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Don’t Hide Problems in Computers

Posted on August 11, 2009  Comments (3)

Making things visible is a key to effective management. And data in computers can be easy to ignore. Don’t forget to make data visible. Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston recently hosted Hideshi Yokoi, president of the Toyota Production System Support Center and wrote this blog post:

Together, we visited gemba and observed several hospital processes in action, looking for ways to reduce waste and reorganize work. It was fascinating to have such experts here and see things through their eyes. Mr. Yokoi’s thoughts and observations are very, very clear, notwithstanding a command of English that is still a work in progress.

The highlight? At one point, we pointed out a new information system that we were thinking of putting into place to monitor and control the flow of certain inventory. Mr. Yokoi’s wise response, suggesting otherwise, was:

“When you put problem in computer, box hide answer. Problem must be visible!”

The mission of the Toyota Production System Support Center to share Toyota Production System know-how with North American organizations that have a true desire to learn and adopt TPS.

Related: The Importance of Making Problems Visible – Great Visual Instruction Example – Health Care the Toyota Way

Three Years of Real-World IT Projects In Ruby

Posted on July 16, 2009  Comments (0)

Nice webcast by Martin Fowler, Three Years of Real-World Ruby. This talk is probably only of interest to those of you in software development, but for them I think it is an excellent presentation.

At work we have been use Ruby for the last 3 years and have found it to be a powerful language that helps make writing software applications fun. And that is important. By providing a powerful language and a rails framework that takes away much of the drudgery of writing code you can create an environment where develops are happy and productive. We are hiring, by the way.

The talk provides a good background on their experience using ruby to manage projects; and how they manage ruby application development projects.

Related: Combinatorial Testing for Software – Checklists in Software Development – Future Directions for Agile Management

Management By IT Crowd Bosses

Posted on July 9, 2009  Comments (1)

John Hunter's IT Crowd badgeJohn Hunter’s IT Crowd badge (Reynholm Industries)

The IT Crowd is a great BBC show on an IT support office in a large organization. The IT staff are knowledgeable and tired of dealing with foolish users of IT. And you wouldn’t want to watch for any customer support tips (though companies like United Airlines might do just that). Anyone involved in IT know Internet Explorer 6 is not an acceptable tool in this day and age. But some IT departments don’t let that stop them from forcing it on their users. Orange UK exiles Firefox from call centres

Yes, the corporate world is taking its sweet time upgrading from Microsoft’s eight-year-old Internet Explorer 6, a patently insecure web browser that lacks even a tabbed interface. Take, for example, the mobile and broadband giant Orange UK.

According to a support technician working in the company’s Bristol call centre – who requested anonymity for fear of losing his job – Orange UK still requires the use of IE6 in all its call centres, forbidding technicians from adopting Mozilla’s Firefox or any other browser of a newer vintage.

This technician tells us that about a quarter of the Bristol staff had moved to Firefox after growing increasingly frustrated with IE6′s inability to open multiple pages in the same window and overall sluggish performance. But a recent email from management informed call-centre reps that downloading Firefox was verboten and that they would be fined £250 if their PCs experienced problems and had to be rebuilt after running Firefox or any other application downloaded from the net.

Great management. Provide only an outdated and poor tool. Then threaten to fine employees that try to get a tool to allow themselves to do their job. Yes, it makes sense to setup rules for managing IT resources in a company but it is not acceptable to provide extremely outdated tools and then instead of fixing the problem when employees can’t stand your lousy service any longer you threaten to fine them. Wonderful. I guess you could call it the punishment-by-threat-demotivation-drive-in-fear management (for those that think Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards model is too light on the punishment part of management).

Related: Stop Demotivating Me! – Software Supporting Processes Not the Other Way Around – Lean IT Systems – Not ERP – The Defect Black Market (another theory X IT management example) – Change Your Name
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Computer Network Operations Center Failures

Posted on July 3, 2009  Comments (0)

Obviously many businesses are now dependent on computer Network Operations Centers (NOC). Some of these data centers can cause millions of dollars in lost sales each minute if they fail. So sound engineering, including off-site redundancy is critical. Authorize.net is a recent example of such a failure, Authorize.net Goes Down, E-Commerce Vendors Left Hanging

Payment gateway service provider Authorize.net has been down and out for several hours… That has big implications: since the service is used by tens of thousands of e-commerce vendors to accept credit card and electronic checks payments on their websites, it likely means millions are being lost during its downtime. PayPal and Google Checkout are still up and running.
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A fire in Fisher Plaza, Seattle has cause a massive power outage causing leading IP-based payment gateway solution Authorize.Net to go down around approximately 11:15pm PST (last night). A traffic reporter for KOMO News that operates out of Fisher Plaza tweeted that a fire set off the sprinkler system which fried the generators.

From what I can piece together it seems within about 5 hours services were back up, at least partially. NOC failures are not uncommon (either due to fire, power failure [including backup systems], government raids, software glitches [not exactly the same as a NOC failure but some can have the affect of essentially knocking off a NOC from providing the specific service desired]). Evaluating these risks must be part of management systems with significant NOC dependencies.

Authorize.net set up a Twitter account and within hours has 2,500 followers. I am not a huge fan of Twitter, it is nice but seems pretty limited to me. But this is an example of using it effectively. You can follow me on Twitter @curiouscat_com.

Related: Information Technology and Business Process Support – Amazon S3 Failure Analysis – Information Technology and Management – IT Operations as a Competitive Advantage – Undersea Cables Cut Again, Reducing India’s Capacity by 65%

Google Innovates Again with Google Wave

Posted on June 25, 2009  Comments (1)

Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. They are developing this as an open access project. The creative team is lead by the creators for Google Maps (brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen). A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. You really have to watch to understand what it is.

This is a long webcast (1 hour and 20 minutes) and likely will be best only for those interested in internet technology solutions. But it also provides useful insight into how Google is managing the creation of new tools. But the ideas are not explicit (the demo was meant to present the new product Google Wave, not explain the thought behind producing useful technology solutions), so you have to think about how what they are doing can apply in other situations.

For software developer readers they also highly recommended the Google Web Development Kit, which they used heavily on this project. They also have a very cool context sensitive spell checker that can highlight misspelled words that are another dictionary word but not right in the context used (about 44:30 in the webcast). And they discuss using Wave to manage bug tracking and manage information about dealing with bugs (@ 1 hour 4 min point).

Very cool stuff. The super easy blog interaction is great. And the user experience with notification and collaborative editing seems excellent. The playback feature to view changes seems good though that is still an area I worry about on heavily collaborative work. Hopefully they let you see like all change x person made, search changes…

Related: Eric Schmidt on Management at Google – Joel Spolsky Webcast on Creating Social Web Resources – Great Marissa Mayer Webcast on Google Innovation – Google Should Stay True to Their Management Practices – Amazon Innovation

Top 10 Reasons Why Employees Leave in IT

Posted on June 23, 2009  Comments (1)

Some of the problems expressed in the post linked to are specific to IT, and some are more important in software development (where as I have said before employees have higher expectations of management than most employees do), but many have truth for many employees. A good manager can create an environment where these problems are eliminated or reduced.

Top 10 Reasons Why Employees Leave in IT

No prioritization on items therefore constant interruptions in projects are the norm leaving projects unfinished due to a shift to “yet another project or task unexpectedly”
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Boss doesn’t communicate things that affect the team or you as an individual and makes all decisions without your knowledge only you finding about it later through another source
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Managers who fail to promote the very people who deserve it rather than who is popular or who they like
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Bad co-workers who do not get stomped out (let go) and hurt the culture
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Teams work best when they collaborate and are allowed to question what the proposed process or standard is, not just following and doing what is told 100% of the time. If the process suggested or currently ongoing sucks, question it and expect your team to question it!
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Employee comes up with an idea and manager disregards it because “no I’ve always done it my way” even if it’s a 1999 way of doing things

Related: Helping Employees Improve – Information Technology and Business Process Support – Stop Demotivating Me! – The Manager FAQ – Flaws in Understanding Psychology Lead to Flawed Management – posts on managing people

Joel Spolsky Webcast on Creating Social Web Resources

Posted on May 4, 2009  Comments (1)

Joel Spolsky webcast on creating Stack Overflow (with the goal of providing answers to professional programmers) using ideas from anthropology. Once again he provides great information. This is particularly interesting for software development but also just a good presentation for understanding the importance of customer focus and systems thinking.

What they focused on and did:

  • Voting – Reddit… (see our management Reddit)
  • Tags – lets you see what you want and to block tags you don’t want to see.
  • Editing – letting users edit the questions and responses. For a technical question and answer system this is very useful (based on my experience).
  • Badges – people like to earn “credit” (psychology)
  • Karma – “people are willing to do for free what people are not willing to do for small amounts of money” (psychology)
  • Pre-search – provide quick view of previously answered questions
  • Google is UI – Assumption: “the front page is Google search” – build based on the idea people will search via Google
  • Performance – 16 million pages a month with 2 web servers. They are using the Microsoft stack, not open source.
  • Critical mass – they focused on getting a large user base on day one of the beta site

Related: posts related to Joel Spolsky – Dell, Reddit and Customer Focus – Information Technology and Management – What Motivates Programmers?

Build Your Business Slowly and Without Huge Cash Requirements

Posted on April 12, 2009  Comments (0)

Get Rich Slow by Josh Quittner

At no other time in recent history has it been easier or cheaper to start a new kind of company… These are Web-based businesses that cost almost nothing to get off the ground
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The term ramen profitable was coined by Paul Graham, a Silicon Valley start-up investor, essayist and muse to LILO entrepreneurs. It means that your start-up is self-sustaining and can eke out enough profit to keep you alive on instant noodles while your business gains traction.

“At this point, it would be hard for companies to get any cheaper,” Graham said. Since everyone already has an Internet-connected computer, “it’s gotten to the point that you can’t detect the cost of a company when added to a person’s living expenses. A company is no more expensive than a hobby these days.”

I see a great deal of truth to this and it provides interesting opportunities. Including being able to build a business slowly while still working full time. I have written about Y-combinator previously they have helped make this model popular. And the services these companies make seem to me to often be much more refreshing than ideas so watered down they lose much passion (so common from so many companies). Though some large companies provide great web sites.

Related: Some Good IT Business Ideas – Find Joy and Success in Business – Our Policy is to Stick Our Heads in the Sand – Small Business Profit and Cash Flow

Checklists in Software Development

Posted on April 7, 2009  Comments (2)

Verify your work with checklists

WHO has recently shown that surgical deaths can be reduced by a third when hospitals follow their Surgical Safety Checklist. The checklist is very low tech. It includes questions like whether the patient has been properly identified, whether the proper tools are available, and whether everyone knows what kind of procedure is about to be done.

If a checklist so simple can save so many lives, I thought the technique could surely help us do better as well. So after reading about this study and their checklist, I’ve been pushing us to create checklists for all the common procedures at 37signals.

We now have checklists in Backpack for confirming that a feature is complete, we have a checklist for preparing the feature for deployment and for executing the deployment, and finally for verifying that the feature is working as expected in the wild.
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It’s the kind of stuff that we all know, but that we’ll often forget if we’re not being reminded about it in the moment. Thinking back to the mistakes we’ve made in the past, there are plenty of those that could have been avoided or caught much earlier if we had been using checklists.

This is a great reminder of two things: using checklists and adopting good ideas. Checklists are a simple and effective quality management tool. We use them for our software development (I have been a bit slow at getting them in place but we have been making progress recently). Also this shows how management improvement should work. You get good ideas from others and adapt them for use in your systems. Copying what others do, doesn’t work well. But understanding the concepts they use to improve performance and then adapting those concepts to your organization is the path to improved performance.

Related: Checklists Save Lives – Find Joy and Success in Business – Lean, Toyota and Deming for Software Development – The Power of a Checklist – Most Meetings are Muda

The Importance of Making Problems Visible

Posted on April 2, 2009  Comments (1)

Great, short, presentation webcast by Jason Yip showing the importance of making problems visible. Anyone interested in software development should watch this, and it is valuable for everyone else, also. Great visuals.

Related: Future Directions for Agile Management – Agile Software Development Slideshow – Leading Lean: Missed Opportunity – Information Technology and Management – Curious Cat Micro-financiers – posts on project management – Toyota Institute for Managers

What Managers can Learn From Open Source Project Management

Posted on February 23, 2009  Comments (1)

What managers can learn from Open Source by Murray Cumming

Motivation: People work on open source projects because they enjoy it. These happy developers are productive developers. Managers of open source projects must ensure that the developers feel valued and fulfilled. They must minimise the tedious aspects of the work to ensure that development remains interesting. Otherwise, projects fail.

Although money can provide some incentive it does not provide as much. Managers who say that money is the greatest motivator are justifying their own poor performance. Managers of proprietary software, just like managers of open source software, must ensure that their developers are motivated properly. It is not enough to think that they should feel motivated.
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Open source projects have the benefit of direct feedback from users. Systems such as bugzilla and open mailing lists make it easy for customers to express their needs. That is the necessary first step to satisfying those needs. See the Structural Solutions section.

For instance, proprietary application server projects such as BEA and WebSphere seem deaf to the frustrations of their customers, but the open source JBoss project is happy to hear about those problems and avoid them in its own product.

Standards/Consensus: Open Source projects must conform to, and reuse, accepted, up-to-date standards. Proprietary projects, without the benefit of high visibility or feedback are free to make inferior decisions.

Don’t miss this great essay by Paul Graham: What Business Can Learn from Open Source. And you know what else? I don’t think open source projects use the annual performance review.

Related: Open Source: The Scientific Model Applied to Programming – Dangers of Extrinsic Motivation – What Motivates Programmers? – Open Source Management Terms

Newspaper Innovation In Kansas

Posted on January 29, 2009  Comments (1)

The newspaper industry is facing challenging times. One success story is the Lawrence Journal-World in Lawrence, Kansas. I first heard about their efforts years ago:

Watchful Eyes on Kansas Media Innovations, NPR, 2005

Many media companies hoped that convergence — combining television, print and online resources — would help them survive. Instead, many companies have lost money on online journalism. In Lawrence, Kan., Dolph Simons’ Journal-World newspaper has taken ambitious news-gathering approaches to local issues.

The Newspaper of the Future, by Timothy O’Brien, New York Times

Lawrencians buying tickets for University of Kansas football games can visit the same site, LJWorld.com, and find photographs offering sightlines from each of Memorial Stadium’s 50,000 seats. Law aficionados can find transcripts of locally significant court cases posted on the site and participate in live, online chats debating the pros or cons of some cases – sometimes with experts who are involved in the proceedings.

A related Web site, lawrence.com, is aimed at college readers. It allows visitors to download tunes from the Wakarusa Music Festival, find spirited reviews of local bars and restaurants and plunge into a vast trove of blogs
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The steward of this online smorgasbord is Dolph C. Simons Jr., a politically conservative, 75-year-old who corresponds via a vintage Royal typewriter and red grease pencil while eschewing e-mail and personal computers. “I don’t think of us as being in the newspaper business,” said Mr. Simons, the editor and publisher of The Journal-World and the chairman of the World Company, the newspaper’s parent. “Information is our business and we’re trying to provide information, in one form or another, however the consumer wants it and wherever the consumer wants it, in the most complete and useful way possible.”

The company has continued on an path of customer focus and innovation. There work shows what can be done by understanding what need you fulfill for customers.

They understand what they offer customers (and it isn’t just paper). They understand the technology related to their business (not the technology of their past methods of working but the technology possibilities related to serving their customers). They understand the realities of the marketplace. And they have divined a strategy based on this knowledge (they have innovated). And finally, the Lawrence Journal-World has maintained a constancy of purpose.

Related: Zipcar Innovation – Innovation Strategy – Information Technology and Business Process Support Continue reading →

What to Wear to an Interview

Posted on January 3, 2009  Comments (6)

Response to What to Wear for an IT Job Interview?. Is this just a huge bit stereotypical?

Who can blame them for not wanting to bother with their wardrobes? Fashion is fickle. Fashion is expensive. Fashion requires imagination and inspiration, and let’s face it, after a long day spent debugging code or trouble-shooting computer problems, there’s not a lot of creativity left for clothing.

But if there’s one professional occasion when a tech worker should think fashion first, it’s the job interview. CIOs says so. According to research conducted by Robert Half Technology, more than one-third (35 percent) of CIOs surveyed say that IT professionals should sport a suit for a job interview.

I don’t see any harm in wearing a suit and tie or such business attire if you have no other information to go on for IT, or other employees. That advice to candidates is perfectly fine. Asking what is appropriate attire when the interview is set is also a good idea. In fact, that is all you need to take from this post as an interviewee, in my opinion.

Is there any value in you wearing a suit? If so, then not doing so might be a negative. The psychology of what makes people uncomfortable is tricky. And dress is one of those factors that may seem trivial but to differing extents most people base opinions partial on dress (even if they claim they don’t). Some organization with casual dress codes may also look at being too dressed up as a bad sign (out of touch…). Basically they are experiencing the same discomfort with your dress even though most likely they would profess to find those making judgments based on dress to be superficial. The Manager FAQ does a good job of looking at the thought process behind some managers thinking on the topic.

My manager seems to dress funny. Is there any way to impress upon him the pointlessness of corporate appearance?

Your manager is probably aware that, in the abstract, the way she dresses changes nothing. However, part of her job is to interact with other people, and there are rules of etiquette for these dealings. Your manager’s clothing, even when she’s not dealing with other people, is selected in part as a way of telling you that she takes you seriously; it’s just like calling people “sir”. It’s a convention, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a real convention, and your manager is honoring it.

Even if there is no value to doing so there are many people who make judgments on silly factors like clothing.

Now for the most important point for manager’s, from this post, if you evaluate software developers on how they dress please quit and go work in some other line of work. You really don’t have what is needed to manage software developers or system administrators. If you are hiring someone to sit in meetings with MBAs and translate technology to them, then maybe being comfortable in a suit is a valued trait. But if you are hiring someone to create code 90+% of the time the suit is a completely silly measurement of value.

Related: Curious Cat Management Improvement Jobs – IT Talent Shortage, or Management Failure? – Hiring the Right Workers – Google’s Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm
Continue reading →

Information Technology and Business Process Support

Posted on December 3, 2008  Comments (4)

I moved from management improvement work into information technology work (where I continue to practice management improvement). Many IT practices follow quality management guidelines well (agile software development for one).

I have found it far easier to design and provide software solutions than convince people to change their processes directly. I found it funny that as I delivered new IT solutions, in which was embedded a redesign of the process, those changes were often accepted without any significant debate. But the same changes that I tried to implement without a new IT solution had been impossible to make progress on (all sorts of reasons why it couldn’t be done were raised).

I strove, and believe I succeeded, to implement software solutions in a manner consistent with management improvement concepts. I started doing so in areas where I had been working and I was designing software tools based on my intimate knowledge of the system. And in doing so I tried to use an iterative approach (and the concepts of PDSA, though not really formally doing PDSA) involving those who were actually working in the business system. So I am not talking about just plastering in some IT solution from headquarters on the other side of the continent.

Too often organizations fail to invest enough in IT. The IT department is staffed merely to do what others request (and often not even provided the resources to do that). So then the executives can get what they need from IT. Others can get IT to respond if the manager can elevate the issue and explain how important it is that they get some support. But in general, all sorts of obvious improvement opportunities are wasted because the resources to carry them out are just not available.

In my opinion many organizations would benefit from increasing the resources to IT and shifting the focus from passive supplier to active participant in using information technology to meet business needs. This requires staffing IT with some people that are able to work with others to determine business needs and then determine the best IT solutions and then deliver those solutions. I have found many IT people are well suited to this role (though not all – which is fine those that prefer to focus on technical implementation can do so).

Another reason this often makes sense is how integral IT is to the functioning of the company. Expertise is technology is often very important today (and it is often missing). And getting your proactive quality experts working closing with IT will help them provide more value.

This post presents some thoughts in response to: Does anyone see value in merging Quality and Information Technology departments into a Business Process Management department?

Related: Software Supporting Processes Not the Other Way Around – Information Technology and Management – Using Quality Management Principles to Develop an Internet Resource by John Hunter, Jun 1999 (pdf)

Lame Move by Google

Posted on November 2, 2008  Comments (0)

Google does great things and makes good decisions most often. However a recent move on their part has ended very lamely. As part of what their 10th anniversary celebration they provided a search of the 2001 index (the oldest index they could find to search now). This was extremely cool.

Now if you go to find it so you can try it out you will be disappointed. Search for it on Google you will find a link to Google Search 2001 which gives you a page that says: “The page – www.google.com/search2001.html – does not exist.” Is it amazingly lame that Google took the search down, has it has the first result on searches, and has no explanation on that page of what it was about.

It would be cool for them to leave it up (it was interesting). And I would think they could make a great deal of money showing ads (I can’t remember if they did show ads). But not leaving a page at that address (which was linked to over 95,000 times) explaining what the page did and that it is now offline is very lame. Breaking 95,000 links is bad enough for some pointy haired boss that believes the internet is made up of tubes but for a well run internet company to do that is pitiful.

This move shows Google in a similar light as Gap when managers shut down the Gap’s web site for days (in 2005). Google failed when exiting the video business (DRM issues), then realized their mistake and recovered. The fix for this would take all of 1 hour. Someone just has to put up a page discussing what the page was for and that the search has been discontinued.

But really they should explore if it is better to just make it live – maybe it doesn’t but I would certainly want to look into that option. If not, I would put up some interesting results from the experiment (though if the choice is just a 1 hour solution or nothing then just put up a page in 1 hour) and link to commentary about the search and interesting things people found. This would be an interesting task for an intern, or someone else, and could provide an interesting and popular page. but most importantly at least not breaking 95,000 links (plus all those who go to the page from search results pages) is the minimum Google should do.

Related: web pages should live forever – Search Share Data Checking the ACSI – Ways for Google to Improve Continue reading →

The Software Engineering Manager’s Lament

Posted on October 23, 2008  Comments (0)

The engineering manager’s lament by Eric Ries:

In teams that follow the “pick two” agenda [quality, time or price], which two has to be resolved via a power play. In companies with a strong engineering culture, the engineers pick quality. It’s their professional pride on the line, after all. So they insist on having the final say on when a feature is “done” enough to show to customers. Business people may want to speed things up by spending more money, but enough people have read the Mythical Man-Month to know that doesn’t work.

In teams that have a business culture, the MBA’s pick time. After all, our startup is on a fixed budget. They set deadlines, schedules, and launch plans, and expect the engineering team to do what it takes to hit them. If quality suffers, that’s just the way it is. Or, if they care a lot about quality, they will replace anyone who ships without quality. Unfortunately, threats work a lot better at incentivizing people to CYA than getting them to write quality software.
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* Practice five why’s to get to the root cause of future problems. Use those opportunities to add tests or alerts that would have prevented that problem. Make the investment proportional to the problem caused, so that everyone (even the business leaders) feels good about it.

Excellent post, focused on software development but with usable information for anyone seeking to improve management practices.

Related: Amazon S3 Failure Analysis – IT Talent Shortage, or Management Failure? – Future Directions for Agile Management – Why Extrinsic Motivation Fails – If Tech Companies Made Sudoku

Making Life Difficult for Customers

Posted on September 27, 2008  Comments (5)

Companies seem to think technology is an excuse to provide bad service. Or maybe they don’t need any excuse at all to do so, based on how often they provide bad service. My latest experience with lame pointy haired boss technology came while looking to watch a football game online. Years ago you could listen to any Wisconsin Badger game over the internet – very simple, no special software (just the simple free Real Audio plugin). In subsequent years (just to play a simple audio stream that had worked in previous years they kept requiring upgrades and their ever more complex required software would fail very often). Then the option of listen to online radio broadcasts disappeared altogether (for schools that chose to prevent this anyway).

Now sites that provide video seem incapable of making it a simple process. They chose not to use standard open software solutions. Instead they require you follow their desires to use this or that and then the whole operation fails quite often. Google, no surprise, is an exception (yes it worked prior to Google, they were just smart enough to buy it and not break it). YouTube just works. Can others copy this, idea? Some can, but many phbs decide that really everyone that uses their web sites should be happy to try and download special software and make configuration changes… to get their site working on their personal computers.

The idea that playing video online is solved problem and just making it more and more complex is not a good idea for users no matter if they want to add some bullet points to their boss on why they should get a larger raise this year because they got the engineers to add on some additional new feature that no-one actually wants. Granted This solved problem is a bit lame now, so I am all for improving it. But this should be a process that goes for simpler solutions, not more complex ones. And certainly any timed to the operating system of the end user is too idiotic to consider.
Continue reading →

Management Articles, Posts…

Posted on September 4, 2008  Comments (1)

Reddit is a web site that ranks web pages by user votes. If you login and vote yourself they will develop a pattern of what you like and can show you a list of the pages you are likely to enjoy. I believe this is done by matching your likes and dislikes with others. When showing you a list of recommended links it gives some importance to up votes by anyone and more priority to up votes by those that have shown a tendency to like what you do.

I have recently setup a management sub-reddit (a distinct topic-focused-area on the management improvement topics covered in this blog). 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 success of this management subreddit depends on reaching a critical mass of users. 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.

I have also recently added a page to johnhunter.com with links to my online presence on various sites (such as: StumbleUpon, Kiva, LinkedIn…).

Related: Dell, Reddit and Customer Focus – Curious Cat Management Improvement Search – Curious Cat Management Improvement Library

Seth Godin: Intern Program and the Internet

Posted on September 3, 2008  Comments (0)

Learning from a summer intern program:

I was overwhelmed by the quality of what I got back. (The quantity was expected… interesting internships are hard to find). I heard from students on most continents, with a huge variety of backgrounds and life experiences. And these people were smart.

Unable to just pick a PDF or two, I invited the applicants to join a Facebook group I had set up. Then I let them meet each other and hang out online. It was absolutely fascinating. Within a day, the group had divided into four camps:
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* The leaders. A few started conversations, directed initiatives and got to work.
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If you’re hiring for people to work online, I can’t imagine not screening people in this way. This is the work, and you can watch people do it for real before you hire them.

Excellent post and the advice echoes his advice on hiring: the End of the Job Interview. We have an internship directory, that helps people find opportunities (and those with internships to offer a way to market it) which includes a list of virtual internships.

Related: Seth Godin on Marketing and the Internet – Internships Increasing – Curious Cat Management SubReddit

Future Directions for Agile Management

Posted on August 25, 2008  Comments (4)

Agile management (agile software development specifically) is something that makes a big difference in my work life. David Anderson consistently provides great ideas on agile management and he does so again in this 90 minute presentation on the future directions for agile. As I learned about agile software development, what I saw was a great implementation of management improvement practices focused on software development that was very compatible with Deming’s management philosophy and lean thinking practices. The Agile manifesto:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

The first line can seem to be at odds, but I think in practice it is not – though I admit it may seem that way based on the importance placed on process by Deming (I think you have to read on agile to understand why this is the case). For my use of agile software develop, a highlight of the most important ideas is:

  • Deliver working systems quickly (with limited features, add features based on user needs) – [management improvement practice: PDSA, pilot ideas on a small scale, go to the gemba (don't sit in conference rooms talking about what might be an issue for the computer application you want to see in 6 months, create working systems and then continually improve it)]
  • Build systems that cope well with uncertainty and allow for constant continuous improvement of processes (with IT systems that can adjust as needed to changing business conditions and desires) – [continual improvement - what is good enough today is not good enough next year]

Important concepts addressed by agile management: highly collaborative, risk tolerance, systems thinking, customer interaction, craftsmanship ethic [joy in work], eliminate waste. Great quote from the webcast:

What we know about knowledge work, and software engineering, is that coordination cost grow non-linearly with batch size. We’ve known this since Greg Brooks published the Mythical Man Month, probably longer than that. So that is a key difference with manufacturing, coordination costs do not grow with batch size in manufacturing.

Related: Kanban In Software Engineering – Management Science for Software Engineering – Improving Communication – webcast of David Anderson talking about applying Agile and Deming’s ideas at Microsoft – What is Agile Software Development?

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