Friday, June 15, 2007

Policies - You’ve Got the Power

If you are a manager reading this, then the chances are you are running a department with sub-optimal performance. Much of that performance is being constrained by policies. Those policies may have been around for years. Many of them pre-date you taking control of the team. Many of the staff have forgotten why a certain policy was introduced. They are part of the folklore of how things are done around here. Often your shop floor individual contributors will know that these policies are affecting performance but they abdicate any responsibility viewing it as a management problem.

Guess what? You are the manager!

Policies are under your control (or maybe your boss or an upline manager).

If a policy is affecting the performance of your team - change it! Show some courage. Make a change. Just do it!

For example, we had a policy that locked down our test environment for 3 days after every release. Since introducing our kanban system for sustaining work, we’ve put a release out every two weeks. A 3 day outage in testing was constraining our productivity by limiting our test capacity to only 70% efficiency. The effect was lower total throughput of change requests and delivered business value. A small cross functional team investigated the policies behind the 3 day lock down and discovered that most of the original reasons for the 3 day period no longer applied. On the recommendation of the team, I changed the policy to 1 day, giving us back 20% of our testing capacity. Since we made this change in early April we’ve seen continued growth in throughput of processed change requests delivered to production each month.

Where are your policy constrained bottlenecks?