Tag Archives: business

Agile, Business

Knowledge-work, is serendipity-work

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Serendipity is core to the success of modern companies. While some may not have articulated their insights as facilitating serendipity, it was certainly what they were thinking, even if they didn’t realise it.

Enabling Serendipity

For example, Google’s 20% time, where employees can spend 20% of their time working on anything they like, has resulted in numerous “happy accidents” where pet projects have matured into fully fledged revenue enhancing products, such as gmail.

Charles Leadbeater talks of the “we think” phenomenon, where innovation occurs simply by people having access to products that give them flexibility in how they use them. This philosophy taps into the free thinking collective consciousness of the social web. The birth of Twitter is the perfect example. Hash tags, “@” mentions, retweets are all customer innovations that were subsequently added to the Twitter experience we know and love today. It’s highly likely that “@” mentions were a significant factor in boosting user engagement and hashtags are now one of Twitter’s revenue sources.

Countless more examples exist but how is this achieved and what does this have to do with serendipity?

Adrian Cockroft of Netflix explains that you can’t force innovation, you have to get out of the way of innovation. This applies to what we enable people to do with products, such as the Twitter story, as much as what people do with their 20% (or more) time.

Facilitating Serendipity

It’s not just the organisation that needs to embrace serendipity, the working environment does too. In “Designs for Working” Malcolm Gladwell highlights:

“Who, after all, has a direct interest in creating diverse, vital spaces that foster creativity and serendipity? Employers do.”

He uses Greenwich Village, where opportunities for people to meet by happenstance are rife,  as a model for the ideal work environment. Many of his ideas can be found in the forward thinking companies, I’ve already mentioned, that are breaking all the rules and being so successful as a result.

Much innovation in what we produce or even how we produce it may never have happened if they had required a typical business case or if the working environment was more like a factory-line or made up of closed offices.

The Serendipity Economy

Daniel Rasmus, the person who coined the phrase “the serendipity economy”, captures the problem with your traditional business case so well when he says:

“If the only economics you have to work with come from the industrial age, then everything looks like a factory.”

Rasmus highlights, in “Welcome to the Serendipity Economy”, the benefits of knowledge, ideas, experimentation are not immediate or predictable within a specific time-frame or quantifiable with traditional measures of productivity or returns on investment. He highlights the importance of serendipity in innovation and the power of social networking in accelerating the process.

I was talking with one client the other day about their budget approvals process. It was so heavyweight that several increments of the product could have been developed with the money spent on documenting theoretical feasibility and commercial viability.

Exploiting Serendipity

Instead, companies would be better off adopting a lean start-up model for new projects. Ensure that employees have social networking tools at their disposal. Share the ideas. Create a simple sign up page that’s sent out to employees or even the general public. Get feedback. Provide “seed-funding” to the projects that inspire the most passionate responses. Get the first few features built. See how hard or easy it is. If it works out, you’ll have empirical data to base future estimates on and you’ll have the beginnings of the product (maybe something releasable).

All this can be done with less than many large companies would have spent on writing business cases with hypothesised technical-feasibility and unproven commercial-viability. Yes, some ideas will flop, but that experience could be the very thing that inspires your biggest success.

Google, Twitter, Netflix and more show us that investing in serendipity (and talent) is key to the modern organisation’s success. It will take a leap of faith that many feel they cannot afford to take in these difficult economic times. But, to survive and thrive in the future, you have to ask if it’s a leap you can afford to not take.

Agile, Business, People, Project Management, Software Development, Software Testing

Sushi, Hibachi and Other Ways of Serving Software Delicacies

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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.

Agile

Software Teams can Jump

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For many years I’ve been coaching software teams in various things such as Example Driven Methods (xDD), including BDD and TDD; pair-programming; programming; testing; retrospectives; Scrum, kanban and various other ways of getting the most out of a development team. One thing that I notice is that while the teams are being coached, they do amazing things. They are more happy, more productive, fast to improve as if there are no limits to what they can achieve.
Michael Jordan, Blue Dunk, Lisle, IL, 1987
Then, at some point they decide that it’s time to go it alone. I always say to my clients to keep at least one day in their budget for me to go away and come back some time later. Usually within a month or two to see how things are going. Inevitably when I return, the team is doing reasonably well, but not as well as if I’d stayed involved, even if I was just popping in once every couple of weeks.

Some say that this is what the Scrum master is there for, however, I’ve noticed that this is something that the Scrum master doesn’t get to do much of as they are are often dealing with external pressures “to get things done”…

On many teams, once I move on, there is a coaching void. Despite my pleas and efforts to encourage them to at least establish a coach from someone in-house, the team is often left to just get on with it.

This isn’t a new idea. For example, Extreme Programming highlights “the coach” as a key role in the team.

In sports, teams have coaches. Have you ever heard of a professional sports team without a coach? Can you imagine a professional sports team hiring a coach for a while and then saying – “we think we’re ready to compete on our own now so thanks for your help but you’re not needed anymore”. No, I don’t think so. This is unheard of in competitive sports, yet all too common in competitive business.

Even my 12 year old son’s basketball team, the Islington Panthers, has a coach. He trains them 2-3 times per week and he (or an acting coach from the seniors) attends all of their games. In some training sessions he gets a member of the under 21s team to coach the under 13s training session – so there is always a coach even if they’re just borrowed from another of the club’s teams. Without him, do you think any of the club’s teams would make the national play-offs as they regularly do? Very unlikely.

So, competitive sports teams always have a coach. Temporary coaching in a professional sports team is almost unheard of… Sure, they could get by but would they be taken seriously? Would they be competitive? Would they save money by not having a coach or would this be an obvious false economy? What are their chances of generating sponsorship revenue if they are not winning games? What are their chances of winning games without a coach?

The same applies in software teams. For example, I worked with a client recently and helped a team of 6 people double their output in one day. They’d have to hire another 7-10 people in order to achieve that but instead, one good coach was enough.

So, if you have a professional software team without a coach, consider, are you really helping your business save money by going it alone? Or, like the professional sports team, is having a professional development team without a coach another example of a false economy.

 

Business, People

Your Company Values What?

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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:

  1. Deliver WOW Through Service
  2. Embrace and Drive Change
  3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
  4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
  5. Pursue Growth and Learning
  6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
  7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
  8. Do More With Less
  9. Be Passionate and Determined
  10. 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.

Culture

View more presentations from Reed Hastings

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.


Business, Project Management

MARTA – Risk Management… beyond mitigation

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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.