Clarke Ching's Rocks and Snowballs

Another exceptionally well written, well hidden, exceptional article -" Extreme Programming and Agile Software Development Methodologies" - by Lowell Lindstrom and Ron Jeffries

One of the perks of my MBA was free access to tones of great journal articles.  For instance, I've got free access to HBR, IEEE, ACM, MIT Sloan and tonnes of other journals that I've never even heard of.  There's some really good stuff hidden out there that you mere mortals aren't even aware of and can't get your hands on.

But! I lose my access in a few months and will have to start pay for the articles in many cases or just go without completely.  I will be mortal again.  Yikes!

Now, this execptional article (it really is good stuff) is an exception - it's free but you have to register first, and it takes a day to get the reply:

Extreme Programming and Agile Software Development Methodologies

Lowell Lindstrom and Ron Jeffries

Several agile (i.e., lightweight) development methodologies, especially extreme programming (XP), have been argued to be a solution to many of the problems that continue to plague software development projects. The authors provide a useful evaluation of such approaches, including a discussion of the values that underlie the XP methodology.

[from http://www.ism-journal.com/Contents2004.html]

But, the annoying thing is that (a) this article is really good (b) I only found it through one of my MBA databases (searching for "agile") and (c) it took me ages to find it on the web.

Understanding Constraints-at 6:00am on a Saturday

Joe Ely has an excellent, every-day example of using TOC and lean: Understanding Constraints-at 6:00am on a Saturday. 

Go take a look and then ponder why someone in charge wasn't looking at things the same way as Joe. 

Effective vs Successful managers

David Anderson's post about Eli Goldratt, hero's, and firefighting reminded me of one of the few EXTREMELY USEFUL articles from my MBA: Successful vs. Effective Real Managers by Fred Luthans.

• Successful managers are those who have been promoted quickly. 
• Effective managers are those who have happy staff and good results. 
• Guess what? The two sets hardly overlap at all - in fact, less than 10% rate in the top third of both sets.

Go read the article.  It might explain a few things.

 

The Physics of Gridlock

Further to my post about pareto, TOC and traffic here's an Atlantic Online article The physics of Gridlock which I had forgotten about, that digs in a bit deeper to the fluid nature of traffic flow:

Even when American traffic engineers have ventured closer to rocket science, with computer simulations of traffic flow on multi-lane highways, the results have tended to reinforce the American reputation for practicality and level-headedness. The mathematical and computer models indicate that when traffic jams occur, they are the result of bottlenecks (merging lanes, bad curves, accidents), which constrict flow. Find a way to eliminate the bottlenecks and flow will be restored.

SUCH was the happy, practical, and deterministic state of affairs up until a few years ago, when several German theoretical physicists began publishing papers on traffic flow in Physical Review Letters, Journal of Physics, Nature, and other publications not normally read by civil engineers. The Germans had noticed that if one simulated the movement of cars and trucks on a highway using the well-established equations that describe how the molecules of a gas move, some distinctly eerie results emerged. Cars do not behave exactly like gas molecules, to be sure: for example, drivers try to avoid collisions by slowing down when they get too near another car, whereas gas molecules have no such aversion. But the physicists added some terms to the equations to take the differences into account, and the overall description of traffic as a flowing gas has proved to be a very good one. The moving-gas model of traffic reproduces many phenomena seen in real-world traffic. When a flowing gas encounters a bottleneck, for example, it becomes compressed as the molecules suddenly crowd together -- and that compression travels back through the stream of oncoming gas as a shock wave. That is precisely analogous to the well-known slowing and queuing of cars behind a traffic bottleneck: as cars slow at the obstruction, cars behind them slow too, which causes a wave of stop-and-go movement to be transmitted "upstream" along the highway.

Them and Us

I wish I wrote this:

By treating talented people as machines, while simultaneously removing many of their powers and choices, management hierarchies can remove one perceived source of risk - programmers thinking for themselves. This leaves the programmers feeling controlled and not trusted, but satisfies the manager's need for control in an uncertain world. - by Kevin Rutherford

 

Poppendieck's giving UK course in October

Yipee!

My friend Hubert Smits has arranged for the Poppendiecks to run a Lean Software Development course in Edinburgh this October.

Well done Hubert (for this and the Scrum Master course last year).

Pareto rule and/or TOC?

1. Take a city you know well.
2. In your mind, draw a map of the major traffic flows. Draw these in Grey. They don't have to be perfect or even precise.
3. Draw angry red circles in the spots you know to be peak-hour bottlenecks. You'll already have a good idea where these are. There won't be many.  They're probably at round-abouts, on-ramps, off-ramps, traffic lights. You spend a lot of time waiting to get to them, then speed up once you get past them. They may differ in the morning and evening.
4. Now stand back and view the map. Even if it's a bit blury it's a very useful tool. Your local government hopefully has a paper version pinned to their wall.

Right.

Now take a look at the grey traffic flows. Although they make up less than 20% of the roads, they probably contain over 80% of the traffic flow, so this is where the most wear-and-tear and accidents will be be. And the most eyeballs. This is where the Pareto (80/20) principle applies. If you're in charge of road maintainance, emergency services or billboard advertising then you're interested in the grey traffic flows.

Now focus on the angry red bottlenecks. If you want to get more traffic through the system and people home quicker then the bottlenecks are your leverage point. Improving the capacity at points other than the bottlenecks doesn't improve the flow of traffic across the whole city (unless they provide new alternatives to the bottlenecks, in which case they improve the bottleneck capacity indirectly and therefore the whole systems throughput). This is where you use Theory of Constraints: to find and improve leverage points. Now go draw another map. But this time focus on something important to you where change is within your span of control or sphere of influence. Go do some good.

Tight High Heels

Every couple of days, or so, I have a little vanity moment and check my typepad stats.

A couple of hours ago someone came to my site via this google search:

http://www.google.ca/search?q=%22tight%20high%20heels%22&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=10&sa=N

I'm number 3 in the list.  How embarrassing.

I am an email GOD!

Jeff Sutherland very kindly gave me a GMail invite.

I AM AN EMAIL GOD!

Click on the spam protected email on the left, just below my picture, or try me on clarke.ching AT gmail.com

I AM AN EMAIL GOD!

Thoughts via Winnie the Pooh

Here's a Winnie the Pooh quote that seems quite pertinent to all wannabe paradigm changers: Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn't. -- A. A. Milne [via a Ron Jeffries email signature]