The role of leadership in software development
Posted on August 30, 2010 Comments (0)
The webcast of Mary Poppendieck’s talk, The role of leadership in software development, at Google. As usual Mary does a very nice job of providing some good historical background while exploring wise management practices (tied to software development but plenty useful for any manager).
via: Sheep of a different fold
Related: Lean, Toyota and Deming for Software Development – Webcast on the Toyota Development Process – Don’t Use Performance Appraisals – Lean Software Development – The Leader’s Handbook
Management Blog Posts from July 2006
Posted on August 27, 2010 Comments (1)
- New Rules for Management? No! – “New” rule: “Look out, not in.” What kind of rule is that? It is pretty obvious you need to do both. I find it incredible the amount of time that is taken trying to show “new” ideas that amount to absolutely nothing. See comments on: Fast Company Interview: Jeff Immelt.
- How Google Works – Google understands when you experiment things might not work out. Google’s solution is to experiment quickly and fail early (turn the pdsa cycle quickly). That is something every organization can apply.
- Quality and Innovation – For getting some good ideas about what managers/executives should understand about innovation Gary Hamel and Clayton Christensen (The Innovators Solution by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, 2003) offer very valuable information.
- Usability Failures – if 63% of purchasers return your phone that you think “have nothing wrong with them” you have bigger problems than production defects.
- Motivation – Most manager focus on motivating people is wasted time and effort. Instead managers would be much more effectively used improving the system, learning, coaching, eliminating de-motivation…
- Ron Pereria (Lean Six Sigma Academy)
- Jon Miller (Gemba Panta Rei)
- Kevin Meyer (Evolving Excellence)
- Matt May (In Pursuit of Elegance)
- Jamie Flinchbaugh (Lean Learning Center)
- and this site, John Hunter (Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog)
- “To find out what happens when you change something, it is necessary to change it.” by Andrew Gelman – “From the classic Box, Hunter, and Hunter book. The point of the saying is pretty clear, I think: There are things you learn from perturbing a system that you’ll never find out from any amount of passive observation.”
- Lean and Six Sigma: PDCA and DMAIC Comparison by Pete Abilla – “A big difference between PDCA and DMAIC is the corporate infrastructure required. Six Sigma and the DMAIC methodology in which its work is carried out, requires a steering committee, tollgates, a champion, and a project sponsor.”
- That’s the trouble with targets by Glyn Lumley – “That’s the trouble with targets. The whole mindset is wrong. It’s as if quality is seen as something that should be achieved – an outcome, a result. Meet the target and everything is fine; miss the target and you’re doomed!”
- The question every manager should be able to answer – “What does success and excellence look like for me in this role?”
- Podcast #97 – Bob Sutton, PhD, “Good Boss, Bad Boss” by Mark Graban
- MBA Case Studies Teach the Wrong Things – “The truth is that the corporate ecosystem is enormously complex. Presenting a simplified view of that ecosystem may seem to make pedagogical sense, but it leads to the false belief that problems are easily understood, that there is one “right” answer, and that there’s no need for experimentation. And that’s a tremendous disservice to future business leaders.”
- Feedback is the Key! by Matt Stine – “Perhaps the most important feedback loop of all is team to client. You can have a well-oiled machine of a development team writing the highest quality code in the industry, but if it doesn’t deliver value to your customer, it’s absolutely worthless!”
- Five Critical Success Factors for Project Managers by Sonja Hughes – “If management support is missing, people and funding resources may not be available for the project…. Lack of management support is a major reason for project failures.”
- Idea Deficit Disorder – Stopping the Epidemic by Wally Bock – “Remember human nature. Human beings are natural idea generators. At work they usually have plenty of ideas. They don’t share them because most of their bosses didn’t want to hear new ideas.”
- 3 Observations of Healthcare vs. Construction by Mike Lombard. Lombi gives us his fresh view on the differences between construction businesses and healthcare organizations, two months after moving to a healthcare lean leader position. Culture is all about people and how they look at the world. I’m looking forward to more observations from Lombi on the culture in healthcare as he continues to explore and support process improvement.
- 10 Tips for Re-energizing Your Day, Every Day by Matthew May. This article is full of everyday wisdom on keeping our energy level high. These practices and habits are so easy to pick up yet so easy to drop during our busiest days. Thanks Matt for bringing these back to the front of our minds. Have you taken a few deep breaths today?
- How to Design Poor Service – Expect 100% Utilization of People or Resources by Mark Graban. Mark gives us a primer on how to show customers you hate them by making sure you optimize one performance metric at the expense of others. It’s a fine object lesson in reverse. It sounds like American Airlines could benefit from a bit from some valid metrics…
- Instead of a Layoff by Gregg Stocker – “Everyone has a stake in the company. When a company has a history of layoffs, though, people feel powerless, disconnected, and expendable. The organization’s leaders send a very clear message that employees are not important when jobs are cut in response to a crisis.” (Also see my 2007 post, Bad Management Results in Layoffs, John)
- The Importance of the Storefront in Lean Manufacturing by Jon Miller “Like fish, the defects should be ‘sold’ or taken care of that day, because old fish begin to smell bad.”
- Comparing Lean Principles to the 14 Toyota Principles – “Toyota Principle #1: Base Your Management Decisions on a Long-Term Philosophy, Even at the Expense of Short-Term Financial Goals… Toyota Principle #2: Create Continuous Process Flow to Bring Problems to the Surface”
- 10 Engagement-Building Behaviors for the Boss by Wally Bock – “Make sure people have the resources to do what you expect. Resources include skills and time and equipment and support. If your people don’t have them, get them before you hold people accountable for results.”
- Switching to a Data-Driven Culture by Brent Dykes – “How can a data-driven identity transform your online marketing team’s behaviors? Rather than perceiving analysis to be someone else’s job, what if they thought of themselves as analysts, not just marketers?”
- A chance to prevent failures rather than cleaning up after them – “FMEA is an analytical approach that is used in the development stage as well as operations management to focus on “What could go wrong?” with respect to a product or service. Teams identify potential failures in a system, and in the design stage, try to eliminate these potential failures as far as possible.”
- Valid or reliable – in the board room by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “In order to maximize the utilization of board time, use of a suite of reliable metrics can provide a steady point of focus. Most of these will be quantitative such as financial, customer-focused, or employee-focused.”
Photo by John Hunter: Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky.
Lean Daily
Posted on August 25, 2010 Comments (0)
Lean Daily consolidates the latest posts from seven excellent lean blogs in one convenient, free, iPhone app. Learn more about it, see a simulator demo, and download it directly from iTunes.
Mark Graban, Lean Blog, took the lead and a number of us combined efforts to provide this as a free service to our loyal readers:
This iPhone app allows you to read these lean blogs while on the go. You can also listen to and view some multimedia lean content, such as the Lean Blog Podcasts and Video Podcasts and the Gemba Academy sample videos in the app as well. You can also find lean news and some other feeds.
Related: Curious Cat management blog directory – Interesting management content (Reddit) – search for management content online
Managing Our Way to Economic Success
Posted on August 23, 2010 Comments (0)
From Managing Our Way to Economic Success, Two Untapped Resources by William G. Hunter, my father. Written in 1986, but still plenty relevant. We have made some good progress, but there is much more to do: we have barely started adopting these ideas systemically.
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W. Edwards Deming has illustrated one of the troubles with U.S. industry in terms of making toast. He says, “Let’s play American industry. I’ll burn. You scrape.” Use of statistical tools, however, allows you to reduce waste, scrap, rework, and machine downtime. It costs just as much to make defective products as it does to make good products. Eliminate defects and other things that cause inefficiencies, and you reduce costs, increase quality, and raise productivity. Note that quality and productivity are not trade-offs. They increase together.
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Potential information surrounds all industrial processes. Statistical techniques, many of which are simple yet powerful, are tools that employees can use to tap and exploit this potential information so that increasingly higher levels of productivity, quality, and innovation can be attained. Engaging the brains as well as the brawn of employees in this way improves morale and participation…and profits.
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What is called for is constant, never-ending improvement of all processes in the organization. What management needs, too, is constant, never-ending improvement of ideas.
Related: William Hunter, articles and books – Invest in New Management Methods Not a Failing Company – The Importance of Management Improvement – Statistics for Experimenters
Management Improvement Carnival #107
Posted on August 20, 2010 Comments (0)
The Curious Cat management blog carnival selects recent management blog posts 3 times each month. Since 2006 the carnival has focused on finding interesting posts for managers on improving the performance of organizations (lean manufacturing, Deming, agile software development, six sigma, customer focus, innovation…).
Dee Hock on Hiring
Posted on August 16, 2010 Comments (1)
Great quote from Dee Hock, founder of Visa:
This short article from Fast Company is packed with powerful management and leadership insight. Read more Curious Cat management article suggestions, on our recently improved site.
Related: Hire People You Can Trust to Do Their Job – Hiring the Right People for the Job – find management improvement jobs: lean manufacturing, six sigma… – posts for managers on hiring staff – management and leadership quotes
Technical Non-Support
Posted on August 12, 2010 Comments (1)
A bit of fun from Dilbert. I have had the exact experience Dilbert does of tech support refusing to think about the actual symptoms of the problem and insisting on following some script and wasting my time – repeatedly. The second act takes on another time waster with a management tip from Dogbert: “Always postpone meetings with time wasting morons.” Dogbert hasn’t quite adopted the respect for people principle.
via: The final word on making meetings better
Related: Dilbert and Deming – Financial Planning Made Easy – CEOs Plundering Corporate Coffers – posts on meetings
Management Improvement Carnival #106
Posted on August 10, 2010 Comments (0)
Jon Miller hosts the Management Improvement Carnival #106 on his blog, highlights include:
Related: Management and Leadership Quotes – Management Improvement Carnival #83 – Management Improvement Carnival #72
Build an Environment Where Intrinsic Motivation Flourishes
Posted on August 8, 2010 Comments (8)
50 years after Douglas McGregor’s classic, The Human Side of Enterprise, too many managers still have not learned that using extrinsic motivation is not an effective way to manage complex human systems (organizations). The issue is important to me because their is a huge amount of poor management based on this thinking (focused on how people need to be fixed/motivated) instead of fixing what management really needs to fix.
You can succeed as a manager, and progress in your career, by viewing your role as helping people do their jobs well. As McGregor shows workers want to do a good job. He termed managing with this understanding theory y; and theory x is the idea that people should be motivated with carrots and sticks because they are not going to do work otherwise. Organizations have often so systemically de-motivated people they seem to have lost that desire. What you need to focus on is not motivating them with cheap tricks. Instead focus on eliminating the factors that de-motivate them.
Often simplistic motivation is seen as a replacement for fixing management performance (improving the management systems…). Instead managers should focus on eliminating the sources of de-motivation in the workplace. If you need hints, Dilbert does a good job of showing you what management does that de-motivates.
To succeed as a manager assume people wish to do a good job. If employees are not performing some task well, the manager needs to figure out what is wrong with the system that leads to this outcome (not what is wrong with the employees). When a manger views the problem as one of motivating workers that puts the problem within the worker. They need to be changed. That is the wrong strategy, most of the time. Instead you will have much more success if you seek to improve the system to improve performance.
I believe there is often a burden to overcome. As people have their intrinsic motivation crushed time after time day after day, week after week, year after year they try to protect themselves by shutting off their hope to achieve intrinsic motivation at work. You may have to show you really are serious before they will open up again. You have to make real changes and do so consistently that shows respect for people. The intrinsic motivation is a strong force and a few earlier adopters will quickly come along in all but the most broken organizations. You can build on that success (eliminating more and more de-motivation) to grow intrinsic motivation in more and more people.
Read more
Stop Starting and Start Finishing – Jason Yip
Posted on August 5, 2010 Comments (1)
Jason Yip explores the value of reducing work in process and reducing context switching costs to optimize throughput. By designing processes to work on projects serially instead of in parallel we reduce context switching, and other costs, of multitasking.
Related: Multi-Tasking: Why Projects Take so Long – The Importance of Making Problems Visible – One piece flow (continuous flow) – Kanban
How to Manage What You Can’t Measure
Posted on August 4, 2010 Comments (7)
In Out of the Crisis, page 121, Dr. Deming wrote:
So what do you do then? I am a strong advocate of Deming’s ideas on management. I see understanding system thinking, psychology, the theory of knowledge and variation as the tools to use when you can’t get precise measures (or when you can).
Even if you can’t measure exactly what you want, you can learn about the area with related data. You are not able to measure the exact benefit of a happy customer but you can get measures that give you evidence of the value and even magnitude. And you can get measures of the costs of dis-satisfied customers. I just mention this to be clear getting data is very useful and most organizations need to focus on gathering sensible data and using it well.
Without precise measure though you have to use judgment. Judgment will often be better with an understanding of theory and repeated attempts to test those theories and learn. Understanding variation can be used even if you don’t have control charts and data. Over-reaction to special causes is very common. Even without data, this idea can be used to guide your thoughts.
The danger is that we mistake measures for the thing itself. Measures are a proxy and we need to understand the limitation of the data we use. The main point Deming was making was we can’t just pretend the data we have tells us everything we need to know. We need to think. We need to understand that the data is useful but the limitations need to be remembered.
Human systems involve people. To manage human systems you need to learn about psychology. Paying attention to what research can show about motivation, fear, trust, etc. is important and valuable. It aids management decisions when you can’t get the exact data that you would like. If people are unhappy you can see it. You may also be able to measure aspects of this (increased sick leave, increased turnover…). If people are unhappy they often will not be as pleasant to interact with as people who are happy. You can make judgments about the problems created by internal systems that rob people of joy in work and prevent them from helping customers.
For me the key is to use the Deming’s management system to guide action when you can’t get clear data. We should keep trying to find measures that will help. In my experience even though there are many instances where we can get definite data on exactly what we want we fail to get data that would help guide actions a great deal). Then we need to understand the limitations of the data we can gather. And then we need to continually improve and continually learn.
When you have clear data, Deming’s ideas are also valuable. But when the data is lacking it is even more important to take a systemic approach to making management decisions. Falling back into using the numbers you can get to drive decision making is a recipe for trouble.
LinkedIn discussion on the topic
Related: Manage what you can’t measure – Statistical Engineering Links Statistical Thinking, Methods and Tools – outcome measures
Tags: curiouscat,Data,Deming,management,managing people,Statistics,Systems thinking,variation
Management Improvement Carnival #105
Posted on August 1, 2010 Comments (1)
The management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. Also try our collected management articles and blogs posts at: Curious Cat Management articles.
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