Friday, March 30, 2007

SEPG Trip Report

I’m just back from SEPG 2007 in Austin, Texas. Unlike last yea (SEPG Tribal Markings) , I didn’t blog during the even (Escape from NashVegas) for technical reasons related to the security on uploading to my host ISP box. (See also Beauty of Gaylord Opreyland, Meditating in NashVegas)

For me conferences are mainly social networking opportunities. The content of the conference isn’t so important as who is attending. The aggregation effect of a conference to maximize the social networking value determines whether I’ll attend. For this reason I will be at the Agile conference again this year even though I’m finding the content of the Agile conference less and less relevant to my own situation.

First I met Paul Nielsen, the Director of the Software Engineering Institute (the big boss). Paul was fascinated with what I’m doing with kanban systems and industrial engineering theory applied to software development. He shared with me that the SEI is looking to align CMMI better with Lean and Six Sigma and that they want to tell a far better story of how to use CMMI in enterprise-wide (organizational level) Lean initiatives.

Next I met Bill Petersen and he repeated the same thing. I personally think this is a very strong idea - in fact I’d been using it for the last 2 years to pitch MSF CMMI at Microsoft Executive Briefings to customers who had a Six Sigma or Lean initiative in their company already. MSF CMMI with the reporting provided in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server has all the enablers for a Six Sigma or Lean initiative and I’ve published several presentations explaining how to do it. I left Microsoft before I published a full white paper on the topic. Anyway, I offered to help Bill in any way I could to position CMMI in the Lean space. I guess writing that white paper would be a good place to start. huh?

This is me chatting to Mike Konrad on the terrace at the conference center on Thursday morning about our new Kanban system.

Mike has so much experience with CMM and CMMI that he can listen to the anecdotes and immediately determine the maturity level of the behaviors described. He can then add suggestions on how to take it to the next level. Mike suggestions? Process automation to provide better prediction. Better prediction will allow us to improve due date performance on our SLA and to improve the accuracy of our release announcements and allow us to make announcements earlier - improving service to the business by giving them more warning of what is and is not included in each release. Thanks Mike!

Hillel Glazer has been promoting an agile approach to CMMI with his blog and working with clients pursuing a CMMI appraisal with an agile process. Hillel has even worked with a client that made a full deployment of Team System with MSF for CMMI Process Improvement. He reported back to me that it does “almost precisely what it says on the box.” Hillel has validated with his client that MSF CMMI delivers on the promise and on its design. This was personally very good news for me. It’s always nice to have your work validated in the field.

And here is my friend Clementino Mendonca of Microsoft, explaining MSF for CMMI Process Improvement to a prospective customer on the Microsoft booth at the exhibition. Microsoft have a great product and a great story to tell in the CMMI space. What I’m waiting for now is the first news that a VSTS/MSF customer has achieved a CMMI Level 3 appraisal. I’m hoping that we’ll hear that news over the next 6 months. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson,, SEI, SEPG, Mike+Konrad, CMMI

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Some More Trackback ...

Derek Kivi lists this blog as one of his 10 favorites. Just look at the esteemed list of company I’m keeping. Marco Abis over at BrainScrum discusses why business acumen is important to guide methodology decisions. While Yuri Gadow believes that constraints create opportunity but he refers to several of my HR posts when discussing why measurement decreases performance in a Settlement of Hostilities. And finally, Marco Liuzzi lists this site as one of the definitive Agile Management sites. Now it would’ve been embarrassing not to make that list

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Six Month Review

Yesterday, March 19th was my six month anniversary as Senior Director of Software Engineering at Corbis. This give me occasion to pause and take stock of how I’m doing. Tomorrow, Wednesday 21st March, we will make the 13th software release to production since I joined the team. That’s an average of a release to production every 9.5 business days since mid-September 2006. In addition, we haven’t had an escaped defect to production since the beginning of the year. I’ll repeat that for emphasis - Zero escaped defects since January 1st 2007. I’m very impressed with the team I inherited and this track record is something they can all be proud of.

If we were writing a set of acceptance tests for an agile process they might ask (1) Is software being released to production every two weeks or less? (2) Is the quality of that software high? (3) Is the technology organization able to respond to changes in the business rapidly? On all three of these questions, my team would be passing. What is really interesting is that we aren’t doing many things that would be recognized as “agile.” If there were a set of white box tests to test for agile practices such as (1) are they pair programming? (2) are they using test-driven development? (3) are releases planned in two week iterations? (4) Is there continuous integration running? (5) Are they reporting burn-down?[and so on…] The tests would be failing. We are using a daily standup and we do track progress on a white board. But apart from that, our process would not be recognizable as agile.

So what is the lesson to be learned here? I think it is very simple - there is more than one way to achieve agility. Practices from Extreme Programming and Scrum are just one approach. What many in the Agile community and Agile Alliance see as “agile” is just a recipe that works in some situations. There are many other approaches that can be just as agile and may be more appropriate to your situation. By sticking to the principles in my Recipe For Success - focus on quality, reduce work-in-progress, balance demand against capacity, and prioritize - my team has been able to deliver a continuous flow of business value that enables Corbis to be more agile in the marketplace.

While there is a lot more to be done, my career at Corbis is off to a good start. The challenge now is to take our success with software maintenance and apply it to major projects in our portfolio. As a result, I’m even more excited about the next six months than I was about the first. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Lean,  Corbis

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

HR Myths #6: Where Comparative Payscales Come Unstuck

How do pay scales come about? How do job descriptions get assigned to a pay grade? How do compensation bands get assigned to those pay grades? and how do HR departments decide how much is fair pay to offer a candidate applying for a job? To be mildly unkind, they are thick as thieves with all the other HR folks! They meet usually twice per year to compare pay scales and compensation bands with other companies in the same metropolitan area or industry, and they use salary surveys and other analyst research data to build a map of what compensation levels are appropriate for particular positions. They accumulate mean and median information and spread data that allows them to asses upper quartile, median, and lower quartile pay, and often percentile accuracy.

At a higher level, usually the executive committee, a business decides which percentile or quartile they want to target for their employees. If for example, an executive committee decides that their strategic positioning is as the cost leader in a market, then they might decide as part of that policy that they only want to pay lower quartile salaries. Hence, low cost also means cheap or poor quality staff, presumably leading to poor quality service and products - but at a cheap price.

This would imply that an organization that wants to merely mediocre would instruct its HR department to enforce a policy of say median (or 50th percentile) pay for employees. Congruent, no?

STOP RIGHT THERE!!!

When did you ever meet a strategic planning department that would openly state, “Our goal is to be mediocre!” How motivational do you think that would be? Can you imagine the posters around the office - Master Mediocrity - Strive for Median Performance - Competing is Better than Winning!

And you get my point!

Companies that state, “We want to be no.1 in the [insert subject here] market”, “We will dominate the market for [insert product] in [insert geographical region]” and so on, are declaring that they want to be the best. So how do you reconcile that with for example, a recruiting policy of targeting the 60th percentile in an industry?

I like to call the proper alignment of goals with recruitment policy, the Kenny Dalglish School of Management. Dalglish was the most successful football player ever to come out of Scotland. Arguably he has to cede the position as best ever manager to Alex Ferguson, but Dalglish’s managerial record is very impressive having won the English league trophy on several occasions and with two different clubs. With the second team, Blackburn Rovers, he took them from the Second Division to the championship in under 5 years and thus proved that he hadn’t been lucky the first time around with Liverpool. Dalglish had a simple approach to management. He believed that you had to optimize each part in the system to be the best. So if you wanted to concede the fewest goals in the league, you needed to have the best goalkeeper. If you wanted to score the most goals, you needed the best striker. And so on. He consistently broke transfer records, to sign the best players to his team and deny the competition the use of those players. His actions were aligned with the goals of his employer. Consider this snippet from his Wikipedia page…

1994-95 saw Dalglish again break the transfer record, paying Norwich City £5 million for Chris Sutton who along with Shearer formed a formidable striking partnership. He had now spent £27¾ million putting together a squad that could make a serious challenge for the ultimate prize, the Premier League Championship. The challenge came and by the last game of the season both Blackburn and Man United were pushing for the title, Blackburn had to go to Dalglish’s former home Anfield with United having to go to East London to face West Ham United at Upton Park, Dalglish smiled as Rovers went 2-1 down to a late Redknapp winner and the news that United had failed to get the result they needed filtered through to him via the radios in the crowd.

At Blackburn Rovers, club owner Jack Walker wanted to win the championship. He hired Dalglish to make it happen. Walker wanted to be number one. Dalglish hired the best by paying the most and delivered the prize.

Now ask yourself this… Are your employer’s strategic positioning and stated goals aligned with the recruitment policy and compensation policy?

Further consider, whether one blanket policy - a one size fits all approach to define the targeted pay band is appropriate? For example, if your employer has a goal to be no.1 in services, but lower costs in widget manufacture because the widget market is coming under price pressure and has been commoditized by competitors, would you have a single policy on recruitment and compensation, or would you tailor those policies according to your strategic plan? Might it be better to have an upper quartile policy for people who can deliver on the goal of being “no. 1 in services” while other areas of the business might rightly have a 3rd quartile policy?

If you know of any businesses that have fine-grained targeted recruitment and compensation policies and have correctly aligned those policies with their strategic positioning, please comment. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Human+Resources, Organizational+Agility, Performance+Management, Talent+Management

More Recent Trackback Commentary

My kanban post is attracting a lot of attention. I believe rightfully so, as I haven’t seen anyone else publish material showing a genuine kanban system for software development in action. Agile Renaissance observes that a critical benefit of the approach is to break the constraint of iteration boundaries for the size of work items, while gaining all benefit of reduced work-in-progress and a regular cadence of releases that we normally associate with iterations.

Meanwhile, Silver Stripe Software, coincidentally based in Chennai where we do some of our testing - oh I didn’t mention that all the players in our kanban system aren’t collocated, some of our testers are in India - observes that the kanban system works as a pull system and blocked work items have the effect of “stopping the line.” This emerged from the discussion thread attached to my Kanban in Action post. I didn’t originally mention it as I need to save something for a future conference paper

Meanwhile, Dennis Stevens at Synaptus follows up on my Pay for Performance post with commentary on all five of my HR Myths series. Dennis makes the very valid point that often software engineering problems aren’t technology problems - even though we often jump to this conclusion - they are people problems. Actually, I believe that they are people or process problems and seldom technology problems. By focusing on people and process issues we can leverage much more performance improvement than switching languages, platforms, applications, vendors, tools or APIs. Where I differ a litte from Dennis and many in the Agile community is that I also believe that process (done right) can be a big leverage point to improve performance. In point of fact, the kanban system at Corbis. It achieves significantly improved results without any change in personnel or personnel policies.  Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering