Later this year I’m going to be going on a world tour to present on Lean Software Development and other uses for Lean in Information Technology. The tour will be taking me through China, where it’s planned for me to present with Martin Fowler, the UK and the US.
The details of the UK event are now online here….
Big in Japan: Lean Thinking Techniques for IT Professionals
You can register online for the Manchester and London events. Hopefully I’ll see you there…
I think this is a question on the minds of a lot of people in the IT industry at the moment. The Lean operations community have been on their journey longer than we have in IT and from my experiences at Lean 2008 I think that they are starting to really understand what Lean is all about.
So, what is Lean?
Well, it’s a set of tools (JIT, 5S, 5 Why’s…), it’s a production system, it’s a product development system, it’s a business model, it’s a mentality of continuous improvement, it’s about the ruthless elimination of waste.
Right?
I don’t think so. Of course it is all of those things but today I tend to look at these elements as symptoms of what Lean is really all about; a leadership philosophy for business and life focussed on getting the most out of people.
I’m not going to try and describe what I mean by this becasue I think Konosuke Matsushita, the founder and president of Matsushita Electric (the parent company of Panasonic, Technics and other famous brands), put it much better than I ever could in his speach to visiting European and American managers in 1979….
“We are going to win and the industrial west is going to lose: there’s nothing much you can do about it, because the reasons for your failure are within yourselves. Your firms are built on the Taylor model; even worse, so are your heads. For you, the essence of management is getting the ideas out of the heads of the bosses into the hands of labour. We are beyond the Taylor model : business, we know, is now so complex and difficult, the survival of firms so hazardous in an environment increasingly unpredictable, competitive and fraught with danger, that their continued existence depends on the day-to-day mobilisation of every ounce of intelligence.
For us, the core of management is precisely this art of mobilising and pulling together the intellectual resources of all employees in the service of the firm. We know that the intelligence of a handful of technocrats, however brilliant and smart they may be, is no longer enough. Only by drawing on the combined brain power of all its employees can a firm face up to the turbulence and constraints of today’s environment.”
Is your organisational philosophy about getting the ideas of the managers into the hands of the people or about empowering the people to lead the company?
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves” Shakespeare - Julius Caesar.
About Kent :: Kent Beck is the creator of eXtreme Programming and author of Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change
Q. What influence, if any, did the Lean revolution taking place in the automotive industry have on the development of Agile XP during the C3 project?
None. It wasn’t until a few years later that I ran into Taiichi Ohno’s book “Toyota Production System”. Bob Charette was the first person I heard make the connection between lean production and software development, but again, this was several years after the C3 project.
Q. What do you feel the current view is within the IT community at large toward Agile and Lean software development?
I don’t think there is any one reaction. I hear healthy scepticism, which makes sense given the history of inflated claims in our industry. I hope that things really can be better. I hear curiosity and a willingness to try new things. I hear resistance to change.
Q. What are your thoughts on ‘Lean Thinking’ principles and their application to software development processes?
There are at least two levels of lessons for software development in lean production. One is the techniques themselves, something I explore in www.threeriversinstitute.org/LearningFromLean.html. Many of the techniques of both lean manufacturing and lean product development suggest techniques in software development. The second level of lessons comes from Read the rest of this entry ?
A3 reports have been a favourite Lean tool of mine for a long time. The idea is a simple one… All reports should be presented on a single side of a single piece of A3 paper. The philosophy is that ‘less is more’, all the information required should be concise, anything else is just fluff.
Toyota have been applying this concept for a long time and I’ve seen it successfully adopted at a number of organisations outside of Toyota. I heard a rumour about a year ago that Toyota are moving to A4 reporting but I’m not sure in the truth behind that one.
To understand the power that this simple tool provides sit down and think about the amount of time you spend writing stuff and reading stuff. Will anyone read past the executive summary of your business case? Will your executive come back to you and say “that report’s great but could you summarise it to me in a paragraph?”. Maybe A3’s are worth a shot.
I spent Tuesday and Wednesday of last week hanging out at Lean 2008 at the Park Hyatt in Melbourne, Australia. The event was organised by Lean Enterprise Australia and they flew in some great speakers from all around the world to talk on all things Lean alongside some locals who are doing some really interesting things. I’ve had a shot at summarising the things I’ve taken away and the key points from the sessions that I attended below. I’m sure some of the numbers are incorrect but my handwriting is slow and I was under pressure!…
and the most interesting piece of information I came across was this, courtesy of Gary Stewart at Aisin…
The most interesting story I heard (and there were lots) was this one from John Shook when responding to a question on suggestion schemes. I think it says a lot about how we can encourage the right behaviours in people by creating the right system. (It’s paraphrased from Johns original response).
To encourage employees to make suggestions and implement change, an organisation introduced a $20 reward for every suggestion that was made and accepted. One employee made a suggestion that was successful and given his $20. After a few weeks it was clear to the management team that the change wasn’t working and things needed to be reverted back. So, what did they do? They changed things back and took the $20 away from the employee right? Wrong. They spoke to the employee, got him to assess the change, understand that it wasn’t working and submit another suggestion to fix it, which was to change it back in this case, collecting another $20 for his new suggestion.
It’s all about people and creating systems for them that encourage and re-enforce the right behaviours.
John Shook is one of a handful of the most prominent experts on Lean outside of Toyota in the World. I believe John was the first westerner to work for Toyota in Japan and John was the only US guy on the NUMMI transplant initiative, a joint venture between General Motors and Toyota. John is the author of a number of books, including the definitive book on value-stream mapping ‘Learning to See’.
John spoke about his time on the NUMMI initiative and the lessons he learned. When the NUMMI project started the GM facility in the US that was used had the worst quality and productivity of all GM plants, which is saying something! Toyota took over the management from GM but Read the rest of this entry ?
About Mary Poppendieck:: Mary is a former programmer and IT manager turned Lean Software Development Evangelist, Author and Trainer. Mary, with her husband Tom, is the author of the award winning books Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit
Q. What does the term Lean software development mean to you?
Lean software development is applying lean principles to software development.
Q. What level of improvement have you seen from teams transitioning from traditional waterfall software development models to Lean software development models?
I never even heard of the word waterfall until 1998 when I retired from my job at 3M and got involved in my first government software project – which was “waterfall and proud of it”. It was also pretty much of a disaster. So it’s hard for me to think of “waterfall” as traditional. And in fact, I haven’t seen many waterfall models in action – except for that one I ran into in 1998. So I’m not quite sure how to answer your question. I can say that when organizations start using a disciplined test-driven development process combined with short iterations, they often report 30-50% defect reduction and dramatic productivity improvements. But productivity is tricky to measure – so I won’t put a number on that.
Q. To date within the IT community we have applied Lean to the software development process to gain efficiencies. Do you feel that there is an opportunity to use this knowledge to work with our business partners to apply Lean principles to improve the processes that our applications automate?
I find it often works the other way around. People with lean operational processes need software to support the process and urge the software development group to become lean so as to provide them with better support. In fact, I did a workshop at a bank which processed mortgage papers. The paper handling process was vastly improved through lean techniques, but the teams were unable to get software changes they needed – even though their process was driven by workflow software. In another case, an insurance company, the IT department was unable to support business teams. At both companies, I suggested that a couple of developers simply be assigned to each lean team to make the software changes the team needed in a Just-in-Time manner.
Q. Hand-offs are viewed as being wasteful. There is often a hand-off from business to IT but there is also a common hand-off from IT to operations and support. Do you have any suggestions on how this second hand-off can be handled?
Both handoffs are equally harmful. The very words “business” and “IT” indicate that people think Read the rest of this entry ?
Last week Google released their 2007 financial results. The headline numbers go like this…
Revenues :: $US16.5B
Net Income (read Profit) :: $US4.2B
Ouch! I had to try to put that into context so I did a bit of research and if Google was a country it would have the 90th largest economy in the world (based on the World Banks 2006 GDP table) and if I was to stack all that cash up in $100 bills it would be about the same size as the sky scrapers in the city here in Melbourne. It would buy 2,426 Ferrari F430’s (MSRP $US173,079), if you’re that way inclined.
The most interesting thing was this performance was poorly predicted by the ‘top analysts’ at the investment banks. On average they predicted around 15% better performance.
I love the business model behind AdSense and AdWords because it scales so well. I’ve worked with a few companies that have sold advertising online and more often than not they have charged a fixed price. The beauty of the pay per click and impression model is how nicely it scales. Well, it’s certainly got Microsoft’s attention with them launching a $US44.6 bid for Yahoo! This comes shortly after Microsoft beat Google in a bidding war and bought a 1.6% share of FaceBook for $US240M. This values FaceBook at somewhere around $US15B. Why? Well, if the technology can be developed then FaceBook has the potential to be able to deliver exceptionally targeted advertising; something people will pay big bucks for.
It’s going to be really interesting watching the actions of Google, Microsoft, FaceBook and others in 2008. In front of a backdrop of economic mumblings about a potential global recession they are going to fight for the advertising dollar on the online battle field and we’ve all got a front row seat.
For some background information check out my previous posts on Push Systems and Pull Systems.
In both the business operations and software development worlds it is often desirable to transition from push processes to pull processes; pull processes better support concepts like just-in-time and have long since been proved superior in most contexts within the business world. There are often a number of barriers to this transition, fortunately the Lean operations community have developed a number of tools and techniques to make this transition simpler….
Impediments to Pull Systems
(1) End-to-end processes (value-streams) are usually really big. In a manufacturing context trying to move production, supply chain, distribution, sales and marketing etc. to a pull system in a single step is a very big task.
(2) Book-keeping practices have often been created for the old push system so as well as the physical impact of the change there can often been an economic impact and a short term hit on profitability. For example, automotive companies historically register a sale with the general ledger at the point of gate release (where the car is flagged as finished at the end of the line). This was a big barrier in moving to a true pull system but removing it and registering a sale at the point a vehicle is sold (!) results in a large short-term negative impact on the books.
(3) Cultural barriers; people are naturally resistant to change.
It is important that when we try to introduce new processes we understand and register the barriers we are dealing with and plan to tackle them.
Dealing with our Impediments
(1) When we introduce Lean processes to business operations environments we can make use of supermarkets and minimum/maximum levels to manage the transition Read the rest of this entry ?
Here’s the second installment in my series of interviews with interesting industry luminaries. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to put some SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) questions to Rand Fishkin. What’s SEO got to do with Agile & Lean software development? Quite a lot in my opinion. Agile & Lean teach us to focus on the customer and I use a lot of principles from user-centred design to support this principle in the way I work. SEO strategies support this model of thinking and encourage us to not only to think about our customers but their behaviours and how to use this information to access them better. User-centred design helps us to build web apps that our target users want and can use; SEO helps us get it to them…
For an intro to SEO check on my previous post on Search Engine Optimisation.
About Rand :: Rand Fishkin is the CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz, one of the most visible companies in the search marketing world. Rand is the author of ‘Beginners Guide to Search Engine Optimisation‘. Rand is a key SEO thinker and has presented to Google, Microsoft and Stanford University on SEO and Internet Marketing.
Q. What do the terms ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ and ‘Internet Marketing’ mean to you?
It’s funny, but over time, I’ve come to think of them almost interchangeably because of how much broader Internet Marketing (and every related discipline) crosses over into SEO.
In the most basic sense, Search Engine Optimization is simply the practice of improving a website or webpage to receive more traffic through search engines. That alone is somewhere that I think some folks get confused - it’s not about rankings, it’s about traffic. If you concentrate on trying to achieve rankings for a few specific keyphrases without considering the larger view of traffic, you’re missing out on a huge slice of the pie.
Internet Marketing to me refers to literally any activity involving marketing and the web, and in many ways, that means virtually every form of marketing because of how incredibly reliant the US has become on integration with the Internet. Ten years ago, Internet Marketing was a tiny subset of the greater practice of drawing attention and customers to a brand, today, it’s virtually impossible to separate from even the most old school forms of marketing - even your local pub is likely as not to carry a sign in the window saying “people love us on Yelp” or “voted top bars at Citysearch.” The field of web marketing has come a long, long way.
Q. What innovations do you see taking place in the SEO area in 2008?
I know some of the tool and measurement innovations we’re up to at SEOmoz are pretty revolutionary (although I’m not sure they’ll be ready in 2008 and I’m not really at liberty to discuss our secret stuff). Beyond that Read the rest of this entry ?
I’ve added a reading list to the site accessible through the main navigation in the top bar. The list isn’t intended to be a comprehensive list of all things Agile and Lean. Instead I’ve tried to capture what I think are the most valuable books around on the topics covered in this site. Here’s a direct link ‘Agile & Lean Software Development Reading List‘. Happy reading…
