Management Improvement Carnival #125

Posted on March 10, 2011 by John Hunter
photo of cypress trees in swamp in South Carolina

Photo of Cypress Trees by John Hunter

The Curious Cat Management Blog Carnival selects recent management blog posts 3 times each month. You may submit a link to the management Reddit to have it considered for inclusion in our carnival. More photos from Cypress Gardens, South Carolina.

  • What Next? by David Ing – “The underlying problem is that it seems to come down to having to completely change the culture of an existing business. This can be done internally, and often is done by heroic souls today, but like the advice of how to eat an elephant (‘one bite at a time’) after a while anyone’s going to get pretty sick of tasting just bad elephant every day.”
  • Systems in Place to Prevent These Medication Errors? Seems Not… by Mark Graban – “We’re taught in the Lean methodology that ‘standardized work’ is not just a matter of writing procedures. We need a culture and an environment where standardized work is actively managed.”
  • Driving Out Fear and Other Similarities Between Drucker and Deming by Kelly Allan – “[Drucker] Inherent in the managerial task is entrepreneurship: making the business of tomorrow. Inherent in the task is innovation. Innovation is above all, top-management attitude and practices. [Deming] The moral is that it is necessary to innovate, to predict the needs of the customer.” (Deming on Innovation – John Hunter)
  • The second death of agile by Niklas Bjørnerstedt – “Agile should evolve, but I think it should not loose its focus on software. If you are interested in “agile” outside of software you should study systems thinking. Why reinvent the wheel? The combination of systems thinking and agile is much more potent that some new bloated variant of agile.”
  • Lean’s Fork In The Road by Bill Waddell – “They are driven by the idea that the future is unknown, but if you continually improve the processes for getting work done you will be in good shape, no matter what the future holds. Do the work well in terms of minimal waste, excellent quality, driving yourself to take the best care of customers, and things will turn out all right. Better than all right, in fact…”

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Learn by Seeking Knowledge – Not Just from Mistakes

Posted on March 7, 2011 by John Hunter

Being open to new ideas and new knowledge is what is needed to learn. Experimenting, seeking out new knowledge is even better.

You can be successful and see an even better way to do things and learn from it. This seems the best way to learn to me – not to just learn from mistakes. Of course this means your goal has to be improvement not just avoiding more mistakes than before.

Your actions are based on theories (often unconsciously): and learning involves improving those theories. Learning requires updating faulty ideas (or learning new ideas – in which case ignorance rather than a faulty theory may have lead to the mistake). Encouraging people to learn from mistakes is useful when it is about freeing them to make errors and learn from them. But you should be learning all the time – not just when you make mistakes.

You can be also be wrong and not learn (lots of people seem to do this). This is by far the biggest state I see. It isn’t an absence of people making mistakes (including carrying out processes based on faulty theories) that is slowing learning. People are very reluctant to make errors of commission (and errors of commission due to a change is avoided even more). This reluctance obviously makes learning (and improvement) more difficult. And the reluctance is often enhanced by fear created by the management system.

It is best to be open and seek out new knowledge and learn that way as much as possible. Now, you should also not be scared to be wrong. Taking the right risks is important to improving – encouraging creativity and innovation and risk taking is wise.

Experiment and be open to learn from what could be better and improve (PDSA is a great way to try things and evaluate how they work). And the idea is not to be so conservative that every turn of the PDSA cycle has no failures. In order to get significant successes it is likely you will try things that don’t always work.

The desire to improve understanding (and the desire to improve results provides focus to the learning) is what is valuable in learning – not being wrong. Creating a culture where being wrong needs to be avoided harms learning because people avoid risk and seek to distance themselves from failure instead of experimenting and digging into the details when something goes wrong. Instead of learning from mistakes people try to stay as far away from them and hide them from others. That is not helpful. But what is needed is more desire to continually learn – learning from mistakes is wise but hardly the only way to learn.

Related: The Illusion of Knowledge – confirmation bias – Management is Prediction

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Warren Buffett’s 2010 Letter to Shareholders

Posted on March 3, 2011 by John Hunter

Warren Buffett has published his always excellent annual shareholder letter. His letters, provide excellent investing insight and good management ideas.

Yearly figures, it should be noted, are neither to be ignored nor viewed as all-important. The pace of the earth’s movement around the sun is not synchronized with the time required for either investment ideas or operating decisions to bear fruit. At GEICO, for example, we enthusiastically spent $900 million last year on advertising to obtain policyholders who deliver us no immediate profits. If we could spend twice that amount productively, we would happily do so though short-term results would be further penalized. Many large investments at our railroad and utility operations are also made with an eye to payoffs well down the road.
…
At Berkshire, managers can focus on running their businesses: They are not subjected to meetings at headquarters nor financing worries nor Wall Street harassment. They simply get a letter from me every two years and call me when they wish. And their wishes do differ: There are managers to whom I have not talked in the last year, while there is one with whom I talk almost daily. Our trust is in people rather than process. A “hire well, manage little” code suits both them and me.
…
Cultures self-propagate. Winston Churchill once said, “You shape your houses and then they shape you.” That wisdom applies to businesses as well. Bureaucratic procedures beget more bureaucracy, and imperial corporate palaces induce imperious behavior. (As one wag put it, “You know you’re no longer CEO when you get in the back seat of your car and it doesn’t move.”) At Berkshire’s “World Headquarters” our annual rent is $270,212. Moreover, the home-office investment in furniture, art, Coke dispenser, lunch room, high-tech equipment – you name it – totals $301,363. As long as Charlie and I treat your money as if it were our own, Berkshire’s managers are likely to be careful with it as well.
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At bottom, a sound insurance operation requires four disciplines… (4) The willingness to walk away if the appropriate premium can’t be obtained. Many insurers pass the first three tests and flunk the fourth. The urgings of Wall Street, pressures from the agency force and brokers, or simply a refusal by a testosterone-driven CEO to accept shrinking volumes has led too many insurers to write business at inadequate prices. “The other guy is doing it so we must as well” spells trouble in any business, but none more so than insurance.

I don’t agree with everything he says. And what works at one company, obviously won’t work everywhere. Copying doesn’t work. Learning from others and understanding what makes it work and then determining how to incorporate some of the ideas into your organization can be valuable. I don’t believe in “Our trust is in people rather than process.” I do believe in “hire well, manage little.” Exactly what those phrases mean is not necessarily straight forward. I believe you need to focus on creating a Deming based management system and that will require educating and coaching managers about how to manage such a system. But that the management decisions about day to day operations should be left to those who are working on the processes in question (which will often be workers, that are not managers, sometimes will be supervisors and managers and sometimes will be senior executives).

Related: Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance. – Management Advice from Warren Buffet – Great Advice from Warren Buffett to University of Texas – Austin business school students – 2004 Warren Buffet Report
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Management Improvement Carnival #124

Posted on March 1, 2011 by John Hunter
photo of Helitrope Ridge Trail

Helitrope Ridge Trail, North Cascades National Park

The management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. Also try Curious Cat Management Articles for online management improvement articles.

  • Jerry Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret by Brad Isaac – “Think for a moment about what action would make the most profound impact on your life if you worked it every day. That is the action I recommend you put on your Seinfeld calendar.”
  • Employee Engagement by Krista Ogburn Francis – “Meaningful work. Most people want to know that their 8+/- hours of effort aren’t in vain, that their day results in a product or service they can believe in and feel proud of.”
  • Going to Gemba by Pascal Dennis – “The more time spent at Gemba, the more you know about what’s actually happening, so the less time you need to spend in meetings trying to figure out what’s going on, and the faster you’ll solve small problems before they become large business killers.”
  • The 0th Trap of Teams by Esther Derby – “The zeroeth trap of teams is calling any old group of people a team and then expecting teamwork and collaboration. “
  • More Problems is a Good Thing by Kevin Meyer – “To fix the process you must first understand the failures occurring in the process. If you focus on the person caught up in the failed process you won’t learn about many of the failures and therefore won’t have the ability to even start to fix and improve the process.”
  • Five Steps to Breaking the Multitasking Cycle by Holly Green – “research shows time and again that business leaders need long periods of uninterrupted time in order to perform at peak levels… Most important, it enables us to refocus on the high-level activities we should be doing that move us closer to our strategic goals.”
  • The Toyota Way has worked as it’s supposed to, helping the company to face its challenges by Michael Ballé – “The “problems first” spirit is still alive and well in Toyota, from the president’s comments to reactions on the floor, and as we all know, facing problems doesn’t make them disappear in the instant: it’s a long hard slog. But Toyota has expressed its challenges, and has been working at solving them.”
  • The Fine Line Between Micro-Management and Surfacing Problems by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “The problem is that you cannot manage work that you cannot see… The difference between engagement and micro-management is how management responds to this increased transparency.”
  • How to Balance Life and Work – “I want you to pause for a minute, you wretched weaklings, and take stock of your miserable existence.” Nigel Marsh paraphrasing Saint Benedict.

Related: Blame the Road, Not the Person – management and leadership quotes – photos of North Cascades National Park

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Nigel Marsh: How to Make Work-Life Balance Work

Posted on February 25, 2011 by John Hunter

“I want you to pause for a minute, you wretched weaklings, and take stock of your miserable existence.” Nigel Marsh paraphrasing (or quoting, I can’t find the source though) the advice that Saint Benedict gave his startled followers.

I wrote some about focusing on your whole life recently: Work and Life.

Related: Medieval Peasants had More Vacation Time – Positivity and Joy in Work – We don’t Have to Accept Despair – The Importance of Management Improvement

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Management Improvement Carnival #123

Posted on February 21, 2011 by John Hunter

The Curious Cat Management blog carnival highlights recent management blog posts 3 times each month. The posts generally focus on the areas I have focused on in the Curious Cat Management Improvement guide since 1996 (lean manufacturing, Deming, agile software development, innovation, six sigma, customer focus…).

  • Tradable Quality Hypothesis by Martin Fowler – “Instead it’s vital to focus on the true value of internal quality – that it’s the enabler to speed. The purpose of internal quality is to go faster” (add I believe better reliability – John)
  • Lean Mindsets for Healthcare by Mark Graban – “Problem solving, leadership, and kaizen can’t be done effectively from an office or conference room… Instead of fighting the same fires each and every time, it’s time to focus on improving systems and processes.”
  • Working smarter by Gabriel Weinberg – “By planting a lot of different seeds, you are spreading your risk a bit hoping that some of them will blossom, or more often than not, prompt you to think of new related or combined efforts that eventually turn into something meaningful.”
  • The Fine Line Between Micro-Management and Surfacing Problems by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “The difference between engagement and micro-management is how management responds to this increased transparency.”
  • Toyota’s Recall Crisis: What Have We Learned? by Jeffrey Liker – “We also learned that the NHTSA knew all along that the only problems were floor mats and sticky pedals, but they had to go ahead with the NASA study to convince members of Congress who believed electronics were the cause of sudden acceleration despite a total lack of evidence to support that belief.”
  • What’s Next for the Agile Manifesto by Dennis Stevens – “We need to learn how to do a better job of defining value and aligning the cadence across the organization and improving the flow of value from concept to delivery.”

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Management Improvement Carnival #122

Posted on February 10, 2011 by John Hunter

The management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. Since 2006 the carnival has focused on finding interesting posts for managers on improving the performance of organizations (lean manufacturing, Deming, agile software development, leadership, systems thinking…).

  • Slow and Steady, and Routine by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Truly internalizing behaviors and skills cannot be done all at once. It takes repetitive practice, which cannot be compressed into one single experience.”
  • Scott Heiferman looks back at Meetup’s bet-the-company moment – “This is going to sound terrible, but the thing I would have done differently is frankly, to have respectfully listened to everyone but, not taken the complaints too seriously.”
  • Why Do Some Testers Find The Critical Problems? by Michael Bolton – “Testers, to be successful, must be given the freedom and responsibility to explore and to contribute what they’ve learned back to their team and to the rest of the organization.”
  • Lean Lego Game – 4 Rounds to Successful Lean Training – “Covering many Lean concepts including waste (the seven wastes), inventory buffers and kanban, kaizen and workcells, it’s perfect for facilitating your own Lego session, whether you’re implementing Lean in software development or on a manufacturing shop floor.”
  • The Hole in the Soul of Business by Gary Hamel – “Apple is in the beauty business. It uses its prodigious software and design talents to produce products and services that are aesthetic stand-outs. There are many within Google who believe their company is in the wisdom business, who talk about raising the world’s IQ, democratizing knowledge and empowering people with information. Sadly, though, this kind of dedication to big-hearted goals and high-minded ideals is all too rare in business.”
  • Why Don’t We See More QC Circles? by Jon Miller – “The lean community seems to be largely rediscovering ideas that were developed 100 years ago, abandoned, adopted, rediscovered, abandoned and discovered yet again. Perhaps QC Circles are the next thing for lean?”
  • Thinking about Moving to Management by Wally Bock – “Are you willing to make decisions and be accountable for the results? Leaders take the blame and share the credit. Are you OK with that? Do you enjoy helping others succeed? It will be your primary job…”
  • Continual Learning by John Hunter – “Look at people like Ackoff and Deming. They knew more than pretty much anyone about management. Yet both continued learning until the day they died. They were quick to credit others. They were quick to challenge people but also had an obvious respect and compassion for people.”
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Management Improvement Carnival #121

Posted on February 6, 2011 by John Hunter

This edition of the Management Improvement Carnival is #121 (editions 119 and 120 were the annual 2010 blog reviews part 1 and part 2). Also try Curious Cat Management Articles for online management improvement articles: you can subscribe to an RSS feed for management articles now.

  • Managing Nerds – “Until you’ve experienced the solving of a seemingly impossible problem, it’s hard to understand how far a nerd will go to protect his problem solving focus and you can help. The road to either High is a mental state traditionally called the Zone. There are three things to know about the Zone: 1. The almost-constant quest of the nerd is managing all the crap that is preventing us from entering the Zone as we search for the Highs. Meetings, casual useless fly-bys…”
  • Jeffrey Liker on Toyota’s Challenges and His New Books by Mark Graban – “Toyota didn’t react very quickly because the engineers in Japan didn’t see these problems as defects with the car. Engineers in Japan are pretty isolated from the gemba and they don’t understand how Americans would use the car… ‘The ultimate root cause was not listening to customers well enough and they took too a long time to investigate and respond.’ That was the problem they needed to solve.”
  • What being in a band taught me about management by Neil Johnson – “Limit work in progress – Getting a song to a performable state is massive step. It brings the group together and feels like progress. It’s better to have three presentable songs than nine nearly finished ‘things’, not least because it then provides a means for feedback from outside of the group.”
  • We Need Less FAKE Lean, More FAIL Lean by Jon Miller – “What we need is less FAKE lean and more FAIL lean: the type of lean that stretches, bends and turns things inside out to the point where were are forced to look at the mental, business and organizational models and challenge our dogma that what worked in the past is still valid today.”
  • Experience agile in an accelerated form and focus on innovation at the same time by Yuval Yeret – ” During the sprints we worked on elaborating our ideas, using Agile User Stories and techniques such as story mapping, as well as started implementation and delivery of “Working Software”. It proved a real challenge to deliver on such short sprints, especially for those of us who didn’t have a somewhat formed idea at the starting point.”

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Assigning Story Points to Bug Fixes

Posted on January 27, 2011 by John Hunter

Agile software development has teams estimate the effort to deliver requests from the product owner. The estimates are done in points (in order to abstract away from hours – as estimates have plenty of variation in how long they will really take). Then the teams capacity (velocity) is determined based on looking at how many points they complete in a “sprint” (a set length, often 2 weeks). Then the product owner can prioritize all of the requests with an understanding of how much effort each is estimated to take and the historical capacity of the development team.

I think it is good to add point estimates to bugs. It may well impact how bugs are prioritized – if it is known to be simple a program manager may say, yes I want these 6 first then… If then know the first 2 are likely to take a bunch of time, they may think, ok, I am not going to get these 4 for awhile… They might just accept that, or may wish to shift more hours to bug fixes this sprint. Or they might say well if it is that big an issue maybe we could do x instead…

In practice I rarely has us estimate emergent bugs we are going to fix in the current sprint, but we do it for bugs that are in the backlog. I sometimes will have us estimate a current bug if I think it is may take significant time – to help determine what we really want to and what the impact may be on the teams output for the sprint. We do not have many emergent significant bugs so it isn’t much of an issue for us.

We do have more difficulty accurately estimating bugs, compared to new stories, but we still provide actionable estimates (they are not perfect, but are usable).

We use agile software development principles at work and they have been a great help in letting us be much more effective than we had been previously. The discussion of priorities and delivery expectations are much improved by such methods I believe. And unrealistic expectations can be reduced. For various reason, without adopting some form of agile/lean… software development methods the common pattern I see is software developers being frustrated by unrealistic expectation of their customers (project managers…) being frustrated by failure to communicate what it is reasonable to expect and status updates. A big part of this is the failure to acknowledge variation (and the related difficulty in estimation). Agile/Kanban… are systems that take the variation into account, and therefore the variation is dealt with as natural instead of leading to bad outcomes for developers and their customers.

Response to Should story points be assigned to a bug fixing story.

Related: Future Directions for Agile Management – Mistake Proofing Deployment of Software Applications – Checklists in Software Development

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Supporting Free and Open Source Software

Posted on January 24, 2011 by John Hunter

Gabriel Weinberg (founder of the great Duck Duck Go search engine) proposed starting a FOSS Tithing movement. Many benefit greatly from free and open source software like: Ruby on Rails, Linux (my favorite version Ubuntu), WordPress, Apache, Ruby, Perl, Nginx, Phusion Passenger. As well as other related efforts Electronic Frontier Foundation, creative commons, PLoS.

If we can get people to contribute to this idea that would be great. I have had curiouscat.com give some money to continue the development of the open source software we use, and the related efforts.

The contribution of time is often even more important (and for some people, easier). Those individuals and organizations that are giving back in this way are key to the community benefits. Open source software is a great example of systems thinking and taking a broader view of how to succeed. And for managers interested just in their organization allowing programmers to contribute to open source projects can be very beneficial building their intrinsic motivation by contributing to something they care about them and having them learn through such participation.

My goal is to give back more. But so far that goal has been held back by my failure to better achieve the goal to increase revenue at curiouscat.com. I am going to make a new effort to have curiouscat.com give back more going forward.

I get so much from great open source software like Ruby, Rails, Ubuntu, Apache, MySQL along with lots of less well known software, that it is important to me to contribute to sustaining the environment that will continue to produce such great software.

Related: Open Source Management Terms – What Managers can Learn From Open Source Project Management – Open Source: The Scientific Model Applied to Programming – Google Summer of Code

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