Archive for category Business
Sushi, Hibachi and Other Ways of Serving Software Delicacies
Posted by AntonyMarcano in Agile, Business, People, Project Management, Software Development, Software Testing on July 1, 2011
Let’s say you own a restaurant. Quite a large restaurant. You’ve hired a manager to run the place for you because you are about to take the fruits of your success and invest in opening three more around the country. You leave the manager with a budget to make any improvements he sees fit.
After being away for a few weeks, you return to your restaurant. It’s very busy thanks to the great reputation you had built for it. The kitchen has some new state of the art equipment and you can see that there are a lot of chefs and kitchen-staff preparing meals furiously. Obviously, with a restaurant this full you have to prepare a lot of meals.
Too many chefs?
But then, you notice that there are only a few service staff taking orders and delivering the meals to the customers. Tables are waiting a long time for their meals. You notice the service staff spending a lot of their time taking meals back to the kitchen because they have gone cold waiting so long to be served. You also overhear several customers complaining that the meal they received was not the one they ordered, increasing the demand for the preparation of more meals. You call the manager over and ask him what’s going on… he says “because we need to invest more in the kitchen”. You wonder why. He tells you “because there are so many meals to prepare and we can’t keep up”.
At this point, it’s quite obvious that the constraint is not through lack of investment in the kitchen. Instead the lack of investment is in taking the right orders and getting the meals to the customers. To solve this, I think most people would increase the investment in getting the order right and in how the meals get to the customer not by investing more into the kitchen.
Obvious, right? Despite this, time and again, I see organisations happy to grow their investment in more programmers writing more code and fixing more bugs and all but ignore the end-to-end process of finding out what people want and taking these needs through to working capabilities available to the customer. Business analysis, user-experience, testing and operations all seem to suffer in under investment. If it takes you four weeks to write some code for several new features and then another four weeks for that to become capabilities available to your customer, hiring more programmers to write more code is not going to make things any better.
Sushi and Hibachi
So, how would you advise the restaurant? In the short term, you can get some of the chefs to serve customers while you hire more service staff. Another solution is to invest in infrastructure that brings the meals closer to the customer, such as in hibachi restaurants where the chef takes the order and cooks the meal at the table or in sushi restaurants where meals are automatically transported via conveyor belt.
In software teams, we can bring the preparation of features closer to our customers. We can involve a cross-functional team in the conversation with the customer (such as the chef being at the customer’s table). We can also automate a large proportion of the manual effort of getting features from a programmer’s terminal into the hands of the customer (as in with the conveyor belt). And, there is so much we can automate.
Integration, scripted test execution, deployment and release management can largely be automated. Since speeding up these tasks has the potential to increase the throughput of an entire development organisation, it seems appropriate to invest in these activities as we would in automating any other significant business activity – such as stock-control or invoice processing.
Cooking for ourselves
Why not ask a good number of our programmers to take some time out from automating the rest of the business and automate more of our own part of the business? Taking this approach seems to be the exception rather than the rule. I see organisations having one or two dev-ops folks trying to create automated builds; and similar number of testers, with next to no programming experience, trying to automate a key part of the business – regression testing. And then asking them all to keep up with an army of developers churning out new code and testers churning out more scripted tests.
Serving up the capabilities
Instead, let’s stop looking so closely at one part of the process and look more at the whole system of getting from concept to capability. Let’s invest in automating for ourselves as much as we automate for others – and let’s dedicate some of our best people to doing so.
In short, it’s not just about the speed at which we cook up new features. It’s as much about the speed at which we can serve new, working capabilities to our customers.
Old Favourite – More Sharks and Delaying Critical Mass
Posted by AntonyMarcano in Agile, Business, Business Analysis, Old Favourites, Project Management, Software Development, Software Testing on June 7, 2011
This article originally featured on my old blog on 19th January 2010.
In a previous post I talked about Critical Mass of software. I showed how an ever-increasing cost of change resulted in it becoming more economical to completely rewrite the system than to enhance and maintain the original.
I explained how this could be avoided by using practices that sustain a consistent and flat cost of change. I also mentioned that you could defer reaching critical mass. Some teams find it difficult to get the time to do this because “the business” always has “more important” or “higher-value” things on their backlog.
What are the implications of reaching critical mass? Well, depending on what the software does and whether the rewritten version still has to do all of those things, it could cost millions… or more.
Presented with the situation that the product could reach critical mass within a year – costing millions to replace – do you think “the business” would start to think it is worth investing in reducing the cost of change? Obviously, I would advise teams to avoid this situation in the first place:
The reality for many teams I’ve encountered is that they don’t feel empowered to push back on the business’ demands for that next feature in half the time it takes to do it properly. If we could present back the impact of that choice as shortening the time to Critical Mass and bringing about costs to replace the software far in excess of the value gained by delivering that feature a month early then perhaps the business would be better informed.
A big visible chart on the wall, showing the estimated point at which Critical Mass was reached could play a big role in getting the business more interested in sustainable change, or at least inspire a conversation on the subject.
Convincing “the business” to invest in some remedial refactoring or allowing three times as long for each feature to facilitate enough remedial refactoring for each new feature and refactoring-as-we-go for the new feature might be easier if we could represent this idea visually:
The problem with this idea is how do we credibly determine when Critical Mass is going to be reached? Many experienced practitioners could probably reasonably accurately estimate when that was going to happen purely on gut feel but this would be torn to pieces by many product managers. I’ve not solved this problem yet because doing this would require a mathematical model, determined by empirical data.
Perhaps someone will take inspiration from the ideas in these blog posts and find a solution. Perhaps someone has already done this or maybe this is an idea for a future PhD I might undertake? Maybe someone else will take inspiration from this article and undertake that work before I do. If so, they’re welcome to (with due attribution where applicable of course 
I think it is possible, however, to come up with a simple model based on the average complexity per unit of value (assuming that the team is using value and complexity). Trending this and keeping an estimate of a complete re-write up to date might allow the simple charts above to be maintained along side release-level burn-down charts.
These ideas are still in their infancy for me. Has this problem been solved already? If not, I encourage others to explore my hypothesis and help take it from just an interesting idea to something more useful.
Old Favourite – Sharks, Debts, Critical Mass and other reasons to Sustain Quality
Posted by AntonyMarcano in Agile, BDD/ATDD, Business, Business Analysis, Old Favourites, Project Management, Software Development, Software Testing on June 7, 2011
This article originally featured on my old blog on 18th January 2010.
A while back I tweeted about critical mass of software:
Critical Mass of Code – past which the changeability of the code is infeasible, requiring that it be completely rewritten.
An elaboration of this might be:
Critical Mass of Software: the state of a software system when the cost of changing it (enhancement or correcting defects) is less economical than re-writing it.
This graph illustrates a hypothetical project where the cost of change increases over time (the shape of which reminds me of a thresher shark):
Note:The cost of a rewrite gradually grows at first to account for the delay between starting the re-write and achieving the same amount of functionality in the original version of the software at the same point in time. The gap between the cost-of-change and the cost-of-rewrite begins to decrease as the time it takes to implement each feature of comparable benefit in the original version grows.
It was just one of those thoughts that popped into my head. I soon discovered that critical mass of software is not a new idea.
One opportunity that I feel organisations miss out on is that this can be used as a financial justification for repaying technical debt, thus preventing or delaying the point at which software reaches its Critical Mass, or avoiding it altogether.
Maintaining quality combined with practices that keep the effort involved in completing each feature from growing over time can defer critical mass indefinitely:
Note: The cost of a rewrite is slightly less at first assuming that we are doing a little extra work to ensure that we get the infrastructure we need up and running to support sustainable change (e.g. continuous integration etc.)
This flat cost of change curve is one of the motivations of many agile practices and software craftsmanship techniques, such as continuous integration, test-driven-development, behaviour driven development and the continuous refactoring inherent in the latter two. A flat cost-of-change trend is good for the business, as they have more predictable expenditure.
The behaviour I’ve noticed with some teams is to knowingly accrue technical debt to shorten time to a near-future delivery in order to capitalise on an opportunity and then pay it back soon after:
This certainly defers reaching critical mass but it doesn’t prevent it.
Unfortunately, I see more teams taking on technical debt and not repaying it (for various reasons, often blamed on “the business” putting pressure on delivery dates).
If we had a way of estimating the point at which we’d reach critical mass, we’d be able to compare the benefit of repaying technical debt now in order to avoid or delay the cost of a rewrite… or even better, demonstrate the value of achieving a flatter cost of change.
I’m not sure that we have the data or the means of predicting it, but perhaps these illustrations of a hypothetical scenario will help you explain why sustaining constant quality, automating repeatable tests (or checking as some prefer to call it) wherever technically possible and, on those occasions when we do need to make a conscious choice to compromise quality to capitalise on an opportunity, that the debt is repaid soon after.
One company I know reached this point a couple of years ago and embarked on a department wide transformation to grow their skills in agile methods so that they not only re-wrote the software but could also avoid ever reaching critical mass again. A bold move, but one that paid off within a year. Even for them, they’ll need to avoid complacency as time goes on and not forget the lessons of the past. Let’s hope they do.
Financial Rewards & Poorer Performance
Posted by AntonyMarcano in Business, People on February 17, 2011
I like the message in this post by Johanna Rothman on Hiring Technical People. Johanna voices her disagreement with something said to her at a conference:
“I don’t think people have the same passion about their jobs. They just want more money.”
Johanna goes on to say:
I, of course, disagreed. The reasons people want money is that organizations have broken the implicit social contract to be fair with their employees [...] That means there is strictly a financial contract between the employee and the organization.
There is, however, even more to this topic that I’d like to share.
The Business Incentive
There is a business incentive to paying more per employee that gets hidden by typical “per-unit” cost-budgetting.
Chapter 2 of Dan Pink’s book “Drive” references research (funded by the United States Federal Reserve Bank) that showed that monetary incentives for cognitive tasks will actually have the opposite of the desired effect – perhaps because cognitive capacity is wasted on thinking about what happens if the criteria for the financial incentive are met/not met.
So, financial incentives actually result in poorer performance for cognitive tasks.
Instead, Dan recommends paying enough that money just isn’t something that the employee ever thinks about. This frees up cognitive capacity to focus on the work at hand – thus increasing performance.
As a result, the total output of fewer employees who are paid more can be greater than having more employees who are paid less. This assumes that all the people in these two situations are of comparable levels of talent.
Add to this the fact that a company that does this will not only attract and retain the best talent, the performance gains through increasing the organisation’s “talent-density” can be even greater!
Even if your total salaries budget was the same in both cases and you just had fewer employees, each paid more but delivering the same as the scenario with the larger number of employees – there are still savings to be made on accommodation costs, management overheads etc.
Understanding Drive & Motivation
In Part Two of Drive, Dan Pink explains the three elements of motivation:
- Autonomy
- Mastery
- Purpose
Many of Johanna’s suggestions mostly fall into the “Mastery” category – conferences, book-allowance, etc. Some of her suggestions imply autonomy - such as more flexibility in working hours and holiday/vacation.
A great example of this is Netflix. They started with old-fashioned holiday limits, but eventually…
…some employees recognised that this arrangement was at odds with how they really did their jobs. After all, they were responding to emails on weekends, they were solving problems online at home at night. [...]
Since Netflix wasn’t tracking how many hours people were logging each work day, these employees wondered, why should it track how many holidays people were taking each work year?
Netflix no longer tracks holiday time taken by their employees. Despite this, Netflix offices aren’t deserted with everyone on a permanent holiday and its people have made Netflix so successful that they (arguably) played a role in driving a much larger, more well established provider of blockbuster movie rentals to bankruptcy.
Dan delivers some compelling arguments that motivation and getting the best performance from people comes from giving people autonomy, the opportunity to master what they do and a clear purpose (beyond just making a profit for their employer).
Choosing the right incentives
We can take Dan’s “Three Elements” to inspire ideas about what incentives will motivate our people. Or, we can take these ideas completely to heart.
Rather than telling our employees that they have a book allowance and a conference/workshop budget and so on, we could simply give individuals (or teams) a “Mastery” budget and give them autonomy in how they spend it. Or, we could just pay it directly to the employees (like many companies do with a car allowance) and trust that they’ll spend it wisely.
Realistically, there may be taxation benefits to not giving the money directly to the employees. It may also offer more flexibility, say if a team, wanted to combine some of their budget for coaching or bringing a trainer in-house rather than individually going on the same public course.
The biggest fear some will have is that employees will abuse this freedom. If this happens, we can consider the misspent cash as an investment in discovering the people in our company who we might not want in our company anymore.
Some may argue that this is too much of a risk, but you know what they say… the greater the risk, the greater the rewards.
Many of the things I mention in this post can be heard in Dan Pink’s 10 minute talk on “Drive”…
Old Favourite: Adaptive Budgets? “Pull” the other one!
Posted by AntonyMarcano in Business, Old Favourites, Project Management, Software Development on December 13, 2010
This was originally posted on my old blog on 10th April 2010
Recently, I wrote about my views on using and estimating with task-cards. I highlighted that tracking progress with burn-up/down charts showing effort completed/remaining is not a true measure of progress, especially if we subscribe to the idea that we measure progress with working-software.
I also highlighted how tasks “horizontally slice” a “vertically sliced” story.
This inspired an article on infoq by Mark Levison. Since its publication, there have been several comments.
There are some specific points I’ll be answering on infoq, but some general points are more easily answered here…
True measures of progress
One of the key points I was trying to make in my first post (linked to above) is that if “working software” is our measure of progress then tracking task completion is not consistent with that.
One of the problems task-hours are trying to solve is to provide a visible indication of progress. It’s also something that many people find easier to understand. The idea of relative-points estimation seems to baffle many people when they first encounter it.
In my original post (linked above) I referenced an approach, blogged about by Jason Gorman, outlining a solution to providing a visible indication of progress that is compatible with the idea of measuring progress with working software. It also works more seamlessly with the solution of measuring throughput trends of the team (e.g. with story points) so that the team can estimate how much can be done in the next iteration.
Value Points & Task Points
Value points were mentioned in the infoq comments. Value points are solving a different problem and don’t help the team estimate what can be done. The value of a story isn’t an indication of its complexity. Value, combined with complexity points, can help determine priorities. Arlo Belshey explains some interesting views on this.
Prioritisation is, in my view, one of the few reasons to place some sort of estimate on value & complexity. Unfortunately, it seems to be often used to establish a contract with the team for when something will be done and apply pressure when the estimates turn out to be inaccurate.
Non-estimating pull systems
My preference is to use such estimates only for prioritisation… after that, things just take as long as they take. There is some benefit in tracking accuracy trends so that we can learn from them, however, spending too much time on these things simply slows down the process of getting things done. Interestingly, I have not yet seen the business be quite so passionate about evaluating whether their value estimates were accurate when the product makes it to the real world. Funny that.
Instead, I prefer to leave estimation behind once we’ve prioritised things and pull stories or customer valued work items through the system without using previous estimates to predict their completion date. With the way that most budgets are determined and allocated, this idea isn’t compatible with the way much of the business world works. For pull systems that eliminate estimation as a means of predicting the future to work (such as Kanban), we need a more adaptive approach to budgetary spend. Business needs to find a way to adapt budget allocation more frequently, perhaps as frequently as monthly, perhaps more frequently still. The business now needs to look at how it can respond to change rather than focus on following a budget-plan.
Business-world: now it’s your turn
Budget holders now need to be more agile. We, those who evolve the implementation of the ideas of the business, have responded to their demands to be able to respond to rapidly changing markets and provide that competitive edge. For the more mature implementation teams, the hindrance now is no longer how we make the products, but the business culture of inflexible and predictive budget allocation.
Your Company Values What?
Posted by AntonyMarcano in Business, People on December 12, 2010
I’ve recently given some time to think about company values on behalf of a client. In my research, I have looked through the stated corporate/business/company values of several organisations, I’m not convinced that many of them are really values.
I’ll take Zappos company values (as they were at the time of writing this) as a perfect example of what I’ve been seeing:
- Deliver WOW Through Service
- Embrace and Drive Change
- Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
- Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
- Pursue Growth and Learning
- Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
- Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
- Do More With Less
- Be Passionate and Determined
- Be Humble
I love the spirit of these statements and Zappos have a culture that seems to reflect them. These statements, however, are not really ‘values’. Instead, these statements are more like ‘behaviours’.
Behaviours are the things we do. Values are the things we care about.
What are the things we care about?
The things we care about are the things that cause an emotional response – such as when we get angry or frustrated at something someone does, shame at something we do or feel joy and pride when we or someone else does something.
For example, if we care about delighting our customers, we may feel frustration when we see a colleague act with apathy towards a customer complaint or we may feel pride when we or a colleague does something wonderful that our customer didn’t expect.
We may see these responses towards in our clients too. For example, if we value Compassion and Empathy and our customer intentionally delays payment because it helps with their cash-flow we may get frustrated – or if they pay well before the final due-date we may feel positively towards them. But the issue of ‘choosing the right clients’ is perhaps beyond the scope of this article.
When we see our people reacting in these ways, we know that we have an organisational culture based on shared values. We know that we care about the same things.
Why do we want ‘company values’?
For some companies, it’s more about branding – a display of the type of company they think future customers or future employees would want to buy the products of or to work with. It is something that appears on the face of the company but isn’t necessarily reflected in the actual behaviours of the people, as we can see from this article about Enron’s company values. The journalist makes the point that all company values are much the same and really are little reflection of the reality:
I know one writer who, while struggling to draft one of these corporate credos, threw up her hands in despair and observed: ”Why not just come right out and say it? ‘We will strive to make as much money as we can without going to prison.’ ”
She was joking, of course.
What I want from stating our company values is to understand what kind of company we want to be and to guide – even drive – what we do, who we hire and who we fire. I want to see that people in our organisation (and even our clients) have shared, or at least compatible, values. I want to see a negative emotional reaction to situations that go against these values and a positive emotional reaction to situations that are aligned with these values. I want to see the people I work with instinctively do ‘the right thing’ based on our shared (or compatible) values without having to be told what ‘the right thing’ is. I accept that ‘the right thing’ for one person and another may be different – and this is where shared or compatible values are the key to a consistent experience of what we do – for the people inside and outside the company.
The things we care about drive us to act, instinctively, based on the situation at hand. If our people share these values, we’ll act reasonably consistently with each other – delivering a consistent service to our customers.
A Code of Conduct?
When we list our values as the things we do there is a danger that these statements become, to all intents and purposes, a code of conduct. Why does this matter?
A code of conduct, in some ways the ‘laws’ of a company, tells people what to do and what not to do. If we need to tell our people what to do and what not to do (i.e. what is ‘the right thing’ and what is ‘the wrong thing’ to do), I believe, we are compensating for having hired the wrong people.
“Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.” – Plato
Codes of conduct are a way of constraining freedom. In a society where we have no choice as to who is a member of it, this may be necessary. In an organisation where we do have a choice over who is a member of it, the only reason we would have to reduce freedom is if we compromise on the ‘quality’ of the people we hire.
From slide 38 of this presentation from Netflix, they explain how many companies curtail freedoms as they grow and why they aim to increase freedoms. Hiring the right people is key to the success of this approach.
Many companies try to grow more quickly than they can find the right people to do so effectively. They hire the least-worst from the available candidates in order to grow quickly rather than hiring the best. Netflix have chosen to grow no faster than they can find the most talented people who share in their values.
The people in such an organisation can simply be trusted to do the right thing, in any situation, even if that situation isn’t one we’ve thought of previously. A code-of-conduct and its loopholes is then redundant.
RiverGlide Values
We spent a lot of time thinking about our company values when we first created RiverGlide. We (Andy Palmer, James Martin and I) discussed, explored and refined our understanding of what we cared about and reflected that in our stated values. We learned more as time passed. We added to them (quite recently) because we realised there were many more things that we cared about. How we state our values continuously evolves as we deepen our understanding of what matters to us and what we think differentiates us. These values are not the values we aspire to or the values we want to impose on others. They are the values that reflect what we actually care about. They are the values we see in the people we want working with us.
We originally found ourselves wording our values like this:
<the thing we care about> – <how we reflect that in our behaviour>
Now, I think we’ll be experimenting with this subtle change:
<the thing we care about> – <how it makes us feel when…>
For example:
- Trust and Transparency – We feel great when we know you trust us through our extreme levels of transparency.
- Integrity and Courage – We would be unhappy if we told you what you wanted to hear if that was not the same as what you need to know.
- Innovation and Personal Growth – We get a buzz from learning new things, developing skills, trying whacky ideas and cultivating outside-the-box thinking.
- Compassion and Empathy – We love what we do when you love what we do. We are as passionate about your people and products as we are about our own.
- Joy and Creativity – We are inspired by fun and creativity – whether it’s in what we do or what we help you do.
Behind these values is a single purpose to our company – we make things easy – hence our tag-line “flow without friction“.
Your Company Values What?
So, what does your company appear to actually value? What values does the culture of your organisation reflect through how it rewards, recognises and respects the things that people do? How do you feel when people act in a way that is aligned or against these values? How does all of this match up to what your company says are its core values?
Why does any of this matter? It matters to me because I am happier when the people I work with are happy – clients, contractors, employees and colleagues alike. It matters to me because I want to trust that the people around me will ‘do the right thing’ and that we’ll all generally agree that what they did was the right thing (even if sometimes we have to have a discussion to understand why). It matters to the people in the company because we know we’ll share in a vision of what kind of company we should be and be motivated to make it a success together – from the most skilled & experienced craftsmen to the smartest and passionate intern.
For us this was relatively easy because we figured out the essence of our core values early in the life of our company and it has formed the foundation of all our working relationships. For you, a legacy culture may not be so easy to redefine. But, if you have a vision of the culture you want to inspire in your organisation or team… If you understand what matters (or should matter) to you and your people and what will bring your company, and the people within it, success… I think you’ll have a great starting point to begin the harder task of spreading those values throughout the culture of the people in your company and teams.
My Tack on Effective Change
Posted by AntonyMarcano in Agile, Business, People, Project Management on November 11, 2010
One of the key characteristics of how we coach our clients’ teams is that we help them start from where they are and introduce small, frequent changes that help them progressively achieve their goals.
Each incremental change is driven by a problem the teams recognise they are facing. We then help to find a small change they are happy to introduce as an experiment. This change must be a solution or a step towards a solution to the identified problem. Sometimes this experiment will be limited to a single iteration. Sometimes it’s limited to a single user-story in a given iteration.
Based on the outcome of the experiment, the team decides what to do next. They may continue the experiment, introduce the change beyond the limitations of the experiment or even abandon that change and try something else.
This has two distinguishing factors.
1. Solving Problems: We focus on solving problems not introducing solutions
2. Continuous Improvement: Delivery continues, becoming increasingly productive
1. Solving Problems: For example, we’ve often been contacted to ‘introduce TDD’ or ‘transition a team to Scrum’. Usually, we find that behind these solutions are problems that our client instinctively understands are there but articulates them as these kinds of solutions. Sometimes they want to reduce the amount of re-work, or get early visibility of achievable scope within a time-constraint. Other-times it’s a solution for solution sake.
By solving the problems the people in the organisation recognise as holding them back, they are bought into each change. Sometimes our job is to help them recognise the problems. Retrospectives are a great way of achieving that.
2. Continuous improvement: When helping an organisation to solve the problems they face they expect large and significant change. Instead we help them make a continuous series of small, team-driven changes. This allows them to continue to deliver with the net effect of gradual and continuous improvements in productivity.
We generally find ourselves taking this approach because for most of our clients, big-bang change is not practical simply due to the impact on productivity. We can understand this using the Satir Change Model (explained very well by Steven Smith).
In this simplified and slightly adapted representation, you can see that with a large change there is a period of net-negative productivity. Once the improvement starts to take hold, performance increases take productivity back into the black.
On rare occasions when an organisation’s software reaches critical mass (it’s more expensive to change than to replace) big-bang changes might be necessary. We’ve worked with a client that had exactly that problem. They took the brave step of ceasing delivery while they redefined how they did things and coached their teams in how to do it. This worked out positively for them. After about 6 months of intensive coaching and 3 months of implementation they delivered a revenue generating system to replace something that had been previously worked on for 18 months and had remained incomplete.
Most organisations would find it difficult to take that step and need to continue to deliver whilst transitioning from how they work today to how they want to work in the future. It is for this reason that we find ourselves employing small incremental changes, eliminating the things that add friction to their process – one problem at a time. Doing this with small experiments helps the organisation limit the risk and achieve continuous delivery and continuous improvement.
A way of understanding how this works is with the same Satir Change Model. If we take the curve shown above illustrating big-bang change, shrink it so that each change represents a much smaller alteration to working practices and then repeat, what we end up with is a much healthier looking series of changes.
Yes, each change can slow productivity temporarily but the impact is dramatically reduced and quickly offset by the improvements gained.
The area under the graph is productivity. If the changes are small enough there is never any period of net-negative output.
Another reason this works well is that it reduces the amount of cultural resistance that you have to deal with. Instead of a lot of resistance from many people for complex reasons, you tend to have only a few people resisting the change. Because the change is driven by a need to solve a recognised problem you have more people in favour of the change. Because change is frequent, people get used to change. In fact, they become experts at it and no longer resist the mere idea of change.
Commercially, it also gives you much more flexibility and allows you to adapt your vision continuously as you learn more.
Julian Davies, a developer at one of our clients, likened this to sailing. To travel from point a to point b in sailing you do so in a series of direction changes, called tacking. This is necessary when point b is against the wind.
You could, theoretically, do this in two long legs with one direction change. However, this leaves you vulnerable to changes in wind-direction potentially taking you significantly, perhaps even catastrophically, off course. Tacking is generally done with a series of small diagonal legs where each leg allows you to adapt to the changing wind. These frequent opportunities to read the context, i.e. the wind and currents, means that we will only ever be slightly off course with plenty of opportunity to recover.
Julian likened it to agile development in general but I think it applies equally to what I’m talking about here today.
With big-bang changes, what happens when we’re in the deepest trough of the curve and an opportunity arises? It is much more difficult to change course. With small changes we can put the latest experiment on hold to capitalise on that opportunity. When the wind changes on our projects, say when someone leaves or half the team is ill with a winter flu bug, we can quickly respond to those changes.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Andy Palmer for reviewing this article and providing the snappy title.
MARTA – Risk Management… beyond mitigation
Posted by AntonyMarcano in Business, Project Management on July 8, 2010
Originally posted on my old blog in November 2009:
In a previous rant about the misuse of the term mitigate in the context of risk management I listed the following strategies (I call them MARTA) for managing a given risk:
- Mitigate – Reduce the severity of its impact
- Avoid – Don’t do the thing that makes the risk possible
- Reduce – Make the risk less likely to happen
- Transfer – Move the impact of the problem to another party (e.g. insure such as paid insurance or outsource with penalties for failure)
- Accept – Do nothing or set aside budget to cope with the impact
I recently found myself having to explain this and used the analogy of crossing a busy road with fast-moving cars. What’s the risk? Well, you might get hit by a car.
This will probably be more useful if you take a moment to think of a busy road with fast moving traffic that you know of and then use each of the above strategies to identify different ways of managing the risk. What factors would be significant in deciding on which strategy (or combination of strategies) was the way to go?
Ok, now that you’ve had a chance to think about it, here is what I came up with:
- Mitigate – Walk down the street until I can find a section of the road where there is a 20mph speed restriction. (This is mitigation because I’m not necessarily making it any less likely that I’m hit, but if I am hit the ‘impact’ is reduced – i.e. I’ll probably live – albeit with injury).
- Avoid – I could simply not cross the street, by deciding that whatever is on the other side simply isn’t that important or I could use an underground subway (which of course has other risks associated with it depending on the area you’re in).
- Reduce – Find a stretch of road where there are fewer cars – reducing the probability of being hit by a car.
- Transfer – Get someone else to cross the street, maybe someone more skilled at crossing the road than me.
- Accept – Now, if it was a busy street, I wouldn’t ‘accept’ the risk. But, if the road allowed for lots of visibility and there were very few cars and there were speed bumps slowing the traffic down to 10mph then I might just accept the risk.
The person I explained this to found this to be a useful exercise in understanding my views on risk management – beyond mitigation. Hope you find this way of explaining it useful too.
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Antony Marcano is a consultant in software craftsmanship, effective software processes, software quality and software testing. He has over fifteen years experience with... (read more)
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