Category Archives: IT

Seth Godin: Intern Program and the Internet

Posted on September 3, 2008 by John Hunter

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. … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Education, Innovation, IT, Management | Tagged ,

Future Directions for Agile Management

Posted on August 25, 2008 by John Hunter

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Deming, Innovation, IT, Lean thinking, Management, quote, Software Development, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Gobbledygook

Posted on August 21, 2008 by John Hunter

How is this for Gobbledygook? Your home banking access code is expired! You must change your access code at this time. Your access code: * may be between 4 and 20 characters in length * must not have been changed within the last 0 days * may not be one of 3 previously used access codes * must not repeat the same character more than 0 times * must not contain 0 characters from previous access code * must contain … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, IT, Management, Software Development | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Lean IT Systems – Not ERP

Posted on August 19, 2008 by John Hunter

I am not sure, IT needs to get lean on manufacturing [broken link was removed], does the clearest job of explaining some things, but it does state some things well: …you can see how typical offshoring doesn’t work here, as it is counterproductive to true lean manufacturing. If your plant is 8,000 miles away, you need to plan even further out, building in as much as an extra month for transoceanic shipping. Manufacturers also need to carry a larger safety … Continue reading →

Posted in IT, Lean thinking, Management, Manufacturing, Systems thinking | 2 Comments

Individual Bonuses Are Bad Management

Posted on August 7, 2008 by John Hunter

Gojko Adzic provides a nice post on Mary Poppendieck’s presentation at Agile 2008 on bonus, compensation and motivation: Paying programmers: are bonuses bad and what to do about it? In software development, it is very hard to establish the effects of individual contributions and good teamwork is key to the project. Most individual compensation schemes, according to the presentation, absorb vast amounts of management time and resources and leave nobody happy, but team compensation strategies are not easy to implement. … Continue reading →

Posted in Competition, IT, Management, Performance Appraisal, Psychology, Respect, Software Development, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Amazon S3 Failure Analysis

Posted on July 26, 2008 by John Hunter

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a service providing web hosting. The cloud computing solution has been used by many organizations successfully. However the solution has experienced some problems including failing for much of the day on July 20th. Amazon S3 Availability Event [the broken link was removed] We’ve now determined that message corruption was the cause of the server-to-server communication problems. More specifically, we found that there were a handful of messages on Sunday morning that had a single … Continue reading →

Posted in Innovation, IT, Management, Software Development | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Keeping Good Employees

Posted on July 24, 2008 by John Hunter

Understanding Why Good Workers Quit [the broken link was removed] “What do you need to want to stay?” Most managers, she acknowledges, are afraid to ask this question and that is a reason why their companies have to do plenty of exit interviews. When stay interviews are part of the culture—and this is a practice in very few companies—attrition of the people you don’t want to lose plummets. “Ask them directly: What can we do to keep you?,” urges Kaye. … Continue reading →

Posted in Career, IT, Management, quote, Respect | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Some Good IT Business Ideas

Posted on July 22, 2008 by John Hunter

Paul Graham has some excellent ideas. I have written about some of them previously: Innovation Strategy, What Business Can Learn from Open Source and Google and Paul Graham’s Latest Essay. Y Combinator, which he founded, provides seed funding. Here are some ideas they would like to fund: Outsourced IT. In most companies the IT department is an expensive bottleneck. Getting them to make you a simple web form could take months. Enter Wufoo. Now if the marketing department wants to … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Innovation, IT, Software Development | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Toyota Canada CIO on Genchi Genbutsu and Kaizen

Posted on April 24, 2008 by John Hunter

What’s driving Toyota Canada’s success? – CIO reveals all for Hao Tien, chief information officer (CIO) at Toyota Canada Inc. those two Japanese phrases – Genchi Genbutsu (go and see) and Kaizen (continuous improvement) really capture it all. … the innovation wasn’t in the technology, but in the way the various partners were brought together to agree upon processes, which were then consistently executed. CustomerOne is only project of its kind in the Toyota empire. … A computer system links … Continue reading →

Posted in IT, Lean thinking, Management, Management Articles, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Find Joy and Success in Business

Posted on April 21, 2008 by John Hunter

David Heinemeier Hansson Talk [the broken link has been removed] at Startup School 2008 (Paul Graham‘s Y-combinator school). It is helpful to appreciate the importance of some simple ideas. Working on web focused businesses people often get carried away with the huge potential and sometimes lose touch with reality. While the ideas are more obvious when looking at web related business their is plenty here for many companies (the second half might be more helpful for many). In this talk … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Deming, Fun, Innovation, IT, Management, Psychology, Respect, Software Development | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

The Defect Black Market

Posted on April 18, 2008 by John Hunter

The Defect Black Market It all started a week before, when the CTO of Damon’s midsize warehousing and transportation company in Northern California announced an innovative program to motivate employees and boost the quality of their logistics software. For every bug found by a tester and fixed by a programmer, both would get $10. Well, this doesn’t sound very well thought out. Bonuses often distort behavior. Dr. Deming was not against such targets and bonuses because he thought they would … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Deming, IT, Management, quote, Respect, Software Development | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments

10x Productivity Difference in Software Development

Posted on April 2, 2008 by John Hunter

10x Software Development The original study that found huge variations in individual programming productivity was conducted in the late 1960s by Sackman, Erikson, and Grant (1968). They studied professional programmers with an average of 7 years’ experience and found that the ratio of initial coding time between the best and worst programmers was about 20 to 1; the ratio of debugging times over 25 to 1; of program size 5 to 1; and of program execution speed about 10 to … Continue reading →

Posted in IT, Management, Performance Appraisal, Software Development | Tagged | 5 Comments

What Motivates Programmers?

Posted on February 22, 2008 by John Hunter

A fun read on What motivates programmers? I will start with a question, if you have a spare £400 in your development budget do you A) Reward your star programmer with a £400 bonus or B) Buy him a 24 Inch 1920—1200 LCD screen? If you answered ‘A’ then you need to read on. … Programmers see meetings as wastes of time. Most communication between programmers is done via email or by a quick wander to another desk to clarify … Continue reading →

Posted in IT, Management, Psychology | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Software Supporting Processes Not the Other Way Around

Posted on February 19, 2008 by John Hunter

Rental Car IT What was funny about that exercise were the looks we got from the no nonsense King of IT: “Of course, we want things to be simple and flexible — why are you bothering to tell us this?” Yet, in the next sentence, they are talking about spending 3 million dollars on a packaged application to help them with one small part of their business, rather than building it themselves (which we all thought would be cheaper but … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, IT, Lean thinking, Management, Software Development, Systems thinking | 10 Comments

Giving Away Your Service for Free on Weekends

Posted on January 28, 2008 by John Hunter

Copilot is a cool application that lets you control someone else’s computer. So you can receive technical support remotely. You let someone access your computer and copilot takes care of the sometimes very complex task of linking the two computers up (getting through firewalls, etc.). You can use it to fix your parents computer after you move away… or you can can have your kid fix your computer for while you pay for part of their college… (I am not … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, IT, Management, Systems thinking | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

IT Talent Shortage, or Management Failure?

Posted on January 7, 2008 by John Hunter

IT talent shortage, or management failure? [the broken link was removed] Is there a talent shortage? Only because employers have created it. The real shortage is in good management. Without proper seeding, feeding and cultivating, the IT community withers like any other garden. Companies are madly trying to hire skills, not talent. They want to harvest fruit overnight. Give a smart IT worker some manuals, a workstation, an objective, and a little time, and they’ll come up to speed every … Continue reading →

Posted in Career, IT, Management, Software Development | Tagged | 7 Comments