and the emergence of industrial competition has been happening for decades. They are hungry… we have long been comfortable and distracted. Credit helped the illusion that all things could be had. But the spoils always go to the victors and the battle for economic power is neverending.

What keeps America mighty has been in peril for years. There was a time when we were hungry and we need to get there again. But the idea that cost-cutting will get us there is foolish. The idea that we just work harder will burn through our means of production; we cannot work twice as hard or four times as hard as our overseas counterpart. We can only work smarter. No doubt government is swayed by the arguments of Walmart and a range of other global companies that “need” access to this cheaper labor pool. And we have seen what sending our money and our work overseas leads to; wherever the money goes, prosperity follows – and since governments owe their allegiance to the people and not the corporation, they have at least been naive in creating economic peril – if not complicit. Arguably though, we all have also played our part by letting it happen. No doubt the political system has worked better in the past; statesman and political will are in short supply – propaganda and questionable leaders, right and left, bubble to the top again and again. The media as well is part of the cash-driven society now and we happily buy the weakest of reporting.

So largely, we all have done a poor job of minding the store. The job of line managers and management in general lies at the heart of this. Because the quarterly result is not how we should measure ourselves – and bonuses should be mapped to long-term improvements not short-term manipulations. Sales is reasonably motivated by commission – but not operations. And the key to long-term improvement is not simple incremental improvement that is easily mimicked by competitors. The key is leverage. A failure to embrace this in management has driven the bulk of what we see today. Management has always had the job of maintaining and growing our capacity to retain our competitive edge, and much of our recent history has been abdication. There is nothing prophetic in the message from “60 minutes” almost 30 years ago about jobs going overseas and local industry suffering; it was common sense and business as usual.  If we have seen corruption emerge in the system, it is because we have felt the systemin peril and reacted in selfishness and our feverish need for quick gratification. Even now, we expect the economy to quickly rebound – but there are no shortcuts and the global marketplace will not be going away. Our leaders try to pry our dollars loose by trying to drive enthusiasm, but this is a short-term approach; if we do not fortify our means of production, we do not build long-term economic sustainability.

Management has always had the job of maintaining our competitiveness. If you are not building your team, their knowledge, and their capacity to keep that edge, you endanger your organization. The hardest thing in watching layoffs is watching the retention of those who failed to do the right thing… the managers who simply helped tread water. And for those very few managers who built great teams and still lost them – shame on you for not making it self-evident that your team was the better option and worth the money; because that was your job too.

The thing that makes the difference is leverage. Doing what you have always done – repeating the mediocre practices, or even the best practices, of today – does not keep you out of peril tomorrow. Getting rid of waste is a huge thing to do. But finding force multipliers is bigger still. And no one is doing it. We have a few scattered models – Google and Amazon for instance – but mostly we are not trying anything new. Apple gives us a little innovation – but who else is doing anything noticeable? More than that, who is doing anything BIG!? If you cannot make the case for your team and its capability, you are asking for the mean counters to staring pruning it.

And the thing that lies at the heart of this is that we go home exhausted and at best just try to tweak it a little the next day, in hopes that falling behind will magically become leaping ahead.  Mind you, charisma and motivation are short-term fixes also. Celebrating a win here and there does not change the organization. If you are not truly going somewhere new and uncomfortable, then you are going nowhere. Your goal – tonight – try to figure out a way to increase the ability of your team by an order of magnitude; I have seen it happen many times – but not for a while. That is your job. When you go home exhausted, make some coffee… or figure out a way to carve some time out to really manage again; if your team has not grown significantly in 6 months, you should not be going home early. THAT is bad management.

So the need – is to challenge the status quo with something new and amazing. Seriously.   It must be centered on competitive results and it must be compelling and real. If someone else is already doing it – it may help – but it is not enough. And you must put systems in place that keep you breaking the mold and finding new leverage. If you cannot handle the risk – you are in the way.

If you are a line contributor… this message still works. Your own value in the marketplace is found in leverage. No one owes you a job and the economy proves it. You are management in your own life. Are you building something world-class and unique or hoping to catch the gravy train? (That train has left, by the way.) The fact remains – if you build a better mousetrap – the world WILL beat a path to your door. But no amount of marketing in a struggling economy will compensate for a lack of real value; you need to actually be learning and building. So your message had better not be fluff – Asking full price for something that can be bought in bulk at fire-sale prices is not a practical approach. Don’t ask for work – build a machine (you) that can not be ignored.

Do We Still Understand R&D?

I attended a very good presentation last night; but I was disappointed that no one really seemed to know much about research or design anymore. I have been an engineer for many years now. I have worked for many companies in many domains; I have solved internal problems, technical problems, people problems, and business problems.

The presentation revolved around LEAN methods and, in particular, their application to software development; I am a strong advocate of LEAN, though many seem to think the concepts do not completely apply to software efforts.

That said, my sticky point was the idea that EVERYTHING would completely succumb to lean methods. I recall hearing a while back that 3M ran into problems when it tried to over-adopt on lean and six sigma. 3M had a nice history of allowing workers to experiment a bit… they actually allocated approximately 1 day a week (if memory serves) to these exploratory endeavors. Very cool – and smart. But lean is about production, not experimentation; These are separate and often conflicting activities.

I will suggest two kinds of research: (1) Predictable - Finding what is already known, but not immediately available – lots of google search, seeking experts, looking at available information, and (2) Unpredictable – Discovering or inventing something totally new. To Illustrate: You can find out generally how to install, run, and write code in Python(assuming some aptitude and experience perhaps); You can not yet google the cure for cancer.  There are things you can do to move toward a cure, but obviously some goals are not simply realized by process alone.  Serendipidity, luck, ingenuity, creative problem solving - is often restrained by process. 3M figured it out and rediscovered the need for true research.

The reason true research is different; It is not a process – it is experimentation. Though we have lots of tools, it is hard to know what combination will yield results, if fresh insight or totally new methods will be required, or even if there is something blocking we cannot see. We can ask questions, do calculations, perform lab trials, try different combinations, and brainstorm for weeks; A solution may still not present itself.

Good software system designers also commonly do not follow a single methodology or process; They have many tools and methods at their disposal, but the design effort often looks very disorganized and unpredictable.

This is because good design is not simply looking for “a solution”… it is looking for “a very smart solution”. Commodity tools and methodology yield unremarkable results most of the time. What a designer is looking for is something new… new leverage, new synergy, a new paradigm. One piece of true leverage can change the world; Marketing and business models will rarely sell a rock once the customer has seen a pneumatic hammer… but there was a time when we only had rocks and no one could envision the pneumatic hammer.

The presentation talked to how Toyota does R&D using LEAN/TPS and how then it was obvious that ANY activity could be done this way. My suggestion was that this hinges on identifying a predictable success path; It turns out that LEAN suggests this also… divergent technologies and experiments are intentionally avoided in LEAN.

That Toyota R&D works is because auto manufacturing is actually a well established domain; The “research” is actually minimal – it is truly more of a design effort – and invention may result but it is not required or even expected. It also still takes time – but you can allocate the amount of time allowed; Not having to make an outrageous breakthrough clears the mental block bottleneck. Taking a little time, applying past experience, recognizing customer needs, and staying mindful of design proinciples – simple elegance, form following function, consistency, and so on – you can produce newer and better. But this is evolution mostly – not revolution.

A final point… True research is risky; But you do it because risk yields rewards. 3M understood the potential payoff. But we have largely quit looking for leverage; we are not thinking as deeply as we used to. We are trying to re-assemble known pieces or business model our way and expecting breakthrough results. We are often not looking at the complete market challenges at all – we are leaving lots of easy money on the table. We are looking to linear thinking and expecting exponential luck – using the same tools as the next guy doing the same thing.

We are trying to manage our way to bold goals; But this kind of success often comes from risk. You can not construct a microprocessor with a hammer and nails… You must always seek new tools and must try to truly stretch. If we are not trying to invent the future, we are not growing the pie… we are just cutting it differently; And we are usually also not baking any new pies. But more than that… we are at risk because someone may choose to try baking again. Most of us are simply constructing today – we are developing and we should think harder about really researching again. I believe in R&D; Today we need more R.. Not just D.

Is the Stimulus Stimulating Enough?

If you are a fan of  the “Built to Last” book, you know about the idea of a BHAG, the Big Hairy Audacious Goal. I look at the Moon Project in the 60s as our last clear national BHAG, a goal that unified a nation and drove us to reach for something we knew would be hard and something we would not have simply aligned on without leadership. Some would say that the original motivation was fear… that Sputnik made us sweat in that Cold War thinking of the time. But Kennedy played down the fear and gave us a compelling goal instead; Something that would truly echo in the hearts of us all… a true triumphant achievement if we could get there. I wonder if we would align better now, not on survival thinking, but on a true goal… Survival is implicit; What can we do that would raise our hearts and make us celebrate as we did then? My father was on the Apollo pickup crew… I remember it fondly. The human spirit wants to do much more than simply survive.

I think we are overdue for some long-range thinking and some true national goal. We have been managing and cost-cutting, instead of truly making breakthroughs and improving our industrial might. And we have been rationalizing for our dependence on oil, for our toll on the environment, and for our problemmatic programs(healthcare, social security, education). Yeah – I think the iPhone is cool; the web and the PC were a big deal also; Have we really harnessed their potential yet? Have we come close to harnessing our own? Is this our legacy – or can we do better? Is there anything on par with the Space Program that we can think of… to really challenge ourselves and raise the human spirit?

I look at business and worry. We cost-cut as if its the only path to ROI. We lop off the arms and legs of working organizations, taking out communities in the process… But have we tried the real risk of doing something meaningful. And we have largely forgotten the discipline of results; Our productivity has been faltering for years. We have become like our politicians, afraid to make a move without a poll, and even then nurturing our exit strategy. I see managers who manage mainly to risk nothing and to create little; They repeat what others have done, giving a commodity result in a world full of “more of the same.” The bean counters fight over the beans… we need to figure out how to create more, not how to horde what is left. Life is not a zero-sum game, unless we make it that way. (And that is just a narrow mind at work – Consider the “long tail” and how it made Amazon, one of the companies poised to weather the storm ahead.)

Just a tiny bit of meaningful innovation; Just a little more risk than we are used to; Just a little more vision than the next quarter; And a little attention to the system we all live within – I bet we can come up with a goal that could captivate the mind and spirit of a country. Thinking short-term becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy… you can only cut costs so far; Short-term thinking buries us. We like the story of the pheonix for a reason… I wonder if we can be amazing again, instead of just survivors…

Best Practices?

I have been frustrated for a while with the ongoing reference to “best practices”. It sells training, conferences, and more… But it also is used to manipulate. Best implies that you have arrived… that this is as good as it gets.  And it is often the mechanism used to criticize when we try something different. Often enough, no real proof exists(nor can it) that something can’t be improved upon. Often also, a “best practice” may be the right thing  in one particular circumstance – but impossible or unreasonable in another. What is best for one need may not be for another organization, situation, or industry. Many switched to the phrase “lessons learned” a while ago; I do like that better. It has not yet caught on… but I hope it gets a little more momentum. The idea that we keep looking, that things can be improved, and that we can still learn from each other – I will take that humble and open-minded viewpoint – over the confident but closed-minded imposer of best practice. I believe in trying new things. I like the term “Lessons Learned”.

The Same Page?

I wonder how hard it will be to get them both to the table… Developers – and everyone else. I have been deeply aware of agile practices for some years now, but I am surprised at the regular references to Waterfall(a process contraindicated from the beginning; Royce in his paper suggested it would NOT work) and the “breakthrough” agile practices. In Microsoft, they make jokes about having drunk “the koolaid”… I often see a variation of this in the developer world around the new agile techniques.

I actually like Scrum, but it is mostly packaging around what should have been and had been done many places before. The reality that things change is important, of course; But I think too, the act of moving forward is almost as important. Peter Coad’s “Frequent, Tangible, Working Results” was a most meaningful mantra in a sea of hype.

Sprints are iterations; I have seen different organizations do these for years. Drop people in a room and demand a short cycle… and you would be surprised how often they become agile. (If they can work together at all.) Iterative development was supposed to be a best practice in the RUP days and before. (Spiral Development – iterates over the processes of think a little, plan a little, implement a little, then test a little)

So where does all the noise come from? What is truly new about Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum?

Continuous integration was mostly a product of the internet. Regular build and test was a best practice long before, but the shared tools(Ant, JUnit, CruiseControl, Hudson, NUnit, etc.) and the lexicon to go with them… is new.  I have no trouble saluting Martin Fowler’s article on CI, but I think it would have happened almost because of the screaming obvious synergies that were emerging.

Test-driven development… Supposedly there were people doing this long ago, though I consider it new. I used to test as I developed, but its not really the same thing. I have no trouble calling it evolutionary though.

One by one, many of the practices that make up agile are not so revolutionary after all… So the breakthrough is in the packaging. And perhaps also in the selling.

That said, we still have our jobs to do and this industry has seen it’s share of silver bullets. For those who ever had to really do waterfall… I am sorry. It was actually a derivation of the common engineering lifecycle that we use to build bridges, jets, and spacecraft. It came from a theoretical (and originally true) need, when tools were poor, memory was weak, clock speeds were pitiful, and mistakes were expensive; Computers were being used to put a man on the moon and to split the atom. To think we could iterate our way to some of those goals… or see that the whole domain would change this much… is more than Bucky Fuller could ever have guessed. We used phased commitment – becuase government insisted we show a plan before we spend years, taxpayer dollars, risk lives, and embarass a country(or worse)… We still are careful when its time to make a missile or a piece of medical equipment. Can you guess why?

But credit is going to the rockstars anyway… I think we should also salute a myriad of people who came before. I think the Toyota Production System would be in there… Lean thinking created Agile, even if they did not know thats what they were doing.

Given that we have been fighting over each other’s intellectual capital for a while… and spinning hype, for a while, like the most prolific of marketers… Maybe its time to put away the pretense. We are evolving – yes; But old and new ideas – made it all happen.

Can we try to get more of these groups once in conflict at the same table – to quit bickering and round out a true profession? Forget certifications… lets start with truths. (Certifications seem to be another brand of selling these days… Not raising the bar, but creating income.) We hold the future in our minds… What can we do to work together and make another real stride forward?

The Standish Group said we were struggling to be successful, that software production was a mess. A more recent 2004 report says we have gotten better. This was mostly attributed to iterative development and better project management, but I think they missed a lot… Better tools, more refined practice, and perhaps the real competition overseas raising the bar. I think re-use was also incredibly significant… Java is about re-use; Common tools, operating systems, infrastructure… we used to write all of this; And a huge array of open-source activity… spring, eclipse, linux, firefox, ant, junit, hudson, subversion… the list goes on and on.

Where am I going with this? I like that we are collaborating more as teams with this agile stuff How about we also quit fighting about the words… because we are really not so far apart. So we – the community of software professionals become available to each other again.  I think its interesting that so many still think they need a doctor, a lawyer, or an accountant… in the family. I guess my mechanic brother deals with this too… but most mechanics are not ready to go white collar. I do think we could though…

We need to admit that Scrum is not done, that XP is not the one answer, that no dogma or silver bullet has proven itself perfect. We need to remember that good process is about just a few simple things… reduction of waste, faster cycle time, more flexibility, simplification, quality, or repeatability. We bring information and automation – We are the more, faster, better, smarter answer most of the time. But to make any of that work… First you need a team. Collaboration and problem-solving… not buzzwords and bias… can make ours the profession of answers.

What am I asking? Find your local professional groups… User Groups, SPINs, Conferences, Meetups… and get involved. Lets communicate and raise the bar together. In Atlas Shrugged, there were a few special souls and ideas that could stop the world; We are in the situation of being an answer to many of its stuggles. How much can computers still do for our troubled industries?