Jiri’s Notepad

This is a follow-up to Lean v. Agile.

Most of what I read about Agile and Lean is coherent and relatively believable, but I still can’t get rid of a feeling that there is something wrong. When I dug deeper, I then realised that the key sources of my cognitive dissonance (apart from over-generalisation and over-zealous marketing) is the fact that

1. Their benefits of these methods are poorly formulated and
2. The benefits of across-the-board implementation probably do not stack up if you judge it by implementation difficulty

But I am getting ahead of myself. To understand whether Lean and Agile are worth the effort, means understanding cost, benefits and limitations.

Case 1: Agile
To understand how is the business benefit a problem in the case of Agile, let me play out a scenario of me going to one of my senior IT execs asking for sponsorship for an internal project to drive Agile into some parts of our business. The situation is imaginary, but is likely to have happened if I tried to do something like this in one of my gigs during last 2-3 years.

Sponsor: “So what is this Agile thing about?”

Me: “It’s a reshuffle in our delivery process. We’d be basically using a kind of a  ‘Just in Time’ and make our delivery process smooth and produce a lot less documentation”.

Sponsor (looking at me with expectations): “and that would give us?”

Me (channelling David Nicolette): “Our customer will like the incremental delivery and demonstrations of working, value-add software, starting with the most valuable features as defined by the customer. From the earliest iterations we will demonstrate working software to their customer. Our customers have never received results that good from traditional method.”

Sponsor: “That sounds good in theory and I can see how architects would like that, but I am not entirely convinced if business would really see this as a major breakthrough. Sure, the responsiveness is an issue, but when push comes to shove, getting the new customer management system and cleaning out the duplicates in asset data is likely going to bea much higher priority. Money speaks you know and these two things will generate lots of revenue and lower costs.”

Me: “Ehm, um”

The problem is that if you prioritise a wholesale internal process change against delivery of new business capabilities (or an improvement of existing ones), it is typically business capability that wins over internal process. Having said that, there are definite situations where quick and adaptive delivery of new business or IT capabilities is critical. The only question is which one are these. And this will be constrained by the fact that some activities will be inherently difficult to make agile because of capacity, contractual, commercial or plain physical limitations. This means that the right questions relative to Agile arenot if it is worth it but,

• What are the niches in which delivery of small and frequent iterations are indeed business critical rather than desirable
• Which IT delivery activities can be realistically turned agile without impacting dependent activities

Case 2: Lean

Lean is a slightly different story. When compared with Agile, adoption of Lean in manufacturing industry shows  business benefits that would make my execs listen rather intently. For instance if you interpreted some of metrics quoted in Cliff Ransom’s A Wall Street View of Lean Transformation, you could surmise that in the context of an in-house IT organisation it could help to increase total output by 12% to 15% without related increase in cost.

That looks appealing, at least until you find out this  issue of Strategy+Business with Booz&Co consultants saying:

Lean manufacturing may not be rocket science, but implementing it is like advanced rocket science. There has been no shortage of initiatives intended to revive established manufacturing locations in North America and Western Europe. But the failure rates for plant turnaround in these areas are striking. Few manufacturing professionals today have any difficulty describing their vision of how excellent factories should operate. They are highly knowledgeable about the leading manufacturing techniques. Knowing the theory is one thing, of course; making it work in practice is quite another. Despite the fact that practically all of the relevant elements have been public knowledge for nearly 20 years, few brownfield plants have successfully made the transition to lean manufacturing.

So in case of Lean, the question worth looking at are:

• Do the factors that generate the kind of benefits Lean manufacturing companies benefit from apply to IT?
• Would implementation of Lean in IT be more or less difficult than in manufacturing?
• Is partial implementation of Lean in IT feasible and what kind of benefits it would give you?

If you find the above remotely interesting, stay tuned as the follow-up posts that I have in progress.

I received and started reading The Affluent Society this week and although I still reserve my opinion on the book, the first chapter is so great I thought it is worth writing up. As someone who has been always quite strong on following his own way, I can relate too well to its subject of conventional wisdom. Even if its language is a bit dated, it is pretty much on for modern social and business life of 2009 . If Galbraith was a cartoon strip writer rather than an economist, we might have had Dilbert 30 years earlier! Anyway, below are some most pointed quotes from the book:

What people proclaim and what they really mean

At the same time … originality remains highly acceptable in the abstract. Here again the conventional wisdom makes vigorous advocacy of originality a substitute for originality itself.

Why people don’t get tired of conventional wisdom

There are many reasons why people like to hear articulated that which they approve. It serves their ego: the individual has the satisfaction of knowing that other and more famous people share his conclusions. To hear what he believes is also a source of reassurance… Further to hear what one approves serves the evangelizing instinct.

In some measure, the articulation of the conventional wisdom is a religious rite. It is an act of affirmation like reading aloud from the Scriptures or going to church.

Becoming a pointy hairy boss

The high public official is expected, and indeed is to some extent required to expound the conventional wisdom…Expounding of the conventional wisdom is the prerogative of business success.

How conventional wisdom dies

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events. The fatal blow to the conventional wisdom comes when the conventional ideas fail signally to deal with some contingency to which obsolescence has made them palpably inapplicable… At this stage, the irrelevance will often be dramatized by some individual. To him will accrue the credit for overthrowing the conventional wisdom and for installing the new ideas. In fact, he will have only crystalized in words what the events have made clear.

Why is conventional wisdom to the society

Few men are ever unuseful and the man of conventional wisdom is not. Every society must be protected from a too facile flow of ideas. In the communist countries, stability of ideas and social purpose is achieved by formal adherence to officially proclaimed doctrine. In our society, a similar stability is enforced far more informally by the conventional wisdom.

Benefits of peddling conventional wisdom

Nor is it supposed that the man of conventional wisdom is an object of pity. Apart from his socially useful role, he has come to good terms with life. He can think of himself with justice as socialy elect, for society in fact accords him the applause which his ideas are so arranged to evoke. Secure in this applause, he is well armed against the annoyance of dissent. His bargain is to exchange a strong and even lofty position in the present for a weak one in the future.

Images courtesy of Wikipedia & Ol.v!er

Happy new year to you all. I am continuing with the Best Of theme and today I am moving on to books.

If you measure the quality of a book by how much it changes the way you think or do things, I was lucky to find some truly excellent books. Deciding which one were the best ones was not easy as there were quite a few that had a bit of the ‘my life will not be the same again’ quality, but here it is.

Stephen Clarke: A Year in the Merde

This is a hilarious, and politically incorrect view on French (and British) cultural stereotypes. If you live(d) in France, work with French or even like the country, read the book for your amusement and education. Everyone I spoke about it (regardless their nationality) agreed that it is both extremely funny and at the same time a factual description of many cultural quirks of a Parisian life.

Nassim Taleb: The Black Swan
It would have been enough to read the Black Swan if only for the fact that it foretold the last year’s financial crisis. Yet, Nassim Taleb went a step further and this book gives  a treatment of the subject of predictability (or a lack of thereof) in everyday life and puts up a straw man of a philosophy enabling you to act in a positive manner in a world where ‘noone knows nothin’. Whereas the Black Swan is slightly more applicable to business and investment domain, it is worth checking out his previous book, Fooled by Randomness, which deals more with personal implications of the uncertainty and over-abundance of data.

Michael Pollan: The Omnivore’s Dilemma

What Taleb does for finance and unpredictability, Michael Pollan does for food. Whether you are vegetarian or eat burgers, you will find this book fascinating. The book will make you pause, more than once, to reflect about what you eat and how.

Samuel Hayakawa: Language in Thought And Action

Despite a book on language may seem boring, its subject is something extremely important. Words give us a filter through which we see the world around us. They colour perception with emotions. They enable us to distinguish lie from the truth and give us a windows into the inner world of others’. Their skilful use makes some people charismatic and turns others into spin-doctors. The book paints you the basics of what Samuel Hayakawa describes as ’science of how not to be a damn fool’, explaining the basics of what different usage of words do to you. Overall it is a great self-defence manual to all kind of mischief in the media and a guidebook to a better and fairer use of words.

Other noteworthy books I read in 2008:

• Tom Peters: Brand You 50:
• Darren Brown: Tricks of the Mind
• Andrew Austin: The Rainbow Machine
• Keith Johnstone: Impro
• Stevens, Brook, Jackson & Arnold: Systems Engineering: Coping with Complexity
• Womack & Jones: Lean Thinking