You'd think with all my video game experience that I'd be more prepared for this

Taiichi Ohno re-interpreted

2009-11-21T21:13:00.002+11:00

Via the Limited WIP Society blog,

Keith Swenson provides a nice summary of how Taiichi Ohno's "Toyota Production System: Beyond Large Scale Production" provides lessons to the context of software development.

Grady Booch on Design Patterns, OOP, and Coffee

2009-11-01T10:14:00.002+11:00

Via Josh Price's tweet,

InformIT has an interview with Grady Booch by Larry O'Brien with a number of choice quotes:

"Most [UML] diagrams should be thrown away, but there are a few that should be preserved, and in all, one should only use a graphical notation for those things that cannot easily be reasoned about in code."

"... the code is the truth, but it is not the whole truth ..."

"The most important artifact any development team produces is raw, running, naked code. Everything else is secondary or tertiary. However, that is not to say that these other things are inconsequential."

"... while code is king, one must realize that it is also a servant, for it in the end must serve some constituency, deliver some measurable value."

"Design for design's sake is meaningless; code for code's sake may be fun but it is also meaningless."

One-eye person galloping a horse through your workspace

2009-10-26T09:50:00.003+11:00

I remember a quote from one of my Lean Sensei's that the standard for Visual Factory effectiveness was that a one eyed person could gallop a horse through the plant and at the end be able to tell you what is going on in that plant. It should be that obvious.

from Six Sigma vs Lean. What's the difference?

10 steps to resist unwanted influences

2009-10-23T19:20:00.002+11:00

Just about finished reading The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil which is an excellent book by Phillip Zimbardo of Stanford Prison Experiment fame. Most of the book is about how we as humans tend to succumb to situations created by a system. This is interesting enough but given my interest in Positive Psychology, I'm actually more interested in when someone doesn't succumb so I liked the 10 steps to resist unwanted influences:

"I made a mistake!" - encourage admission of our mistakes
"I am mindful" - pay attention; don't go on auto-pilot
"I am responsible" - take responsibility for one's decisions and actions
"I am Me, the best I can be." - do not allow others to deindividuate you
"I respect just authority but rebel against unjust authority."
"I want group acceptance, but value my independence."
"I will be more frame-vigilant" - who make the frame becomes the artist, or the con artist
"I will balance my time perspective" - don't become trapped in an expanded present moment
"I will not sacrifice personal or civic freedoms for the illusion of security"
"I can oppose unjust systems"

Pictures from Agile Australia 2009

2009-10-20T09:15:00.002+11:00

Josh Price has posted some pictures from Agile Australia 2009. It starts with the back of my head...

Looking for "walk the board" standup experiences

2009-10-19T09:52:00.004+11:00

I'm planning a rewrite of my "It's Not Just Standing Up" paper ("It's Still Not Just Standing Up") and one key difference is that I want to focus on the "walk the board" or "story-focused" style standups more.

If you've tried this "new style" of standup, I'd like to talk to you about it. Post a comment here or e-mail me at j.c.yip@computer.org.

How does it compare to the 3 questions style? Quickness, energy, supportiveness, self-organisation?
What is better? What is worse? Any key points or gotchas?

In case you don't know what I mean by "walk the board" standup, here are a few references:

The movie of dangerous ideas

2009-10-18T18:02:00.003+11:00

At the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Dambisa Moyo said that she wanted to see more movies that showed Africa in a positive light. This is to undermine the "soft bigotry of low expectations".

I actually thought about this and I figure I'd share my semi-random thoughts.

Okay, so first let's do an action-adventure blockbuster, not a drama or documentary. We've had enough of those.

Imagine a future Africa where China and India are the main trading partners (reflected by distribution of extras in scenes), someone like Dambisa Moyo is doing lecture tours about what do about a collapsed US, someone like Christopher Hitchens is doing lecture tours about how some religion (not Christianity which is as obsolete as ancient Greek religion) is poison.

Let's go with a buddy movie with one main character African and the other Chinese. Professions would be something like a bond trader, nuclear engineer or something that seems fantastic now but is matter-of-fact then. So the characters would rant about their work (Vince Vaughn style) in the same manner one would expect of any other job.

Male or female doesn't really matter as long as the actors can pull off the role. Surrounding environment demonstrates a very equal distribution of gender in all roles in a matter-of-fact style. Not explicitly emphasised.

The attitude of all the characters and the way the movie is presented must act as if this idea that Africa is a second-class world citizen is unthinkable. There is just a matter-of-factness of African economic power.

I'm also thinking matter-of-fact Wing Chun and parkour skills. Nothing glamourised or special about it. Why? Because it would be cool.

The plot would send the heroes across the continent with obligatory expanse shots of the wonder of Africa, etc. So this means a treasure hunt / conspiracy genre. Most scenes though would be urban within green cities (obviously as this is a future where we're still alive).

100 million should do it. At most a couple hundred million. Any takers?

Value, Problem Solving, Human Development

2009-10-18T17:14:00.006+11:00

Kenji thinks the heart of Lean is "Think for yourself in your context" and I would agree. So what happens if we actually do that?

Ignore the Agile manifesto, ignore Lean principles. Clear your mind and just consider what you actually see and have seen. What's there? What are the core problems that need to be addressed?

For me there are three major themes:

Insufficient organisational understanding of value from the perspective of the final customer (aka consumer). If this knowledge ever exists, it tends not to survive hand-offs.
Generally poor problem-solving and decision-making approaches. Expensive decisions are routinely made with insufficient knowledge. A common example is a an incorrect technical architecture decision causing significant cost and schedule increase to the project (and all subsequent projects).
Insufficient focus on developing people due to the talent myth. Most places will claim to value people but won't have any visibility of their people's capabilities, their motivations, their passions nor will they have any deliberate structures to reliably develop people. This is because most places still believe that skill is due to inherent talent versus hours and hours of dedicated practice and development.

A more pithy way of summarising this is Value, Problem Solving, Human Development.

I'm not sure this is where I'll end and I'm sure that when I study this more closely, this model will change.

What do you see?

The next time someone says you can't build skyscrapers that way...

2009-10-18T13:56:00.002+11:00

Beyond pointing them to how skyscrapers were built before the Great Depression (see the Poppendieck's new book), also point them to the Lean Construction Institute and Target-Value Design:

Rather than estimate based on a detailed design, design based on a detailed estimate
Rather than evaluate the constructability of a design, design for what is constructable
Rather than design alone and then come together for group reviews and decisions, work together to define the issues and produce decisions then design to those decisions
Rather than narrow choices to proceed with design, carry solution sets far into the design process
Rather than work alone in separate rooms, work in pairs or a larger group, face to face

Some religion and logic quotes

2009-10-18T13:03:00.003+11:00

Recently read Breaking the Spell and Crimes Against Logic, and found a few amusing and some insightful quotes:

"Those to whom his word was revealed were always alone in some remote place, Moses. There wasn't anyone else around when Mohammed got the word, either. Mormon Joseph Smith and Christian Scientist, Mary Baker Eddy, had exclusive audience with God. We have to trust them as reporters - and you know how reporters are. They'll do anything for a story." -- Andy Rooney in Sincerely, Andy Rooney

"The Pope traditionally prays for peace every Easter and the fact that it has never had any effect whatsoever in preventing or ending a war never deters him. What goes through the Pope's mind about being rejected all the time? Does God have it in for him?" -- Andy Rooney in Sincerely, Andy Rooney

"When I was a child, I used to pray to God for a bicycle. But then I realized that God doesn't work that way -- so I stole a bike and prayed for forgiveness" -- Emo Phillips

"Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things - that takes religion." -- Stephen Weinberg

"Whenever conviction grows in inverse proportion to it's justification, we have lost the very basis of human cooperation" -- Sam Harris

"Capitalism may indeed exploit the workers, but you can't show this simply by spelling profit 'exploitation'" -- Jamie Whyte

"The idea that sincerity may substitute for reason is founded on an egocentric attitude toward belief: that what I believe is all about me, not about reality" -- Jamie Whyte

The right story to tell about climate change

2009-10-18T12:01:00.003+11:00

Via the Living Climate Change blog,

Drew Jones gives a great presentation about climate change at TEDx Asheville. Get this guy to an official TED.

Technical Debt quadrants

2009-10-17T12:18:00.002+11:00

Martin Fowler blogs about quadrants for technical debt: reckless/prudent and deliberate/inadvertent:

Popcorn kaizen vs life-and-death kaizen

2009-10-17T12:03:00.004+11:00

Jon Miller blogs about Taiichi Ohno's distinguishing "kaizen by inspiration" vs "life or death kaizen".

Taiichi Ohno explains that the type of kaizen that you do when the survival of your company depends on doing kaizen is the most important kaizen. As the term kaizen becomes more popular, Ohno observes that people do kaizen that don't really need to be done.

I would agree with Jon and the commenters that so-called "popcorn kaizen" should not be ignored completely. It allows people to practice as well as allow everyone to engage. However, I would agree with Ohno, that the life-and-death stuff is more important, usually more difficult, and hence has a tendency to be avoided.

Productivity is not the primary goal

2009-10-17T11:14:00.002+11:00

Alan Shalloway blogs about increasing ROI:

Let's first recognize that productivity is not actually a primary goal. [The primary goal] is an attempt to maximize the delivery of value to our customers (internal or external).

3 distinct dimensions of processes

2009-10-17T09:05:00.005+11:00

Allan Shalloway asked Don Reinertsen about the predictability of software development processes and the use of feedback. Quite a sophisticated response if you're interested in this sort of thing.

The gist of it:

I do not believe that there are two triads: defined process, fully-determined output, use no feedback; and undefined process, unpredictable output, use feedback. I consider it more useful to treat these attributes as three distinct dimensions:

1. The degree of process definition.
2. The randomness of its output.
3. The amount of feedback that the process uses.

Problems I know you have

2009-10-13T11:20:00.001+11:00

Problems I Know You Have

View more presentations from Jason Yip.

UK Lean Conference 2009

2009-10-09T16:22:00.007+11:00

I recently attended the UK Lean Conference 2009 and here are my observations and thoughts...

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General theme of focusing on value rather than waste, that waste is not as useful a metaphor for software development. If you focus on value then waste drops out as a side-effect.

My thought: The reason why there is so much talk about eliminating waste in Lean manufacturing is because there is more opportunity in removing waste than there is in optimising value-adding activity. Focusing on value to force out waste seems to be another way to looking at the same issue.

I agree that a better approach to thinking about waste in software development is to ignore the traditional manufacturing categories and simply look at our context and think for ourselves. If patterns emerge, they should be our own, not translations.

----

Chris Matts made a statement asking why would we share knowledge as having exclusive knowledge provides competitive advantage.

My thought: We share knowledge because it is important to society and it challenges us to improve

----

This is something that I first heard from Rich that IT is usually in a unique position of having visibility of the entire value stream. I consider it an accidental visibility. Does this mean that IT should take responsibility for value streams? Probably not but an effective IT organisation should try to encourage that visibility and management to the rest of the organisation.

----

There are two types of value streams in software development. One where the unit of value is implemented customer value. One where the unit of value is knowledge. We need to pay attention to both.

----

Front-loading knowledge is not just about the problem space, but also the solution space.

----

Don Reinertsen gave an example about how smaller batch design document review was better than doing it all in one shot.

My thought: Are you really an engineer if you believe that reviewing a document is equivalent to reviewing a design? That's what popped in my head but I'm thinking about my context (software) and it may not hold for the one he's thinking of (hardware).

----

Paraphrasing David Andersen (imagine strong Scottish accent)... Use a time-based cadence when coordination/transaction cost is high, otherwise use event-based triggers.

So for example, I might have event triggered retrospectives and event triggered story prioritisation meetings... unless it's too expensive to coordinate like that, in which case we might schedule it weekly, etc.

----

There's a general theme that people need to understand their own context, which I agree with. However, from my experience, the problems aren't actually that unique.

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Alan Shalloway on Creating a Model to Understand Product (and Software Development)

If you ask most teams how long it would take to rebuild the product from scratch (with no changes in features), you usually get a number that is 25% of the original time. This suggests that 75% of the time is spent figuring out what to build.

Software development tends to have more market risk than technical risk. I immediately thought of ESBs when he said that but he's probably correct.

3 types of value:

delivered value
improving delivery
understanding customer value

From the practitioner reports, he noticed that there's a common theme where because teams focused on process, not people there was less of a climate of fear and therefore the teams moved faster to a culture of continuous process improvement.

My thoughts:

Expose knowledge first -> improvement

People make poor decision not out of spite but out of ignorance. Therefore improve knowledge by exposing information and you should tend to see better decisions being made.

Don't worry about transformation, just help people see.

----

Jeff Patton on Lean Product Discovery

Internal customers => "caged"

External customers => "free range"

Jeff showed some shots from Florence of how even sculptors iterate on designs using soapstone before going to marble.

Mentioned "storyotypes" which I have not ever encountered before even though it's been around for a few years.

Instead of using % done on features which incorrectly implies that everything must be built, instead assess the releasability of features using grades (i.e., A+, B-, C, etc.)

Someone distinguished between positive iteration (learning something) vs negative iteration (already learned but knowledge didn't stick)

"It's a prototypes until it ships" -- paraphrasing Alan Cooper

"The idea of high fidelity and low fidelity in prototypes is silly. As far as I'm concerned there's only right fidelity and wrong fidelity." -- paraphrasing Bill Buxton

----

People talk about software not being X or Y with the implication that there is nothing to learn from X or Y.

Note that Toyota is not a grocery supermarket and yet a supermarket inspired kanban.

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John Seddon

Only the predictable is preventable, trying to prevent the unpredictable causes chaos

Model the Check. A different way of presenting PDCA to focus on gather knowledge before creating a plan. Really this is just clarifying what PDCA is supposed to be.

Culture is a product of the system.

Study the system (IT = system condition)
Improve the design of the service
Pull IT into the design

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Phil Badley on Business Improvement Through Transformation

Train for demand, not for role.

Focus on knowledge, not performance.

Don't sell, don't push => generate curiosity (this is the same message as Seddon which is unsurprising since Vanguard was consulting with Phil)

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Don Reinertsen on 2nd Generation Lean Product Development

There are no bad tools, just bad times to use them.

If your approach is based on facts and the facts change, your approach automatically changes.

----

Random thoughts:

Where does the demand for certification come from? Why?

Elitism is morally and practically wrong.

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Kenji Hiranbe on Kaizen at Toyota

People are the most effective vehicle of knowledge.

During the discussion, Martine Devos was concerned about all the managers (actually improvement team members) monitoring and hanging around the worker who was part of the work cell experiment. Someone pointed out that this wasn't oppressive but was in fact a demonstration of an obvious support structure that we typically do not see in organisations. That team is there to support the worker, not to tell her what to do. Kenji also pointed out that everyone in the factory were part of the same village so everyone pretty much knew each other and there was inherent trust that may be atypical for most organisations.

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Hal Macomber on Target Value Design

I always thought the Lean Construction Institute was about custom houses but it turns out it's about much larger construction projects like oil refineries and hospitals.

"Separating planning, execution, and control is bullshit"

The schedule doesn't authorise work; someone needing something authorises work.

Make commitments at the last responsible moment. This is a refinement over the previous "decide at the last responsible moment"

Referenced Fernando Flores and the importance of deliberately building trust.

If you give me an open field, I'll do half-ass planning.

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Marc Baker on What is Distinctive about Lean?

Nothing much here that I wasn't already aware of except that 1 vial of HIV is worth 10 million GBP. I'm assuming there's something particular about how the vials are prepared.

----

Hal Macomber says that if the client wants a "low-key transformation" then he'll refuse to engage because those will fail.

John Shook on culture change at NUMMI

2009-10-09T16:17:00.000+11:00

John Shook writes about NUMMI and culture change. I've excerpted some of my favourite sections below:

Define the things we want to do, the ways we want to behave and want each other to behave, provide training, and then do what is necessary to reinforce those behaviors. The culture will change as a result.

...

A cornerstone of Respect for People is the conviction that all employees have the right to be successful every time they do their job. Part of doing their job is finding problems and making improvements. If we as management want people to be successful, to find problems, and make improvements, we have the obligation to provide the means to do so.

...

"You intend to give these workers the right to stop the line?" they asked. Toyota’s answer: "No, we intend to give them the obligation to stop whenever they find a problem."

...

Being very smart, young GM managers, they had a ready response whenever Mr. Uchikawa would ask them to report on how things were proceeding - "No problem!" The last thing they wanted was their boss sticking his nose into their problems. Finally Mr. Uchikawa exploded, "No Problem is problem! Managers' job is to see problems!"

...

Perhaps most importantly, could it be that GM's sense of its very purpose has been utterly different from Toyota's? The question of "What are we here for?" is an important one for an organization, and one that receives remarkably inadequate attention. I suggest that the difference in purpose between GM and Toyota can be summed up simply: Are we here to survive to make money or make money to survive?

Some Lean terms clarified after reading Lean Lexicon

2009-10-08T09:30:00.001+11:00

Recently read the Lean Lexicon, 4th Edition and noticed a clarification and a phrase I haven't really encountered that much:

Cycle Time = time it takes to go through a single process
Production Lead Time = time it takes to go through the entire value stream

Process Village = grouping activities by type rather than in sequence (aka physical layout based on functional speciality rather than by process or product)

Agile Australia 2009 on next week

2009-10-07T18:28:00.001+11:00

Agile Australia 2009 is on next week.

As mentioned earlier, I have a speaker discount code good for $500 (vs normal price of $800): 2323

Two primary tasks for managers

2009-09-25T10:29:00.000+10:00

Managers have two primary tasks: (1) get the people who work for them to take initiative to solve problems and improve their own work, and (2) align the work they do to provide value for customers and prosperity for the company. The manager gets this done by taking initiative to learn and improve, to build processes that enable improvement and problem solving, and to develop subordinates and others through mentoring.

-- John Shook

And that's just the summary... noticed this as the keynote description for the Lean Manager's Conference.

No need to learn... I'm certified

2009-09-24T08:39:00.000+10:00

Mark Graban asks for opinion on Lean certification. I find this interesting since this debate also exists with Agile certification, specifically the value of Certified ScrumMaster.

One of those mentors of mine from my GM days is looking to switch companies. Yes, a great Lean guy at GM -- he was hired in from the Toyota supply based and he's done great work in GM. I was surprised (and somewhat appalled) that he emailed me asking about certification.
Any company who looks at his resume and talks to him and STILL wants certification... that's probably a company for him to stay away from. A company like that doesn't get Lean, I'd say.

In the comments, Mark Welch shares a great story:

He was at Toyota and his sensei wanted to train him on problem solving. Steve said there was no need to train him because he was a CERTIFIED 8D problem-solver. So, Steve worked on solving the problem but wasn't having success, so each time he'd talk with his sensei, the sensei would beat him over the head with, "Ah, but Steve-san, you CERTIFIED!"

It's not about the board

2009-09-16T09:33:00.000+10:00

Lee Fried at DailyKaizen blogs about visual management boards:

The board is simply a tool to help them as a team get better every day. The board helps the team get clear about what the plan is for the day, what the expectations are for each step in the process and when things don’t go well what problems got in the way. The board does not set the expectations for performance nor does the board cause the problems within the process. It simply makes them visible. Leaders still need to lead.

There is no room for royalty in the pursuit of excellence

2009-09-16T09:29:00.000+10:00

Bill Waddell on No Privileged Class in Excellence:

If everyone in the organization carries equal value - and they do in terms of all having to contribute to make the whole organization succeed, there should be one policy - you stay at the same hotels whether you are an entry level engineer or the CEO. Everyone gets liquor and golf, or no one does; everyone flies on a private jet, or the company doesn't need one. There is no room for royalty or a privileged class in the pursuit of excellence.

Agile Australia 2009 speaker discount code

2009-09-16T08:24:00.000+10:00

I'll be speaking at Agile Australia 2009 and they've given me a speaker discount code to pay only $500 for both days (vs $800 normally).

If you follow my blog, I'll consider you part of my network. The code is 2323.