Measuring productivity using Value Points

The major challenge for managers in 21st century is that of improving productivity of knowledge workers. The management in CDC Bangalore have also started working on this as they had an open feedback session recently.

Here is my proposal to improve productivity – I call it “Productivity Management Framework” or PMF in short. I am on a roll creating official sounding terms and acronyms 🙂 . Anyway,this framework can be divided into three parts – Measurement, Target,Reward

Measurement

Clearly, we need a way to measure productivity if we need to know if productivity is improving or not. I propose a new point system called “Value points“.

Managers of an agile team( DEV,QA and Doc) decide together how much a user story is worth to a customer and then assign a value point to it. This point has no relation to the effort required to complete a US. That is a US that is marked large could have 5 value points while a user story marked small could be worth 25 value points.
The criteria for setting points would be –
1) How important is the US for the customer? Does it help customers achieve something? Most features come under this and get high number of value points
2) If it is a bug resulting from a feature previously implemented by the team, then it does not have any value points assigned to it.This helps in ensuring that the quality of the feature implemented is also considered when the above system is used.

At the end of the year, we could just add up all the points a team achieves and that would be their productivity.

Target

Currently with velocity, the team itself decides on the size of the userstory and hence any target associated with the velocity will not work. The solution is to have the above  Value point targets for each team. There should be a target setting meeting with all managers and entire agile team present where this point target is set. This would be similar to how sales team get their sales target set at the beginning of the year.

Managers would also need to have a target. I propose that managers also have a value point target, but this target should not be a blind addition of all the points their teams achieve. The value point target for the managers should be at feature level. So, feature 1 is 25 points, feature 2 is 10 points and feature 3 is 10 points. This might correspond to 300 value points to the agile team but only 45 points for the manager. This would prevent the manager from giving more points to each user story just to meet his/her own target.

Reward

This is the most important part of the framework. Any productivity improvement initiative should have a buy-in from all employees. One way of doing this would be to have substantial bonuses to people who have achieved the target. If it were up to me, I would set up the reward system as follows –

Team – Every team would have a substantial amount set as bonus. If team achieves the target points, it gets the full amount else a partial or no bonus can be given depending on the company’s financial situation. Also, the bonus amount is same irrespective of number of people in the team. This encourages people to work harder to achieve the target with less number of people rather than hiring more people.
 It also encourages team members to help each other out to meet the target.

Possible issues

•Cumbersome process to assign points to all the user stories. Tracking them would be even bigger task as there is no inbuilt field in rally( the software we use to track). Tracking it in a separate tool would mean proper integration between rally and the new tool
•Issue resolution – The team might not agree with the value points associated to a US by the managers. This would lead to a very sticky situation.
•Meetings – People might complain about having too many meetings.
•Teams might change during course of a year. Managers can change during the course of a year. Need to think of ways to handle these situations.
The weakest point in the above framework is the measurement part. The value points assigned are very subjective and we cannot compare one set of value points( assigned by one set of dev/qa/doc manager) with another set of value points assigned by a different set of managers.

I am sure there are a lot of loopholes in this framework. What do you think are the major concerns in implementing this framework?

What are you competing on?

Clayton Christensen in his book Innovator’s dilemma had explained a concept that struck me recently when I was watching an advertisement for a TV with facebook & twitter support!

The concept that Christensen explained is that companies first compete in a product based on features. Then sustaining innovation takes over and newer versions of the product will have more features compared to competitors. But pretty soon this type of innovation results in a set of features that is not yet demanded by the customer. The diagram below explains this concept –

 

In the above diagram, the blue line represents features added due to sustaining innovation. The black lines depict the range of features customers expect in a product, lower line representing low-end of the market and higer line representing the top-end of the market. The red line represents the features offered by a competing disruptive technology.

 

According to me regular TVs have crossed the top end of the features expected by customers. Afterall, would you want to stop watching your TV and shift to checking your facebook or twitter account? Why do you even want this feature? In fact, according to me a TV and facebook will never be a winning combination for a majority of people. My logic is that they are two different ways of spending time. TV is usually watched along with your family and  friends, while updating your facebook account is an individual activity and would not suit well for a device like TV. There is enough fighting over which channel to watch! 

 

So, what is the next step for TV manufacturers? According to Christensen, the next level of competition is reliability. The graph for reliability also looks the same and over a period of time all the competitors will have similar level of reliability. An example of such an offering is our mobile service providers. All of them provide similar features, but we go for one provider over other based on their coverage( how reliable their signal is).

 

Over a period of time reliability is also assured by most competitors, then the next point of competition would be Performance. Computer processors are at this stage now. Most processors last long(reliability not an issue) and only thing that customers look at nowadays is how fast and how many cores the processor has.

 

The next stage of competition is convinience for the customer. How easy is your product to use by customers? That is where Nokia used to rule the mobile world. Their software was supposed to be the easiest to use. However, iOS and Android proved to be the disruptive technologies that dethroned Nokia.

 

The last stage of competition is price. Christensen says when you start competing on price, it is time to get out of this market and look for another product to enter. An example of a product that is in this category is the USB sticks.

 

Now, coming back to our TV example, I find that apart from the normal TVs( plasma,LCD,LED) were already offering features which were not really required by average customers. I really cannot make out a difference in clarity between LCD,LED and plasma TVs.  Now, there is also evidence of disruptive technology in TVs. 

The red line in the above diagram depicts disruptive innovation. Initially, it offers features which are below the expectations of most of the customers. However, over time they offer more and more features and become mainstream. I believe the red line of TVs belong to the new 3D TVs. Currently, one has to wear a special glasses which run on batteries to have the 3D experience. This is not what people want. The features offered are below the range of acceptable features. However with improvement in technology I believe slowly the red line will make it into the range of acceptable range for customers in future.

An interesting product that I cannot place in any of the above cateories is Cars. There are companies that seem to be competing successfully on all of the categories, which I think is a sign of a product that has a lot of potential to be profitable.

• Features – Hyundai(i10, i20 cannot be beaten on features)
• Reliability – Toyota
• Performance – Some cars from Maruti, skoda, honda,VW
• Convinience – Maruti – service station in every village in India.
• Price – Tata and Maruti

Do you agree with me or do you really think you need facebook with your TV?

Do you know what your company is competing on?

Please do comment! 

 

Fooled by Randomness

Fooled by Randomness is a masterpiece written by Nicholas Nassim Taleb that truly elevated him to the “Guru” status.  I first heard about this book when it was being used as a phrase when describing someone attributing a pattern to something that is plain co-incidence( ex:- Every time Sachin Tendulkar hits a century, India loses)

The book is by no means an easy read and I recommend it to people only if they are fascinated by what they find about the book on the net. So far I have read about half of the book and already I have come across many interesting concepts.

The main concept explained in the book is that every incident is based on probability. For everything that happens there could be 100 alternative outcomes that could have happened but didn’t. These other probabilities are present but hidden from people who don’t think in terms of probabilities.

In general, we believe that  more knowledge we have about something, the better the decisions we can take about a particular situation.

He gives an example of a person asked to pick balls from a wooden box and come to the conclusion as to the contents of the box. This person can pick one ball( say red color) and assume that all balls are red. He might pick a second ball( say yellow) and assumes that  they are distributed evenly( 50-50 red yellow). As he keeps picking the balls he can arrive at a better decision as to the contents of the box.

This is true in most of the mathematical problems we face. 

However, in real life this is not true since the circumstances and situations change. Suppose you are driving on a smooth,wide, empty road. You drive for hours and yet you don’t see any potholes or any obstacle. Can you assume the road will remain like that till your destination?  No. In this case you know the circumstances could change( you might enter a town)

Many investors in the stock market have been bankrupted because of these changed circumstances which resulted in a previously unrealised probability to become reality.

This is easily explained in terms of crows! No amount of black colored crows will prove that all crows are black. However, a single non-black crow can prove the statement “all crows are black” as false. To prove that all crows are black, one would have to take all the crows that exist on earth and make sure that all of them are indeed black.

[The author explained in this terms of swan. No number of white coloured swans can prove that all swans are white. This is well-known as Black Swan problem]

So, the author says there are only two types of theories in real life. The ones that have been proved wrong and the ones that have not yet been proved wrong!  

 

I personally don’t like this way of thinking as I feel it is too negative. It is like driving on a smooth,empty road at 40 Kmph because there might be a pothole ahead. I don’t mind being fooled by this smooth road and ending up driving over a random pothole as I would be enjoying my drive on the smooth road till that point.

Nicholas knew that there are people like me and then introduces a new concept to bring be back to ground. He talks about skewedness probability. Would you be willing to play Russian roulette for 1 Million dollars? The chances of death are pretty high( 1 in 6). No right? Some of us would go ahead and try it but most of us would refuse.

Now, imagine a game in where 99 out of hundred times there is a chance that you will win 10$ for every 1000$ you put in. There is a 1 in hundred chance that you will lose all 1000$. Now, would you play the game?

This is a really hard question to answer, most of us would say yes, because in all our schooling we learn about even probability. That is schooling teaches that in a coin toss game you have a 50% chance of winning. the other 50% time you lose. So a person aware of probability will play the above game( Hey! 99% chances of winning!!).

However, In the above example, if a person plays 100 times, 99 times the person wins 990$, but the one time he loses, he loses 1000$ for a net effect of -10$. So, a person who is aware of probability will play, but a person who is aware of skewed probability will never play this game!

Even if you play the game, you should be aware that there is a 1 chance in hundred in which you might lose all your winnings and stop playing the game after some time. The problem with trading in the stock market is that the probability of losing everything would be something like 1 in 1 million or so. Since the probability of such an occurrence is so low, many traders forget that such an incident could happen and could ruin him.

The recent Banking meltdown is an example of this rare probability becoming a reality( The price of houses always goes up!).

Now, with this knowledge, would I drive fast on a smooth empty road? There could be a pothole deep enough to destroy my vehicle. I would drive a bit slower for sure…looking out for signs of bad road…but still not at 40 🙂

In the second part of the book, Nicholas explains about how there is a certain bias in all the conclusions made using historic data.

For example, in most of the management books I have read they take a set of good companies( based on performance for last 20-30 yrs) and analyse them. They then figure out things that are common to all these companies and then come to the conclusions that because of these qualities, the companies became good.

The author does not believe in any such conclusions as he says the analysts are confusing causality. He says that it is just plain luck that all the good companies had the same qualities. Causality cannot be established just by looking at a set of good companies because of Survivorship bias. That is, the author argues that there could have been bad companies that also had similar qualities and they could have failed in the past and hence didn’t show up in their sample list of companies.

The author says that only way to establish causality is to take into account ALL the companies that existed 20-30 yrs ago, analyse all of them and see what is common among companies that were considered good and check if the same qualities were MISSING in the companies that failed.

This totally destroys the argument of almost all the management books I have read and I believe Mr. Nicholas Nassim Taleb is right!

Linchpin – Are you one?

Do you feel you are paid enough by your organization? Why do you think the company feels you don’t deserve more when you have done all the work assigned to you? These are the questions that are there in almost every employee in the world.

Linchpin is a book written by Seth Godin which answers some of these questions and provide a plan to make yourself indispensable to the company.

Before industrial revolution, there were no factories and all the goods that were produced were handmade and since they were hand-made, each unit of what you produced was unique. Each person was basically his own employer selling his unique skills like able to make a wheel for the horse cart etc. And for such unique skills, they were highly paid by customers.

Then came the industrial revolution where factories became the center of all production. Every unit was standardized and people became only an expense in the company balance sheet required to run the factories. Factories being companies naturally looked for ways to minimize this cost by brining in rules to reduce waste and increase productivity.

Soon, it became a norm to follow the rules laid out by the company, work hard you could take home decent pay. Even the schooling system was changed to train people in following rules. Children are systematically punished for breaking rules and rewarded for following them without understanding the rules. The result is that most of the students are perfectly trained to work in a factory where you just need to follow rules.

However, what people don’t realise is that things have changed again and industrial revolution was just an anomaly in the history of mankind. Seth Godin says that individuality and unique skills are again in demand. Your brain is again the center of production, not he computer provided to you by the company. However, our education system still has not changed and following rules without question is still being taught.

He compares a person who just does his work and waits for instructions to a cog in the machinery. It is easily replaceable by the company. However, if you provide something extra to the company, then you become the linchpin – the part that holds the machinery together and makes it all work.

He says every one of us has the capability to become a linchpin,but our basic survival instinct likes to follow rules. He calls this instinct Lizard brain. A part of our brain does not like to stand out, because if you stand out, you become a prey for other animals. Hence, it pushes us to conform,remain anonymous and to follow rules. Most of us listen to this part of the brain and remain cogs in the company.

If you consciously fight this lizard brain, then you are willing to provide ideas, stand out and willing to see your ideas shot down by others. When ideas get shot down, your lizard brain again wakes up and says “I told you so”, but a person who keeps fighting it eventually becomes a linchpin.

If an employer is able  to put down all the things you do in a sheet of paper, then you are not a linchpin. Seth Godin says one of the important characteristics a linchpin possesses is that he delivers unique creativity. A linchpin possesses a unique capability that cannot be explained or put in words or measured. However, this unique ability helps him provide creative solutions and deliver results. One such capability is that you are able to bring in enthusiasm or help gel the people into a proper team.  By bringing in enough enthusiasm, you might help some other member in the team to be more productive and arrive at a solution to a problem. These are characteristics that cannot be put in as requirements in a job profile. Even if you do, how will you measure it while interviewing a candidate?

If you constantly provide unique abilities, then you become indispensible. Once you become indispensible, your value within the company increases and you start to get what you feel you deserve.

He concludes the book by saying that many people think that their superiors will not like people who are always questioning the rules and would like to them to just do their work. He says it is just their lizard brain trying to stop them from standing out. You should ask your managers, in fact, most managers are racking their brains to try to motivate people and try to get them to do stuff other than their routine work.

I am sure that is the case in CDC software as I have been in some of these meetings. Managers want people to try new stuff and there are a few people who are stepping up and unafraid of standing out. These people are our linchpin. Are you one of them?

SaaS and Reynolds ball-point pens….

I am currently reading Art of Innovation by Thomas Kelley, one of the founders of IDEO – a design company. This is the second book I am reading about IDEO and how they have found a way to constantly innovate. The first one was 10 faces of innovation which I have already blogged about earlier. There are several good ideas which are mentioned in the book, one of which is about brain storming. I have attended only one brainstorming session in CDC Software and I could relate to what was being said in the book with what happened in that session. Clearly, at least one or all of the facilitator have read this book and implemented it perfectly.

Another concept that the book talks about which made an impression on me is about new projects. The author says that if you cannot express what you want in 30 seconds or if you cannot have a t-shirt printed which portrays what you want then clearly you don’t know what you want and it is better to stop and think about the requirements with a more clear mind.

One thing that helps in getting clear requirements is to have a metaphor or analogies. In the book he gives an example of a project IDEO did. The requirement was to make a portable hard disk which is sturdy and has enough shock-resistance built-in. Now, to the management it might seem like a good enough description of the requirements, but to an engineer it is difficult to understand how sturdy is sturdy enough for the customers. Fortunately, for IDEO, the customer gave an example – “As sturdy as a digital camera.” If you drop a camera from a 6 inches height on a table top, you expect it to work. If you drop it from a height of 3 feet on a concrete floor, you expect to go to a store and buy a new one. This description really helped the engineers understand how sturdy is sturdy enough.

 I personally believe that analogies are a great teaching tool. While reading this book I came up with an analogy on the difference between On-premise and SaaS based software. Why are people moving to SaaS? What advantages do they provide to the customer? I believe On-premise software like Pivotal CRM are equivalent to fountain pens. They are comparatively more expensive to buy but cheaper to run in the long run. You just have to buy an ink pot and it used to last me for more than 6 months( when I was in school). When an On-premise software needs to be updated, the customer has to manually follow all the detailed steps mentioned in the guides. Many customers face issues with upgrades and Support Incidents are raised. This is equivalent to refilling a fountain pen from the ink pot. No matter how careful I was, it was a messy affair with ink all over my fingers, my clothes and some times on my text books. Then came the Reynolds ball-point pen. It was cheaper to buy at Rs.5( about 1/10th the cost of fountain pen). It also came with pre-packaged units of ink called refills. When it ran out of ink, you could just open the pen and throw out the empty refill and replace it with a new one. No mess, easy to do and I am proud to say I never spilled ink on my clothes while changing the refill on my Reynolds 🙂

 The exact same convenience is provided by SaaS software. It would become the responsibility of CDC Software or any other SaaS provider to ensure upgrades are easy and trouble-free. Upgrades will no longer be an “incident” to dread. So, am I changing my stance and supporting SaaS software now?

Umm… yes and no. It is definitely better for the customer, but not necessarily for the provider. Let me explain…

 How did Reynolds survive( no …the word is thrive) in spite of giving away pens at 1/10th the cost of fountain pens? They sold refills at Rs.4 which is 80% of the cost of a brand new ball – point pen. By giving an option to re-fill and by charging a hefty premium for the refill Reynolds ball-point pens made lots of money. Another company that follows the same model is Gillette. All their shavers are sold at a slight loss. However, they make a killing by selling blades for their shaver.

I don’t see an equivalent profitable “refill” for our SaaS deals. I see the current SaaS software deals as take the pen for Rs.5( 1/10th the cost) and you can have the refills for free for next 3 years…. We will make money by selling billions of pens with “economies of scale” blah blah helping us make profit…Hmm… I don’t think this will work out for the company.

What is your company’s current strategy? Does the management expect just the scale of operations to help bring in profitability?I think we need to think hard about selling some add-ons to our SaaS software to make a profit. What do you think? Do you have any ideas on creating profitable refills for software companies? Do comment.

How OREO ended up in India

OREO biscuit is one of the first cream biscuits available in the world. It began selling in US almost 100 years ago. This is not the story of oreo…it is about the companies that owned the brand oreo…   Nabisco( National Biscuit Company) of united states started making OREO in 1912 and it was a big hit.However, over the years due to some mismanagement and focus on immediate profits, Nabisco’s bakeries became outdated and desperately required cash infusion to overhaul their bakeries.This was around 1970s. At the same time the top tobacco company at that time R.J.Reynolds ( RJR in short) was fighting off lawsuits and health concerns about tobacco. This affected RJR’s stock price significantly. To help diversify, the management of RJR looked to enter confectionary business. More than 20 years later, the Indian tobacco major ITC is following the same strategy and entered biscuit business with SunFeast and other brands.   Anyway, in 1975, RJR and Nabisco merged and it seemed like a perfect merger with the excess cashflow from the tobacco business being utilized to revamp and build new bakeries for Nabisco. However, the stock market did not react positively and the stock price of RJR Nabisco was languishing at 45$ per share. The management felt that the company was grossly undervalued in the stock market.Lead by Ross Johnson, the management  hatched a plan to takeover the company and delist it from the stock market.   To buy out a company, there are two ways – pay cash from your own pocket( almost never happens nowadays) or pay money by borrowing money and pledging the bought company as security! This is called a Leveraged Buyout(LBO). You Leverage the assets of a company to secure a loan to buy the company! Typically companies with strong cash flows are ideal candidates for LBOs since the excess cash can now be utilized to pay down debt.   Ross Johnson consulted with lot of banks and finally settled on offering to buy the RJR Nabisco for 75$ a share using debt. His plan was to sell Nabisco after the buyout and use the cashflow of tobacco business to pay the rest of the debts and finally own a company without the stress of publicly traded stock price.   Unfortunately, for him, one of the companies he consulted was KKR( no…not Kolkota Knight Riders) – Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. In fact, it was Henry Kravis of KKR who first suggested to Johnson to  takeover the company with the financial muscle of KKR.   KKR is a known LBO expert. They buy companies with borrowed money and with the help of management trim costs mercilessly to help pay down debts. Once the company is debt free they then sell it again at huge profits. Some of the companies that KKR took over are NXP Semiconductors, Toys “R” Us and SunGard.   Henry Kravis of KKR was angry at Johnson for not picking KKR as the partner for LBO. KKR sent a counter hostile bid of 90$ per share which was way over management bid. Johnson had carefully picked the board of directors and assumed that the board would help him out. However, Kravis’s 90$ bid made the board think and act impartially and announce both the bids to the public. This led to a bidding war with several other banks including Goldman Sachs enter the fray. However, when the bids reached close to 120 $ there was only 2 bids left since there was not enough money in the entire world to support more than 2 bids( 19 billion $ each).   Anyway, due to Directors impartial conduct, RJR Nabisco finally went to KKR  at 120$ per share –  the largest takeover at that time(1989 – 19 billion). The record was broken only in 2006 ( again by KKR).   Once KKR assumed control of RJR Nabisco, it had to sell of assets to pay off the incredible amount of debt. After selling off smaller assets KKR finally sold Nabisco to Kraft’s food in year 2000. Kraft’s food is itself owned by another tobacco company Philip Morris. Hence Nabisco and Oreo has been owned by both the top two tobacco companies in the world!   All the above information is presented in great detail in the book  Barbarians at the Gate: fall of RJR Nabisco written by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar.   However, this does not explain what OREO is doing in our cafeteria now. The story moves forward to year 2010 when Kraft Foods made a hostile bid to takeover Cadbury and succeeded. I am sure someone will write a good book on the happenings between Cadbury, Kraft’s and Hershey( the other bidder for Cadbury) during the takeover.   With the takeover of Cadbury, Kraft foods became the largest confectionary company in the world and it is still owned by Philip Morris tobacco company. So, ITC strategy might just work in India!   With Cadbury acquisition, Krafts food and Nabisco found a new market for its almost 100-year-old product! In India Oreo will always be known as Cadbury oreo, but you now know its origins! Go and have one, it really is better than the standard cream biscuits we have eaten before.

Road to Responsibility

Last Thursday CDC Software  HR team showed us a  presentation on Road to Responsibility by Christopher Avery​  . Here is the summary of the session as I understood it.

When things are going well and everything is successful, everyone is happy to claim and share credit for it. However, when things go wrong, there seems to be no one who is accountable and responsible for the issue. Many people use responsibility and accountability interchangeably. However, Chistropher gives one important difference.

Accountability – Depends on someone else. Some one holds you accountable for failure of the project and there is nothing you can do about it. You might not think that you are the cause of the failure, but there is noway you can convince the other person.

Responsibility – This is an internal feeling. You wanted to do something well, but things didn’t go properly and it was a failure. Then you take responsibility for the failure. Sam(Our HR Head) asked us to give examples of accountability and responsibility at this time and everyone including me were thorougly confused with some of the examples. After some thinking I think I have some answers.

Some examples are an example for both accountability and responsibility depending on the point of view. • Your child behaves badly with another kid – Other parents hold you Accountable. You feel responsible because you want your child to be a model citizen. •Your parents say your room is dirty and needs to be cleaned – Parents hold you accountable for the tidiness of your room. But, You feel it is already tidy( after all You just cleaned it last month)… You don’t think the room is dirty and hence You don’t take responsibility… Every person goes through a set of phases before he starts taking responsibility. These phases can be best described with the example of vegetable price rise and Indian government 🙂

1.Denial – In this phase you refuse to accept the truth. You can recognise the person is in this state when he utters sentences like these… “Oh, it is a seasonal fluctuation. Prices will fall in 6 months”

2.Lay Blame – Once the person comes out of denial, he looks for some one  or some circumstance to blame for the issue. The thinking is that “Problem lies elsewhere… not with me”. In our Indian government stituation the sentence would be “The state governments need to do more to curb hoarding”

3.Justification – If you come out of the previous state, you will start justifying why it happened. The more intelligent you are better are your justification stories.Now you realise that “The problem was not caused by someone else but by me because of certain circumstances.” In our government example, it would result in statements like “The crops were destroyed by unseasonal rains and hence prices have risen…”

4.Shame – This is the most private phase of taking responsibility. You realise that the jsutifivcations you were making are really hollow and the real reaosn for the failure is plain simple “I screwed it up”. You will not find any statements from our government for this phase, but I am glad to report that they have given indication that they have moved to next phase

5.Obligation – This is a phase where from which you start to correct the situation. However, you still are not taking responsibility for it. You will take steps as an obligations. Christopher Avery says, Obligation is a state of mind in which you do just enough to get a “pass”. A person in this state of mind will utter a lot of statements with “have to” in them.In case of Indian govenment ” I have to reduce the prices somehow or else the people will throw us out in the next election”. Hence they announce temporary solutions like banning exports and start imports which will give “pass” marks.

 6.Responsibility – This is a state in which you want to fix the issue. This is a difficult stage to come to since if don’t care about something there is no way someone can make you reach this state. The best you can do is obligation state. Hoever, for things you do care about you will hear yourself say “I want to “. ex: I want to take good care of my family. Our government has not reached this stage yet, but when they do they will come up with some superb ideas like “cold storage” or “Amul-like” co-operative society for vegetables.

One of the participants in the session came up with an interesting point. He said sometimes we do a good job inspite of it being a “have to” rather than want to. He gave an example of his home where sometimes he has to cook food inspite of not liking it. But he does a good job. How is that? Why is it that even when he feels it is an obligation he does a good job of it?

My answer is that sometimes you will do a good job of “have to” to achieve a bigger “want to”. In the above case he cooked well because he wants to keep his wife happy.So, the want to made him do the unpleasant “have to cook” to her satisfaction.

This example also gives us a clue as to how to take responsibility for things that you  would otherwise not care much about. Managers could also help by making employees understand how this meaningless boring task(obligation) would relate to something that they really care about.

 ex: ” Make sure you understand the issue reported by testers so that you can fix it now properly. Don’t ignore the issue if it is not reproducible in your machine.”  If you don’t fix it properly now, you might get a critical issue raised by a customer on friday evening which might keep you away from your family.

I have seen that most people will be able to take responsibility for a task that has a direct reward( or relates to a direct want). However, most people cannot recognise tasks that help them achieve their wants in an indirect or two step way. I think managers need to educate their team members as to how each task that they do contributes to their want.

 Do comment….

Valley of Death

I have started reading “Succeeding with Agile” written by Mike Cohn. I got this book  free when we attended the Agile tour Bangalore. So far, it has been a pretty good read. I had assumed that Mike would preach the ideal way of doing agile like having dedicated scrum master etc. but seems to give surprisingly practical alternatives( which we are following in CDC Software).

Before he starts explaining the process he begins with why a company decides to adopt scrum. One of the reasons he gave is “Valley of death”. It can be best explained with a diagram –

The black line is the revenue a company earns from its old product. The company then decides to work on a new cool product. So all its development resources are put into building this all-new product. After some time, the revenue from the old product starts reducing since the customers of the old product realise that they are not getting anything new.  The revenue from the new product has not yet started since the development is still working on it. This creates a sudden decline in the revenues of a company, but they cannot make reduction in R&D costs since the new product is still under development. This causes huge amounts of losses and death of a few companies. The companies that do survive this phase will start increasing the revenues again from their new product.

The valley of death makes perfect sense to me as Pivotal went through the exact same scenario. We stopped working on major enhancements for Pivotal 5.9 and worked on Sedna(Pivotal 6.0) for close to 2 years. This is a huge risk to take and management would prefer never to see another valley of death.

One of the ways to avoid valley of death is to adopt agile development methodologies. With frequent releases and incremental development, the large gap between releases can be eliminated and hence the dip can be avoided. 

Although agile helps avoiding the valley of death, people in R&D are already tired and bored of frequent releases as service packs. People have started to ask whether we will ever have the next version of Pivotal 7.0.  I feel that the excitement and enthusiasm of a new release has been lost. How can we keep enthusiasm amongst the R&D teams and still release every 3 – 4 months?  

Please do comment.

What got you here won’t get you there…

This book was written by Marshall Goldsmith who helps successful people get even better. He has put down his methodology to improve so  that the less fortunate amongst us( he charges a 6 figure price for his sessions) can also benefit.

He starts with what he calls twenty bad habits a successful person has. Some of these characteristics are –

• Need to win –  Need to win…when it matters, when it does not matter. No matter what, the need to win causes people to treat people who are hindering like dirt.
• Need to add value – When someone comes with a great idea, you say something like “That is good. It would be better if you do “. You might improve the idea by 2% but reduced the motivation of that person by 50%.
• Speaking when angry – ohh… way too familiar for me 🙂
• Starting with However, but or No –  When you start with “I agree, but” or “No, I believe” or “That is correct, However…” , You are saying you don’t agree.
• Too much negativity – “Let me tell you why it wont work”. This really pulls down other people.
• Punishing the messenger
• Failing to recognise other people

There are a lot more… but it is enough to say if you say that when you are reading the 20 flaws, you will recognise yourself in some of them. However, there could be some flaws that you are not even aware of.

The first step is to identify which of the problems you have. Marshall suggests asking the people you work with. You might not agree with all the feedback people give, but the only correct answer to any feedback is “Thank You”. He also suggests a way to ask for feedback. You should ony ask “How can I do better?” and nothing else.

The feedback will suggest that you have one or more of the twenty issues listed. Once you get the feedback, you should work on only one issue at a time. The issue with trying to change is that you need to change 100% to get credit of 10%. That is because once you have established a bad trait, no matter how much you change the perception will always lag behind.

To overcome this, Marshall suggest that you announce the one issue you are going to be working on to the people who gave you the feedback. You should also practise feedforward. That is, you should ask suggestions from people as to how you can improve on that one issue. Now that you advertise that you are working on one issue, every effort you make to improve on it will be noticed by your team. Hence the perception of you changes a lot faster than if you do not share the information.

One last idea that I liked was to recruit a helper. This helper should impose a fine every time you display the bad habit. I already tried this out on a fresher who joined our team recently and was still in the college mode of calling me and everyone around as “Sir” or “Madam”. I imposed a fine of 5 rupees every time he called me Sir. After 45 rupees, he has stopped it :-). So, I know this works.

With many companies moving to agile, people are working more closely with each other. Managers have a lesser idea about your good traits and bad traits compared to your team members.Hence, it becomes more important to ask the opinion of your team members to improve yourself. Do you agree?

Do Comment.

VP of COBS

As you know I am (still) reading Tom Peter’s Re-Imagine!. In one of the chapters, he talks about how people are trained to follow rules and regulations and not to question certain processes as they are a “tradition”.

 

Tom explains how these processes are created. In a company, there is one expert, lets say Mr.Pro. He knows how to do stuff in a particular manner. His manager asks him to document the process to create this stuff so that others can also do the stuff in the same expert manner. This document is then given to others who start doing the stuff as well as Mr.Pro. However, over time one of the less-than-expert-worker , say Mr.Cess follows the document and comes up with the stuff that is not perfect. Mr.Cess assumed step A meant something else. So, Mr.Cess then adds more stuff to the document so that no one else assumes step A to be something else.

 

Together Mr.Pro and Mr.Cess create a huge document with several unnecessary steps which gets to be called Process( since both pro and cess contributed).  Many of the steps added by Mr.Cess are totally useless and could even cause the final result to be less than perfect. However all other workers continue to follow the document because Mr.Pro wrote part of it.

 

Tom Peters says for companies to survive in the future, especially those that have existed for a long time to have another post – VP of COBS created to re-imagine the company. If you are wondering what the post is, it is Vice President of Cutting Out Bull Shit. Oh yes, Tom Peter’s writing has changed quite bit since his “In search of excellence” days :-). He talks quite a bit about his days as a junior member in McKinsey. In fact he says he was able to write in search of excellence in McKinsey only because the senior management did not notice the work of a junior partner. If he was a senior he says his research would have to follow certain processes and it would never have succeeded.

 

According to Tom the main problem is that people have been trained not to take risk, not to think creatively since school days. In a school a student who takes risk and writes imaginative answers gets the least grade while rote answers are preferred. The author says this is because while we have re-imagined and changed the way we do business, the way we teach the youth remains stuck in industrial age of 1920s. During those times most of the work was blue-collared factory work where there was only one expert way of doing things. The school was modelled so that students are trained to follow all the rules set out by the teacher. Any imagination is frowned upon. This worked really well as you would not want to buy a car that was built by a staff that was experimenting a new brake setup!

 

However, industry has moved to white collared jobs while school still crushes all imagination, creativity and innovation. The result is that the workers in the white-collar still obey all rules and regulations without questioning the purpose.In fact, I am afraid of joining an MBA program. I prefer the self-reading method of Personal MBA so that I can maintain my COBS record. Tom says that the job of VP of COBS is to look at all the processes and ruthlessly cut out all BS from it.

 

Whenever I think of BS,time sheets come to my mind…I think it is time for a blog on the many ‘merits’ of it…  

 

I think this is going to be last post on Re-imagine… truly wonderful book that is highly recommended.