Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Information about information
I liked this post, Information about information, from a few days ago by Seth Godin. One of the challenges that my team is working with right now is figuring out how to take the huge amounts of data that we generate and create actionable information. We're making progress, but there is still a huge amount of data that doesn't get reviewed in a timely manner. Sometimes it's weeks before we realize that the automated tests have actually found a bug. If we don't look in the correct time scale it appears to be noise in the system, but if we look graph out a couple of months of results onto a single page, sometimes a pattern leaps out.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Standards, measurement, autonomy, improvement
I was reading a post today on Gemba Panta Rei: Igor Stravinsky Agrees: Standards Enable Creativity
My favorite line was actually a quote from Taiichi Ohno, the "father" of the Toyota Production System.
"Where there are not standards, there can be no improvement."
It got me thinking about the resistance I've run into over the years in various attempts to standardize and measure the work people do in developing and testing software. I've assumed that a lot of the resistance was based on fear. People are afraid if they are measured they are going to fall short. Which leads to lots of conversations about how hard it is to measure what developers and testers do.
The most successful measurement/improvement efforts that I've been part of have happened in places where there is a high trust environment. Senior management was able to start that they wanted to standardized definitions of work and measure things so that they could make the case for more resources. Because they had built up enough trust, they were believed. Or at least believed enough that no one sabotaged the measurements.
I wonder how much of the resistance was also about autonomy? People value being able to work in a particular way--usually the way that they have been working, which feels comfortable and familiar. The best success I've seen with this was at a start-up, so there were not already established ways of doing things that people were invested in. At other places I've seen HUGE resistance from people who have been working in a particular way for a long time and don't want to move to something different.
But it's really hard to improve if you keep doing the same things the same way. The claim "we just need more resources" doesn't fall on receptive ears at the exec level if you aren't making improvements.
My favorite line was actually a quote from Taiichi Ohno, the "father" of the Toyota Production System.
"Where there are not standards, there can be no improvement."
It got me thinking about the resistance I've run into over the years in various attempts to standardize and measure the work people do in developing and testing software. I've assumed that a lot of the resistance was based on fear. People are afraid if they are measured they are going to fall short. Which leads to lots of conversations about how hard it is to measure what developers and testers do.
The most successful measurement/improvement efforts that I've been part of have happened in places where there is a high trust environment. Senior management was able to start that they wanted to standardized definitions of work and measure things so that they could make the case for more resources. Because they had built up enough trust, they were believed. Or at least believed enough that no one sabotaged the measurements.
I wonder how much of the resistance was also about autonomy? People value being able to work in a particular way--usually the way that they have been working, which feels comfortable and familiar. The best success I've seen with this was at a start-up, so there were not already established ways of doing things that people were invested in. At other places I've seen HUGE resistance from people who have been working in a particular way for a long time and don't want to move to something different.
But it's really hard to improve if you keep doing the same things the same way. The claim "we just need more resources" doesn't fall on receptive ears at the exec level if you aren't making improvements.
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