Posted on May 28, 2010  Comments (2)

In the webcast Dan Pink’s shares research results exploring human motivation and ideas on how to manage organization given the scientific research on motivation.

• “once a task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill a larger reward led to poorer performance”
• “Pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough so they are not thinking about money they are thinking about the work.”
• “3 factors lead to better performance: autonomy, mastery and purpose” [not additional cash rewards]
• Open source software is created by highly skilled people contributing their time to collaborative projects that are then given away (such as Linux, Ruby, Apache). For large efforts their are often people paid by companies to contribute to the open source software but many people contribute 20-30, and more hours a week for free to such efforts, why? “Challenge, mastery and making a contribution”
• “When the profit motive becomes unmoored from the purpose motive, bad thing happen. Bad things ethically sometimes, but also bad things like not good stuff, like crappy products, like lame services, like uninspiring places to work… People don’t do great things”
• “If we start treating people like people… get past this ideology of idea of carrots and sticks and look at the science we can actually build organization and work life that make us better off, but I also think they have the promise to make our world a just a little bit better.”

The ideas presented emphasize respect for people, an understanding of psychology and validating beliefs with data. All of it fits very well with Deming’s ideas on management and the idea I try to explore in this blog. It isn’t easy to adjust your ideas. But the evidence continues to pile up against some outdated management practices. And good managers have to learn and adapt their practices to what is actually effective.

Related: Extrinsic Incentives Kill Creativity – The Trouble with Incentives: They Work – Righter Incentivization – Individual Bonuses Are Bad Management

Posted on May 26, 2010  Comments (0)

Reddit is a web site that ranks web pages by user votes. The site uses an algorithm that has a very large timeliness factor. So top ranked links move down the list fairly quickly. This results in a nice site to look at to find links others have found interesting recently.

I created a management sub-reddit (a distinct topic-focused-area on the management improvement topics covered in this blog) in 2008. The sub-reddit seems to be about ready to reach a critical mass, so I am making a push to get those interested in management and specifically Deming, lean management, agile software development, six sigma and the things I normally write about on this blog to participate.

If you sign up you can not only vote on the links displayed but add new links (that then will be voted on by others). I think Reddit does a very good job of using social aspects of the internet to provide recommendations that are worthwhile (I have used the site for years).

The management subreddit depends on the community of users to voice their opinions. And I have an interest in having the community form around the management ideas I value (see my other blog posts for what that is). So I encourage you to give it a try and vote on links you enjoy and add new articles, web sites, blog posts… The benefit of this subreddit will grow as we grow the number of participants and if it develops a shared culture of value.

Related: Creating the Management Sub-Reddit (2008) – John Hunter’s social site links (Reddit, Kiva, LinkedIn) – Dell, Reddit and Customer Focus – Curious Cat Management Improvement Library – Management Improvement Blog Carnival

Posted on May 24, 2010  Comments (1)

There is plenty of research showing that people can’t multitask. But this knowledge is missed by many people. Here is another study showing this: Why We Can’t Do 3 Things at Once

Now I wouldn’t base my judgement on this one study. But we don’t have to. Multitasking decreases productivity. The siren song of multitasking. Multi-tasking: why projects take so long. What we should strive for is flow, the opposite of multi-tasking.

The real world often requires dealing with many interruptions (forcing you not to multi-task but to break up your tasks into fragments). Single piece flow shows the value (the efficient system performance) of getting one thing done then picking up the next. Many interruptions force you to keep stopping and starting tasks. People think they are multi-tasking but in fact they are just doing 4 tasks serially switching back and forth between them. Which slows them down and increases the odds of forgetting something. In these environments checklists are even more important than if you are not being interrupted frequently.

Related: costs of context switching – The Multi-Tasking Myth – Interruptions Can Severely Damage Performance

Posted on May 23, 2010  Comments (0)

Karen Wilhelm is hosting Management Improvement Carnival #98 on the Lean Reflections blog.

She highlights the LeanBlog Podcast #90 featuring Tim Turner, a plant team member at Toyota Kentucky, who compiled stories from 80 fellow team members from every level of the organization about what it feels like to be part of Toyota.

She also mentions the management “subreddit” which I have been encouraging people to use. The sites community votes to highlight management links they found valuable which provides some interesting suggestions reading. Some of the most popular links their in the last few weeks are:

Pete Abilla’s discussion of taking customer service agents for a little gemba walk and a quick activity to demonstrate a few lean fundamentals.

Who’s Got the Monkey? A Harvard Business Review Classic (pdf) with some advice on how managers can avoiding getting stuck with difficult issues others want to pass on to them.

And How Zappos was Born: Place Bets on Passionate People by founder Tony Hsieh.

Posted on May 19, 2010  Comments (1)

This is a continuation of my previous post: Improving Software Development with Automated Tests. Lets look at a typical poka-yoke example. A USB connector must be put in the right way up – for the connection to work properly and the communication to occur as intended. So to mistake proof the process the connector won’t allow the USB device to be put in upside down – the hardware connection designed to not allow that type of connection.

Using a deployment process that prevents code from being submitted that has an error follows a nearly identical process. The process blocks an error from being made. It seems to me a process that blocks code with a bug from being deployed with an error is the basically the same as a USB connection that will not accept the device being put in upside down.

Mistake proofing in no way should limit focusing on improving the process. Mistake-proofing a process both improves it (many poka-yoke solutions make the process easier to use) and prevents an error in case you still try something wrong. So I see the automated tests as a way to serve as a backstop, in case the process improvement you made to the software development process failed in some form. Then the automated testing required to deploy would prevent the introduction of that error to the production environment.

Related: Checklists in Software Development – Baking in Quality to Software Development – Combinatorial Testing for Software Development – Great Visual Instruction Example

Posted on May 17, 2010  Comments (1)

My brother, Justin Hunter, gives a lightning talk on Combinatorial Testing – The Quadrant of Doom and The Quadrant of Massive Efficiency Gains in the video above. The following text is largely directly quoted from the talk – with a bit of editing by me.

When you have a situation that has many many many possible parameters and each time only a few possible choices (a few items you are trying to vary and test – in his example in the video, 2 choices) you wind up with a ridicules number of possible tests. But you can cover all the possibilities in just 30 tests if your coverage target is all possible pairs. When you have situations like that you will see dramatic efficiency gains. What we have found in real world tests is greatly reduced time to create the tests and consistently 2 to 3 times as many defects found compared to the standard methods used for software testing.

You can read more on these ideas on his blog, where he explores software testing and combinatorial testing. The web base software testing application my brother created and shows in the demo is Hexawise. It is free to try out. I recommend it, though I am biased.

Related: Combinatorial Testing for Software – Video Highlight Reel of Hexawise – a pairwise testing tool and combinatorial testing tool – YouTube Uses Multivariate Experiment To Improve Sign-ups 15% – What Else Can Software Development and Testing Learn from Manufacturing? Don’t Forget Design of Experiments (DoE)

Justin posted the presentation slides online at for anyone who is interested in seeing more details about the test plan he reviewed that had 1,746,756,896,558,880,852,541,440 possible tests. The slides are well worth reading.
Read more

Posted on May 14, 2010  Comments (0)

I think looking back at some previous posts to the blog is worthwhile. Here are links to some of the posts from May 2006. The photo shows some South American artwork at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: I took the photo on a trip to New York.

• Using Data Effectively Requires Thought – The numbers are just proxies for the real situation. Look beyond the numbers you see to what they mean and understand how the numbers presented may not fully capture the important details you need to consider.
• Better and Different – Toyota is a great example of doing both. So are Google and Apple. But doing things differently also means taking risks and Apple has suffered in the past. Doing things differently is great as long it is the right differently (which isn’t always easy to judge).
• Find the Root Cause Instead of the Person to Blame – If you find yourself thinking a problem or defect is the fault of a person try asking why a couple more times and see if you can find a system improvement that would eliminate or mitigate such problems in the future. That is a much more effective improvement strategy.
• Respect for People – I think we often have so little respect for people we just avoid dealing with anything touchy because we don’t want to risk they won’t be able to react to the issues raised and will instead just react as if they have been personally attacked.
• Problems Caused by Performance Appraisal – People are increasingly challenging the notion that we just have to live with performance appraisal systems. As usually, I will make my suggestion that chapter 9 of the Leader’s Handbook offers great material on performing without appraisal
• Lean Thinking Misconception – It is a shame so many think lean is equal to “reducing staff.” Lean is about removing waste. Removing waste might mean that fewer people are needed but no real lean thinking organization aims to reduce staff.

Posted on May 12, 2010  Comments (5)

Interruptions can severely degrade your performance. The type of work you are doing impacts the cost greatly. I have spent some of my time programming web applications. When I am doing that interruptions are huge drain on my performance (for me the costs of interruptions while programming are far higher than any other type of work I have done – many times higher). If the interruption disrupts my flow (an interruption needn’t necessarily disrupt it I found, instant messages may not, while speaking to someone else almost surely would – it is a factor of how much of your brain much shift focus I imagine) it can take a huge amount of time to get back into a high performing state. Other work I do can be interrupted with much less impact. I am easily able to slip back into what I was doing.

For me the main cost of interruptions is the time it takes to get back to where I was before the interruption. And the cost is related to how much focus is needed to address what you are working on. Most programming takes a huge amount of focus.

Another big cost of interruptions is the increased risk of mistakes. When people are distracted and then have to go back to a task, and then are distracted, and then go back and… it is more likely they will miss a step or miss noticing some issue than if they can work without distraction. One tool to help cope for distractions that can’t be designed out are checklists.

Paul Graham addressed the importance of managing the system to provide uninterrupted time very well in, Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule

Paul Graham’s article also shows why managers so often fail to adequately address this issue. Manager, by and large, work in an environment where interruptions are the work. I know, much of my time as a program manager is driven by interruptions and is doable even with many interruption every day.

When managing you need to understand how big a cost interruptions have and design systems appropriate to optimize system performance for all parts of the system. The design of the system needs to take into account the costs and benefits of interruptions for those people working on various processes in the system.

Related: Understanding How to Manage Geeks – Explaining Managers to Programmers – What Motivates Programmers? – Joy in Work – Software Development – Programmers Cartoon – Checklists in Software Development

Posted on May 11, 2010  Comments (1)

Mike Wroblewski is hosting Management Improvement Carnival #97 on the Got Boondoggle? blog, highlights include:

• Bagel with a side of Jidoka by Evan Durant – “And the more we explore the concept of Jidoka the more we are forced to challenge our assumptions about what exactly the human and machine elements are. Often there are untapped opportunities to separate the two.”
• The Human in the Loop by Mark Rosenthal – “If we truly want to construct a work environment where people make the best possible decisions, it behooves us to rid ourselves of decades old stereotypes and convenient beliefs about why people decide what they do.”
• 3 Tips for Continuous Improvement by Ron Pereira – “In this article, I want to share some ideas for how to approach things such as workout programs and continuous improvement as they are surprisingly similar.”
• Should I Pursue Waste Elimination or Lead Time Reduction? by Michael Balle as the Gemba Coach – “To respond to your question directly; there is no debate: Kaizen without a pull system will be disappointing.”

Related: Management Improvement Carnival #64 – Curious Cat Management Improvement Search

Posted on May 9, 2010  Comments (3)

Manufacturing in the USA continues to do well. But it could do better. There are reasons manufacturing that could be located in the USA is not. And addressing those can increase USA manufacturing. Some reasons are sensible, based on the existing economics and realities of comparative advantage. Some reasons are just flawed thinking, such as the “spreadsheet management” taught at many business schools that Deming and lean thinkers can understand the flawed thinking that leads to outsourcing.

Typical wall street thinking (also driven by “spreadsheet management think” rather than an actual understanding of value stream of a potential investment) also hampers raising investment capital for USA manufacturing. The broken USA health care system also is a big problem driving up costs of doing business in the USA enormously.

Fighting for ‘made in the USA’

The success of science and engineering university based research is still a huge advantage to the USA. Though other countries have seen the value in this and have invested in building their own capacity. The economic value of such is increased many fold by manufacturing the innovations created in your country.

Related: Manufacturing and the Economy – Economic Strength Through Technology Leadership – Rhode Island Manufacturing – Big Failed Three, Meet the Successful Eight – Toyota in the US Economy

Posted on May 4, 2010  Comments (4)

We can’t Handle the Truth

What I have seen is truth is not valued much. I’m interested in creating improvement. I thought people would be driven by data and possible strategies to improve. But I have found that just isn’t often true.

So, from my experience, the strategy to improve means not distracting people with many of the truths. Try to fix the system and convince others to fix the system as you can. If some efforts are resisted try to adjust. Sometimes try a different strategy to get improvement. Sometimes I just drop trying to improve that particular thing. There are usually so many options for improvement it isn’t tough to find plenty of others that may be more successfully tackled.

I am someone who find it frustrating that many don’t seem interested in really understanding what the system is producing and where weaknesses exist. But, at least for me, trying to have things work the way I want (where an open exploration of the truth was the focus) isn’t the priority. I have figured it is better to give up on that desire and work within the reality that exists.

I can’t stop myself though from pointing out things far more often than people want. I have no doubt it has annoyed people and gotten me in trouble. But nothing that wasn’t manageable, I just make things a bit more difficult for myself.

One, very visible, sign of people avoiding the truth is if people say very different things in meetings and out of them. It is amazing to me how much less likely anything that could be sen as a complaint or criticism to be voiced in a meeting versus in the hallway. It isn’t so surprising if you understand human psychology (the tendency to blame those who voice a problem). People figure this out and keep their mouth shut. But to their friends they understand they can point out the problems and not be blamed (so in the hallways, you get a much more honest understanding of what people think). This is a bad sign. If your organization trains people to ignore unpleasant truths it makes managing more difficult and results in poorer performance.

Related: The difference between respect and disrespect is not avoiding avoiding criticism – Information Technology and Business Process Support – How to Improve – Find the Root Cause Instead of the Person to Blame – Information Technology and Management – Respect for People, Understanding Psychology – Bring Me Problems, and Solutions if You Have Them – Better Meetings – People are Our Most Important Asset

Posted on May 2, 2010  Comments (1)

The Curious Cat Management blog carnival selects recent management blog posts 3 times each month. Also visit the Curious Cat Management Library for online management improvement articles.

• Kanban Systems in Software Development – “In the field, I’ve seen Kanban work best in chaotic environments where upcoming features don’t have much in common.”
• Renegade Recruiting by Chris Ferdinandi – “I think world-class recruiting is really about three things: Building a pipeline of qualified talent before you need to hire someone. Accurate, valid selection criteria. A fantastic candidate experience.”
• How to Deal with Complainers – 2 Approaches by Harwell Thrasher – “People who complain fall into two categories: those who complain because they want help in resolving a problem, and those who complain because they want sympathy. Often the complainers themselves don’t understand why they’re complaining, so it’s up to you to figure it out for yourself.”
• Building Coaching Capabilities
  by Lee Fried – “Let’s be clear the purpose of coaching is to build capability into the leadership line.”
• How to Deal with Low Performers by Tim McMahon – “A production lead should use this simple 5 step checklist… 3) Has the person been trained?… 5) Has there been regular feedback on performance? An answer of “no” to any of these questions will indicate an area for which focused improvement is needed.”
• Top Three Motivators For Developers (Hint: not money!) by Dave Rodenbaugh – “Every developer on the planet wants to get better at what they do. We crave new knowledge like some people quaff coffee after a hangover… Nothing is more tedious, horrific, or uninspiring to developers to work on projects that lack any real meaning in the world.” (this is another in a long line of posts about Danial Pink’s Ted Talk – John).
• We can’t Handle the Truth by Mike Wroblewski – “People who speak the truth are often labeled as a non-team player, a disrupter, a trouble maker or the current tag of being ‘not a good fit’. End result the person either quits or is fired.”
• Get A Life (Not A Job) by Mark Stelzner – “Great career acts: They all share five key elements – 1) Self-awareness; 2) Continuous self-development; 3) Unique and critical roles; 4) Well-managed time, money and human resources; and 5) Harmony among your work, family and personal life” – buy the book

Read more