KANBAN REVEALS SYSTEMIC ISSUES AND CREATES THE OPPORTUNITY FOR CHANGE. THIS CAN BE SCARY, ESPECIALLY IN AN ORGANIZATION THAT HAS BEEN RESISTANT TO CHANGE. THERE IS A DESIRE FOR PERMISSION. AN ACT OF LEADERSHIP CAN BE THE SPARK THAT IGNITES THE NEEDED CHANGE. It is usually a manager or a team lead who first embraces change by signaling that a specific change is needed and that it can safely happen. Leadership can start a cycle of improvement that can lead to a major cultural shift.
Leadership also reflects values. We see it in the decisions managers make and in how the workers are treated. Lean encourages us to take a systemic approach to performing work and to view workers both as a part of the system and as stakeholders in its effective operation. The goal is to finish the work—and the system should support that goal in a healthy and balanced way. It is an imbalanced system that drives the workers harder and harder.
Strong leaders must make bold, risky moves that might be unpopular but ultimately are necessary for success. We can judge a decision retrospectively by looking at the outcome, but also by the congruence of the decision with the values of the organization and the integrity of the individual. The Agile movement itself has produced a number of leaders who shake things up—some for good, others not so much.
One of the founders of the Agile movement, Jim Highsmith’s first book was calledAdaptive Software Development (Dorset House, 1999). Its core idea,“inspect and adapt,” became a core value of the Agile community. Kanban has taken this idea further by suggesting that we make guided changes based on an understanding of workflow models. We experiment with small changes, keep them if they work, and discard them if they don’t. We call this an evolutionary approach to change. But evolutionary changes need a catalyst to get them started. It all begins with an act of leadership.
New Rules for Old Geeks
Friday, January 19, 2007
The challenge for us as managers is to give [the profession of] management a good name by putting in place Lean processes that facilitate rather than hinder, that deliver both productivity and work–life balance, that lead to great code and healthy coders, and that continue to delight customers without all-night code merges and death-march schedules.
THIS WINTER I’M CELEBRATING 25 YEARS IN THE SOFTWARE INDUSTRY. I’M ALSO facing the arrival of a mid-life crisis as my fortieth birthday approaches this spring. Yes, it is 25 years since a group of 14 year old schoolboys (the linked article dates from 19854) launched an advertising campaign in the classified ads in the back of Sinclair User magazine advertising games for the Sinclair ZX81. In exchange for a check in the princely amount of£3.50 we would mail you a set of listings of games written in BASIC. You had to type them in to your computer in order to play! :-O
Back in those days motivating geeks to write great software was easy—you just fed them pizza and cola and let them work all hours of the night and you didn’t worry about all that homework that wasn’t being done.
The conventional management wisdom is that the software industry is different. Software programming geeks are different. Motivating them is different. You don’t manage them. You herd them. The idea goes like this: You hire smart people, usually as young as possible and with as little social life or social skills as possible, stick them in an open-plan office, let them decorate their cubes any way they like, bring toys in to the office, provide a ping-pong table, a foosball table, a fully stocked kitchen, free juice, and a budget to order in food after hours, and then just leave them alone. The result will be fantastic innovation and don’t worry about the quality, the bugs can always be fixed in a future version. This wisdom has prevailed ever since, and here on the west coast of the USA it’s a formula that has made many executives and venture capitalists rich, so they would see little reason to change a winning formula.
But have you noticed anything recently? Perhaps when you are sitting in a meeting providing status on your latest project? Grey hair maybe? Balding heads? Bifocals?
As a manager are you noticing that staff need a lot more time out of the office f
