April 25th, 2006 by Mark Ramm
Sometimes I am better than I was yesterday. Usually that’s a good thin, but it can be a problem for me because I start feeling bad about yesterday’s work — I fell that I should have done it better yesterday.
Sometimes I am worse than I was yesterday, either because I am tired, or I’m distracted, or I just have a headache. And that can be a problem — after all I should be getting better — not worse.
These feelings of guilt are very much related to the problem I discussed in “Always doing your best considered harmful?”
I feel like I ought to always do my best. The problem is that when your best changes day by day, hour by hour, you’ll never be doing your best by some definition of “your best”.
The other day in my annual review we were talking about how I helped someone in my team with managing his tasks and priorities. This individual had definitely turned a corner and the same people who had criticized him a few months earlier were now singing his praises. But I wasn’t as happy about this as I should have been — after all I should have helped him turn this corner months or years earlier — it turned out to be so easy. All I had to do was re-define his job requirements in terms that motivated him. He is a real people person and doing everyday project work was hard for him, but when the work was framed by who he would be helping and how it would make their life better he was happy, even excited to do it. All I had to do was tell him “your job is to keep X, Y and Z happy by doing A, B and C,” and he clicked into gear. Why didn’t I do this a couple of years ago?
Because I didn’t know what needed to happen yet. I’m working to learn that there is no shame in getting better — even though that means that I used to be worse.
November 8th, 2005 by Mark Ramm
Andy Hunt (one of the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer) blogs about how Ford Motor company is explicitly logging the amount of time their employees are spending in the bathroom. This tells their employees that they are not trusted, and it saps the morale, creativity, and eventually the productivity of their workforce.
Clearly this initiative required IT support, and while I don’t suggest that IT Departments make it their practice to regularly second guess business decisions, I do think somebody should have thought longer and harder about how reasonable it was to spend time and money installing key card readers, writing a system to track time in the bathroom, and provide nice reports to management.
Besides this kind of micro-management is pure waste. Does your customer care how much time your employees spend on the toilet? I seriously doubt it. They want products that are cool, reliable, and reasonably priced — all the activity you spend tracking other things is wasted time and energy.
And, if you happen to have an employee who gets more done in a week than any of your other programmers, but for some reason spends more than the average amount of time in the bathroom, is that a problem?
Tracking the wrong thing can get you focused on “solving” non-problems, and that’s another common form of waste.
October 17th, 2005 by Mark Ramm
One of the key elements in the success of Lean Manufacturing is that it empowers individual employees to improve their jobs.
Toyota workers have been able to decrease costs, improve productivity, and reliability — every year for more than three decades. They were able to do this because management trusts employees to shut down the line at any time whenever they see a problem that needs fixing. They where able to do this because there were processes in place that encouraged, and even required their participation in the improvement process.
I’ll take this one step further — if you don’t learn to trust your employees you won’t be in business for long.
If the people you hired are trustworthy, trust them!
If they you have employees who have demonstrated a lack of trustworthiness, let them go!
If you aren’t trusting your people, you are slowly but surely sapping their morale. Even worse, you are cutting yourself from the source of real ground-floor process innovation.
Toyota workers have constantly been able to decrease costs, improve productivity, and reliability — every year for more than three decades. They were able to do this because management trusts employees to shut down the line at any time whenever they see a problem that needs fixing. They where able to do this because there were processes in place that encouraged, and even required their participation in the improvement process.
How many IT shops have the same track record of continual improvement in customer satisfaction and overall employee productivity? Not too many. Perhaps one of the reasons is that we don’t empower our employees to give estimates, or to make budget decisions.
Software development shops could do with Kaizan events where take out a day to:
- automate build processes,
- create test frameworks,
- update our version control systems,
- and clean up any of our processes that has gotten messy.
These events should include the development team, whatever System Administration support is necessary, but managers who attend must be willing to work as team members to get things done. Just for the day, your job is not to lead, but to do, to work along side the front lines people.