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Product Development Page 21

In our last post we talked about three authors whose work give good insight into systems thinking. I want to thank everyone that commented on that post. I’m glad you appreciated it. If any of you don’t know how to reach us and want to provide feedback, you can reach us at info@eacpds.com, or you can message me on my Twitter account @systhinking, or you can simply leave a message below.

The positive feedback from the three books we recommended led us to do another recommendation. These books are on subjects of knowledge work, knowledge management, and knowledge workers themselves.

The first of three authors I would like to recommend is Peter Drucker — probably the most prolific business writer of the 21^st century. Just before his death Druker published his final book titled Management Challenges for the 21^st Century. He called the primary challenge of the 21^st century is increasing the productivity of knowledge workers. He has a chapter inside that book devoted specifically to that topic. Very easy and good reading; easily absorbed.

Druckers work is followed up by the work of Dan Pink who wrote the book Drive. Drive talks about motivation of the knowledge worker. He reinforces the believe of Deming and Drucker that the traditional carrot and stick motivators are not only ineffective for knowledge works, but they’re actually counter productive and cause a reduction in productivity.

The third author I’d like to recommend is Thomas Davenport. He’s really taken the baton from Peter Drucker in the elaboration of the motivation and management of knowledge workers. Davenport has two very good books. One is Thinking for a Living and the other is Working Knowledge. These two books very carefully layout what constitutes a knowledge worker and what constitutes knowledge work. He talks about the distinctions between data, information, and knowledge. He starts making the management of knowledge as a system very clear. In his books he also emphasizes the inclusion of humans in a knowledge management system. Knowledge management has been a stumbling block for most companies in the 21^st century. It’s because we address it with technology solutions alone. Davenport points out that pure technology is not enough — that knowledge exists within the minds of human beings and to move to a pure technology solution – and exclude human beings – is to move away from a real knowledge management system.

In conclusion, the environment for knowledge workers and the knowledge management system are both systems that require very careful systems design.

Contact us to learn more about how Systems Thinking and the application of our Product Development Operating System can help your organization become more efficient, productive, innovative, and competitive.

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We’ve been discussing systems and systems thinking, and a number of you have requested recommendations of some books. So first of all for those of you who may be new to this video series, systems are a collection of elements that interoperate in a cause and effect relationship. The dynamic of a system ends up producing similar results and continuous outcome especially in steady state. It’s called the aim of the system. If you want to think about systems, you think about them as the building blocks, feedback, and time delays.

If you’re interested in doing a deeper dive into systems, I’m going to recommend three authors for you. The first one was really my first encounter with systems thinking. That’s the work of W. Edwards Deming’s book, Deming: Sample Design in Business Research. At a conference in Japan in 1950, Deming took the flow diagram for production that was laid out like most flow diagrams of the time, a process ending with products going into the marketplace, and he drew a feedback loop from the marketplace back into the company. That feedback loop allowed learning, continuous improvement, and the increased quality of products. It was the first systems drawing produced from a process drawing that I am personally aware of. Deming is the starting point for our systems thinking.

Deming has written a number of books, but rather than one of Deming’s books I’d recommend one by Mary Walton. It’s called the Deming Management Method. It gives you a view both of Deming the human being as well as Deming’s principles of management in his view of systems.

Deming did his work in the 50’s and there was a group that was formed in the 60’s at MIT that started to discipline the field of systems dynamic that was lead by Jay Forrester. He and his students and collaborators were the primary drivers of the evolution of our modern view of systems. I found that one of his students moved out of his MIT group and became a professor at Dartmouth. Her name is Donella Meadows. She wrote a really terrific book called Thinking in Systems. It’s a really good way of getting to understand the dynamics of systems especially of complex systems.

The third author I would recommend is Peter Senge, probably the most famous of the systems writers. In his book The Fifth Discipline, he talks about the five disciplines of a learning organization, with systems thinking being the most important, if you will, the glue, of a learning organization. If you either read Senge or have read Senge, be sure not to overlook The Fifth Discipline: Fieldbook. It accompanies Senge’s work and it gives you practical exercises to help move towards a learning organization. It’s a nice compliment to the theory of the textbook, “The Fifth Discipline” itself.

If you read these three books, your understanding of systems will increase immensely and you will be able to understand and see systems that work.

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We’ve been talking about time boxing in the context of an Agile system. But there’s one critical system element that we haven’t touched on so far, and that’s visual management.

Inside of a time box system there are three groups that rely on feedback from visual management. There are the other stakeholders and downstream customers of product development: the executive team, the business team, sales and marketing, and even manufacturing. These groups need updates on the status and prognosis of projects. It gives them a look ahead for their own planning. Inside the time box there is the development team which uses visual feedback to track work completed and work yet to be done. They also use it to test or see how they’re progressing against expectations and delivery. The third group is the leadership team within the time box itself. They are responsible for the big picture. Things like capacity planning for upcoming time boxes, the amount of work in progress, the amount of work that is ready for development, etc. There are a number of things these groups use visual management to keep track of.

The exact details of any particular application of a time box, what is given to management, and how it’s designed are elements of detailed design and we won’t go into them here. But I’d like to share with you a story about the power of visual management and visual displays.

In the book “Thinking in Systems” by Donella Meadows, she tells the story of an energy conservation exercise in the Netherlands. After WWII a number of housing developments were built. They were focused on efficiency and economy so returning servicemen would be able to find affordable independent housing. In the US we have Levittown, NY as an example. Donella’s story references an example in a suburb of Amsterdam. These houses were built very inexpensively. They were exact copies of each other. It was a very boring development where everything looks exactly the same, but it provided affordable homes for the veterans of WWII.

A number of years later the government of the Netherlands ran an austerity program. They asked citizens to reduce their energy usage. They tracked results and were hoping for about a 10% decrease in energy usage, but they got a wide range of results. In this one particular housing development there were two distinct classes. There was one group that was conserving on par with the rest of the nation, but there was a second group that was conserving at an extraordinary rate, much more than the rest of the development and nation. At first it was dismissed as more diligent citizens doing a better job. One persistent researcher dug in and tried to understand what was happening. The researcher found that in these exact copy houses there was one important difference. In two thirds of the houses the electric meter was in the basement and in the other third the meter was in the hallway just inside the front door. There was a very strong correlation to those that had the first floor meter and those with extraordinary conservation. Everyday when they came home they saw the electric meter spinning at the fast rate and were reminded of the conservation effort. That feedback, that persistent of information, caused them to be more diligent and conserve more energy. It was the persistent feedback of their purpose and commitment to the program that the electric meters provided. It lead to a more positive outcome. If you take that same visual feedback into product development you can get the same results if you, in fact, design and deploy visual management.

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In recent posts we talked about teams. We noted how the time box product development system produces two teams, both of which are authentic and appropriate for the execution of product development work. Ultimately what we’re interested in is productivity. So let’s look at this in the context of productivity. The two teams within the time box system are the Leadership Team and the Development/Execution Team. In today’s video we’ll be talking about the leadership team.

As noted in a previous video this team operates like a tennis doubles team. They each have their own assignment but they share work and responsibility; they cover for each other. One member of the team is focused on workflow; on making sure the work flows through the time box efficiently. The other focuses on ensuring the work being executed in the time box is the work of highest value and highest priority. If you create great value with great efficiency you have high productivity.

The efficiency of the time box system managed by this pair is also enhanced by two other elements. One is the filtering of requests into the time box. They make sure it is crystal clear what is being requested of the team. They make sure there is no efficiency lost by team members having to figure out or research what is being requested when it arrives at their desk. The other is the loading of the time box itself in which this team loads an amount of work that is accurately matched to the capacity of that team during that time box period. This eliminates the inefficiencies that are inherent in the overburdened standard matrix approach to the execution of product development.

So we have great efficiency coupled with a focus on the work of highest value. This pair of great value and efficiency is definitely high productivity. The tennis pair’s leadership team in the time box system leads to high productivity. So, that’s one team. In the next post we’ll look at the other team that contributes to high productivity within the time box system.

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In the last post we talked about resource deployment and how we take individuals in product development and assign them to maybe 5 or more project teams. In fragmenting people this way we undercut their morale and efficiency. A preferable way would be to keep people intact. Assign them to one specific team and have them operate on that team, collaboratively with the other product development team members. A way of doing this is through Timeboxing.

Timeboxing is the translation of Agile Software Development into the Hardware or Systems domain. In timeboxing the individuals assigned to a time box, the engineers and other SME’s, are kept intact while the work that is loaded into the time box is sub-divided and fragmented. A great benefit of this is that, as the work is fragmented, it’s done so through dialogue. This dialogue builds a collaborative spirit amongst the team and creates in them a shared vision of the work that needs to be done and how they’ll go about executing the work.

In a time box you take a series of projects and break the work on these projects into smaller pieces and into the time box for execution. These projects can be prioritized so you’re not only optimizing the workflow, the capacity against the available resources to do the work, but you’re always working on the most important projects over any period of time.

Aside from those benefits there’s also the benefits at the human level. Benefits like the affiliation with a team; an accord that develops between these whole individuals as members of the time box team. You have this dialogue during the period of decimating and grooming the work, which leads to a shared vision of the work. You also have an unexpected benefit in the quality mindset of the team. Rather than degrading to a least common denominator, regression to mean of quality consciousness, the quality leaders of the team actually elevate the quality mindset of the team.

In the next session we’re going to talk some more about the team and the team structure inside of timeboxing, but the key takeaway from today is this — if you can keep an individual whole and tie them to a team, there’s incredible benefits both for morale and efficiency of the organization.

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Teams have great value. They have value for the individual who participates in a team – the value of affiliation and the motivation from participating in something bigger than themselves. There is also value to the company. There’s a very strong correlation between team participation and product quality.

When we form teams we tend to do it in name only. We take individuals and we take their time and focus and break it into small pieces and distribute it across multiple projects. This denies the individual the ability to actually affiliate with any individual team. We leave the individual contributor as an individual rather than a member of a team.

Timeboxing has an antidote for this, but before we get to that let’s take a look at some of Peter Drucker’s theories about teams. Drucker says there are only three kinds of teams. There is the baseball team, the tennis doubles team, and the soccer team.

The baseball team is the way we traditionally form teams in product development. You take an individual with a particular skill, fit that person into a position needed in a particular project, and you give that person a series of rules. Their behaviors are then based on reactions to stimuli based upon those rules. If you lose a person on a team like this you replace them like a cog in a machine; with another individual that has a similar skill set and also understands the rules of behavior. This sort of team is absolutely inappropriate for product development. It works very well in manufacturing, but is wrong for product development.

The other two types of teams are deployed in the timeboxing system and are appropriate for product development. Timeboxing system is lead by two leaders. One is responsible for the priority of the work being done. The second individual is responsible for making sure the work actually flows. These two individuals have each other’s back. If one for any reason can’t fulfill their responsibilities, for instance if they’re going to visit a customer, the other person rushes in a takes their palace. Not dissimilar to what a tennis doubles partner would do.

The real important team in a time box system is the execution team — the development team. The individuals work as a unit. They move through the work together like a soccer team moving down the field. In our observation, as we’ve put together development teams together in timeboxing, we’ve seen a collaboration starting almost immediately. One of the behaviors in the time box system is dialogue. This dialoguing leads to a shared understanding of the work and a shared vision of how it’s going to be executed. You gain the benefit of mutual mentoring inside of timeboxing where the knowledge of any individual is shared with the team and people inherently learn from each other.

Finally, as we said, there’s a correlation between team behaviors and quality. Not only is the inherent value there, but the commitment to quality actually rises in a team as they move through the time box system. Teams in timeboxing are true teams and gain all of the benefits of team behavior. Benefits that we tend to throw away through our use of nominal teams most frequently used in product development.

That’s one benefit of the timeboxing system. In the next post we’re going to talk about another benefit, which is the benefit that comes from the natural work and process limitations imposed by the time box so that the work being executed and the capacity of the team to execute the work are perfectly matched.

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