Clarke Ching's Rocks and Snowballs

Missing in Action

I was browsing through the latest HBR issue at lunch time today – as you do – and I found a list of recommended books for 2005.

This one caught my attention:

The Broken Windows Theory for Business
Michael Levine
(Warner Business Books, November)
A popular law-enforcement theory holds that communities can reduce crime by addressing quality-of-life issues. This consultant wonders whether fixing the little things that bother employees will motivate them to tackle the big issues more effectively.

I want to buy it (naturally) … But …

But … I can’t find the damned book anywhere on the web.  It doesn’t seem to exist. 

Huh?

The best I can come up with is this reproduction of the HBR list from 800–CEO-READ. 

But no damned book.

Can anyone help?

Stickyminds article: What Software Development Projects Can Learn from the Quality Revolution

Here’s a wee snippet from the latest – but not yet published –  chapter of my book:

Craig interrupted my thoughts, ‘It doesn’t surprise me that you are in the mess you are in.  My education and experience are in Quality and Lean thinking and it is obvious to me that when your industry “embraced” quality it embraced the wrong quality guru and it neglected the one vital secret ingredient that makes doing quality easy.’

I sat up straight in my chair.  ‘Secret ingredient?’

If you can’t wait to find out what the secret ingrediant is then pop over to Stickyminds.com where they have just published my article: “What Software Development Projects Can Learn from the Quality Revolution”.

I suspect though, that since you’re reading this blog, then you already know what the solution is.

Herding Cats

Cool!  I’ve just discovered that Glen B. Alleman has started blogging.  Glen is a very clever chap, a very experienced project manger and a damned good writer. 

I look forward to learning from his blog.

Pull your socks up amazon.com

Updated 20 Feb, 2005: because it needed a little further clarification.

Amazon.com normally do a pretty good job an excellent job.  I buy from them again and again because I trust them to provide excellent service and value.  But this little “trick” annoys me and makes me trust them just a little less:

• the price quoted for this audio book on amazon.com is $9.99,
• but when I get redirected to audible.com the acutal price is $20.97. 
• The lower price is only available for first time buyers at audible.com.

I wouldn’t have clicked if amazon.com had been honest.

Step 1 Identify the constraint: No Broadband

The UK Sunday Times runs a story today (which I suspect is blocked outside the UK) about how rural businesses are suffering because of the lack of broadband access. 

Rural firms are dead without a broadband connection. David Hewson reveals a growing exodus from countryside to town

Andrew Button ought to be enjoying the perfect 21st-century high-tech lifestyle. Home is a former farm in 40 acres, set 10 miles from the glorious Cardiganshire coast of Wales. Work is a family management consultancy based in a former barn, selling and interpreting data for a variety of educational and commercial cus- tomers, looking to understand the latest demographic information. Yet, nine months after Button moved to the countryside with his wife and her parents, who are partners in the company, business is not as he expected. The broadband internet connection he was promised four days after they moved in failed to materialise because BT decided he was too far from the exchange. Instead of employing more staff to expand his consultancy, Button is staring at a £40,000 investment that has generated not one penny of return, while trying to run a complex database down a single dial-up phone line, shared between two houses to serve business and domestic needs. “I interviewed staff because I need someone here to help us grow,” he complains. “Right now, I can’t give them anything to do because we simply can’t expand. I keep reading about the broadband rollout that’s supposed to be happening everywhere, but I don’t see it. Even if you have a broadband-enabled exchange — as we have — it still might not reach your property. We need to bounce 100MB files around to customers, and I cannot do that down a dial-up line.”

The Kingdom was lost for want of a broadband connection …

TOC links

And here is a fantastic list of TOC links and examples.

How to build a high-throughput sales process

TOC isn’t just about manufacturing.

Here’s an article about using TOC to manage the sales process.

[via Santiago Velásquez Martínez on the cmsig email list]

Chaos is Back by Frank Hayes

Here’s a nice brief article by Frank Hayes from Computer World discussing the latest Chaos report:

We're losing ground. Only 28% of IT projects succeed these days, down from 34% a year or two ago. Outright failures -- IT projects canceled before completion -- are up to 18% from 15%. The remaining 51% of IT projects are "challenged" -- seriously late, over budget and lacking expected features.

Those numbers are from the just-completed Chaos report from The Standish Group. Standish has been doing this study since 1994, and ever since, we've been steadily improving our ability to deliver projects. A decade ago, only 16% of IT projects were successes. By last year, it was twice that. Now we're backsliding.

… [via Greg Belanger on the ScrumDevelopment yahoo group]

Hayes recommends keeping projects small, which is nice but I’m writing a book where this is one of my recommendations … so I wish he’d keep his big gob shut :)

Two things worth noting:

• According to Chaos a “Successful” projects is on time, on budget and with all the features and functions originally promised. 
  
  I can live with on time and on budget but given the finding (from Standish's chairman Jim Johnson) that on average, 45% of built requirements are never used, and 19% are only used rarely then a project probably isn’t successful if it delivers what is in the original spec, because the spec was a guess and is wrong at the start.   So, according to this definition a successful project is one that doesn’t benefit from the learning done during it’s execution and delivers a product that the customer mostly doesn’t want.  Hmmmm.
  
• Statistically speaking (and forgive me because I’m not a statistician) when the numbers go up and down like described in the first chapter (you can see the 1994 – 2000 numbers here) then you can’t predict trends – i.e. you can’t conclude that we are in fact backsliding.  Just because it was sunny all last week and then it rained suddenly today doesn’t mean that monsoon season is upon us.  So, we aren’t necessarily getting better or worse …

Food for thought

Famous Malyasian saying : "The chicken who eats coconut from the table is getting closer to the pot"

– according to TV chef Keith Floyd (from Far Flung Floyd)

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