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.