…or at least talk. I’m appearing at the Epicenter conference in Dublin next week. I’ve got two sessions lined up:
I’ve just finished listening to The Art of Teaching Entrepreneurship and Innovation by Tina Seelig, a podcast from Stanford’s excellent Technology Ventures Program.
One of the key points I took from the podcast came from a story where Tina had given a group of students $5 and challenged them to create as much value as possible in a set period. Those who did best were those who realised that the $5 was a constraint, not an asset and worked around it. Those who limited themselves to the question, “what can I do with $5?” didn’t do as well as the people who asked themselves “how can I generate value”.
My favourite response was the group of students who, instead of using their $5, sold the presentation slot, where they were supposed to present their results to the university, to a local company who came in and did an advertising pitch. This group realised that the assets they had transcended the obvious raw materials in front of them.
To make the point clearer, in future years Tina substituted the $5 for post-it notes or rubber bands. Whilst the results of people trying to generate value with only a handful of rubber bands was more amusing, I personally think the lesson about looking beyond the obvious was more important. But, Tina Seelig is obviously a smart lady, I’ll trust her vision.
I was talking with my friend Clarke Ching today about Kanban and pull systems in general. I came up with a metaphor that we both liked and thought I would share it.
Problem : Imagine you want to get a ball of string ( your features ) through to the other side of a funnel ( your development team ).
Traditional methods involved pushing REALLY, REALLY HARD until it goes through.
Agile and other iterative methods realise that trying to force a whole ball of string through a funnel at once is madness, so they chop the string up into smaller pieces which are easier to push through.
Pull systems, such as Kanban, change the dynamic, rather than pushing the string through, they feed the tip of the string through and then pull it as fast as they can.
Which of these is best?
Well, traditional methods often cheat by mashing some subset of the string through and declaring victory. Or by making the team ( the funnel ) enormous so that you can fit a fairly large ball of string through the hole without effort. Or by minimising the features so that they’re dealing with a tiny ball of string. Or some combination of the above. I’m not sure this is ever a good idea.
Agile works pretty well, but the chopping takes effort ( iteration planning ) and consumes time. But it does break down into nice, neat iterations which provide clear points for releases, milestones, measurement and feedback.
Kanban works pretty well too, it might be slightly more efficient than an iterative Agile approach, but the milestone and release points need to be superimposed onto it since there are no natural break points.
Lean and ToC have their place here too - tools, techniques and strategies to make the hole in the funnel wider and to make sure that the string that gets through is the right string, used as efficiently as possible. Stretching the funnel as far as possible, just as I have stretched this metaphor.
I finished off Almost Perfect this morning and I must admit I was a little disappointed by the ending. All the way through the book I’d interpreted Peterson’s actions one way, and then, in the last fifty pages he started to spout his personal philosophy and I realised that I had been interpreting things in a more charitable way than I now feel he deserved.
One of the things that irked me the most was the section where he described how the employees had been asked to work long hours, six days a week for over a year and they’d done it because they were trying to help the company. Then he follows on with complaints about people being unprofessional and visiting the doctors or the dentists during the day. He complains extensively about anyone doing anything not directly work related during business hours - down to being angry at people for showing new baby pictures to colleagues - and then spends long paragraphs describing how productive he was during his afternoon tennis games, or how much he accomplished just by sitting on the beach relaxing and thinking.
“Hi, my name’s Pete. I’m inconsistent and unreasonable.”
I think he must have taken criticism about some of this in the past because the on-line version has a number of the later pages missing. The second-hand copy I got from Amazon was the complete text and the extra light it shone was, as is the nature of light, illuminating.
I’d still recommend the book to anyone who wants to read it. One particular section near the end of the book contained a valuable lesson.
Peterson had described their problems shipping enough copies of a new version of WordPerfect. A few years later, their next major release was due to ship, in the months leading up to their IPO. The launch went off without a hitch and first month sales were at a record level. Then they died off. The next month wasn’t much better. This unexpected, and un-predicted, drop off in sales hit their IPO hard.
During analysis of the slump, they discovered that because their distributors hadn’t been able to get enough product to supply demand after the last major release, they’d over-ordered for the release of the new product. Since they’d over-ordered, they were carrying extra stock and they didn’t need to re-order. This created a month one with unrepeatable sales, making all subsequent months look bad, and months two and three were bad by any standards.
Apart from all the usual lessons about judging sales based on fulfilment of only part of the supply chain rather than completed end-to-end transactions we’re left with a crystal clear example of human behaviour.
People will guess your future performance based on your past performance. It doesn’t matter what you say or do, a man, or a company, is judged by their actions.
Next Friday, the 29th May, Clarke Ching and I are teaching a one day workshop in Edinburgh entitled ‘An Introduction to Agile, Lean and Kanban’.
We’re charging a small fee (£30) to those who’re in full time employment: really, just enough to recoup the costs of renting the room. Entry is free to those who’re currently an ‘under-utilised resource’ (HR speak for unemployed).
If anyone is interested, please contact me at rob@
One of the notions central to Lean and ToC, is that you can increase productivity by limiting the release of materials into the system.
This is quite a difficult concept to get to grips with. Intuitively, it just doesn’t seem right. Emotionally, it feels that this is exactly the opposite of what the truth should be. One of the reasons I’ve always found it so hard to keep this ideal at the forefront of my mind is because I’ve never found a way to apply it to every-day life. I’ve lived it in the business world, I’ve not lived it in my personal life. Until now …
I’m a spree shopper. I rarely buy just one of anything. If I’m going shopping for CDs, I’ll come back with three. If I go for a wander in a book shop, I’ll buy four books. DVDs .. yup, I’ll come home with a pile. But here’s the funny thing I’ve noticed. If I buy three CDs, I’ll rarely listen to them all enough to enjoy them. If I buy four films on DVD, one or two will never get watched. Being overwhelmed with choice, my mind rejects several of the options. And once I’ve rejected them .. I rarely look back. The extra CDs and DVDs I buy are, in the purest sense, waste. Worst of all, though, is my book pile.
At the moment, I have about ten or twelve books in my ‘to read’ pile. The, fascinating thing though, is that, the bigger the pile gets the less energy I have for reading. To start reading, I need to make a choice. That choice gets harder, the more options there are. And, since I’ve already read some of these books, I’ve had to reject most of the books in this pile more than once. What if I pick the wrong one? Why did I decide not to read this book last time .. I must have had a reason?
Then, when I do pick a book and start reading, my doubts start. Would one of the other books be more interesting? More informative? More fun? Better written? More up-to-date? The list of doubts piles up.
Then I start to read more than one book simultaneously and things get worse.
So, what’s the solution? Well, I’m going to control the flow of materials into the system. I’ve now got a bag, and a pile. The pile is something of a misnomer since it is a pile of one. I’ve tossed all the books I was going to read, except the one I’m currently reading and one book that I’m going to read next into a bag. The bag is not a pile, it is unordered. There is no weighting or relative importance that can be implied by position in the bag.
My new reading workflow:
I can’t explain exactly why this makes me feel better, but it does. There’s no longer this daunting meter high pile of books I’ve “got to get through”. I’ve got the book I’m reading, the book I’m reading next, and an opportunity to choose, not an obligation.
The overlap between GTD, ToC and Lean feels very strong here. I’ve always thought of GTD as Lean/Agile for one.
This feels good now, I hope it works out. I shall report back on my experiences.
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