Clarke Ching - Split Infinitives and Beyond.

Emotion plus Reason = Change?

Very interesting article, especially for us left-brainers, “Why Logic Often takes a Back seat”

[via Cliff Atkinson … who's book I should buy, except I'm broke this month because I bought a new car to drive to the new job that's paying for the new car]

Who turned the radio off, Mr Hawthorne?

A wee while ago I mentioned a paper that questioned the validity of the well known hawthorne effect.

My friend Graeme passed on this story from his time working in a fish factory, which seemed kinda relevant:

A factory I worked for consistently processed 50,000kg of raw product per day. One day the amplifier had a hernia and the radio stopped
playing in the factory. As relaying broadcast vhf signals was not part of our core business, repairing it was relgated to the bottom of the
factory maintenance to-do list. After 3-4 days production started to decline. This was initially put down to a drop in quality of the raw material. After 2 weeks, production was down to 40,000kg with good quality input.

The factory manager asked me what was going on. I replied: "How should I know? I just collate the data and give you the reports." He said: "Stop being smart. You worked in the factory for 8 years, what do you think is wrong?"

I told him: "The radio is broken. They're bored out of their brains, and are fooling around instead of working."

I guess that his work, as a manager, was so different from that done by the guys cutting up fish that he just couldn’t see this perspective.   He suggested that the staff were a pack of sad bastards if all it took to make them work faster was some crap music and did nothing about it.

But, the factory is incredibly boring. Wherever you look, all you can see is stainless steel machinery, white painted walls, and 150 people dressed in white boots, white overalls and white hats.  Oh, and it stinks of fish.

Without the radio, all that can be heard is 40-odd hydraulic motors churning away, water being squirted around at12,000psi and occasionally a steel pallet being dropped on the concrete floor. Wearing earmuffs, you can hardly hear the person next to speaking.

When I worked in the factory I found that, with some practice, you do the job on autopilot. The music is like Peter Pan's 'happy thought', taking you away from the misery. Without the radio as a distraction, all you can do is stare at the product on the conveyor belts and think is 'C'mon Brucie, where's the cuddly toy?'

That weekend a new amplifier was installed, and by Wednesday the factory was back to full speed.

Microsoft Secrets !

I'm currently reading the very readable Microsoft Secrets by Michael A. Cusumano and Richard W Selby (1998).

I’ve been reading how they "buffer" their projects in a critical-chain-like way. You can read the appropriate parts of the book by following the links on this page which lists the pages with the word "buffer" on them using amazons "search inside" feature. [you may have to login to amazon after the first click].

I especially like their project management principles at the bottom of page 64 because they combines elements of critical chain [principle 2] and agile thinking [principles 2, 3, 4, 5]:

1. Let people do their own schedules

2. Build in buffer time for the unseen delays that always occur

3. Assume change will happen so don't waste time trying to write complete specifications upfront.

4. Manage by milestones, starting with the most difficult things first

5. Focus on customer problems, not technologies or processes

6. Move people around, to mix the good and bad.

 

The Hawthorne defect - By Berkeley Rice

What?  The Hawthorne effect is wrong:

As the recent attempts to re-evaluate the Hawthorne experiment demonstrate, the studies continue to serve as a kind of Rorschach test for managers and industrial psychologists, enabling them to find evidence to support many different and often conflicting theories of how to motivate the modern industrial worker.  (One recent analysis suggested that the increased output at Hawthorne was really caused by the deepening economic depression at the time, and the women’s resulting need for more money.) This confusion may not be all bad.  For whatever the flaws, in the conduct and subsequent interpretations of the Hawthorne studies, they did spur effort to humanize the workplace, to find more sensitive ways to mobilize workers, rather than regarding them as assembly line robots that could be kept producing by fear and discipline.  The promise was that social engineering, supported by enlightened management and cooperative workers, could usher in a new era of industrial peace and prosperity.  If this hope has since proven somewhat naïve, it was at least well intentioned.

Baby talk

This morning, I showed my 2.5 year old daughter Ash a pretty flower. 

She said, "Pink".

I said, "That's right, it's pink but the middle is yellow".

"What middle?", she asked, poking the flower in the middle.

I said, "Well, this", point to her head, "is Ash's top".

"No", she said, pointing at her T-Shirt, "this is Ashey's top".

"And, this", I said pointing at her toes, "is Ashey's bottom".

"No", she said, "That Ashey's toes".

She pointed at her rear-end and said "This Ashey's bottom"

"No, that's Ashey's middle", I said. "Like the flower's middle".

"No, that Ashey's bottom".

I gave up.  She was right and I was wrong.

Finally ... Chapter 8 of RollingRocksDownhill - "Candour and Courage"

Hey, finally: Chapter 8 - Candour and Courage  is available at www.rollingrocksdownhill.com

It’s been a while since my last chapter, so a quick reminder:

Steve is our hero.  He manages the internal software development for a large company, Bigfin, and he’s having a bad month.  His most important project VSP – Very Secret Project – has to be delivered months earlier than originally promised despite the original date being doubtul; his boss Eleanor has told him that his whole department will be outsourced; VSP’s staff have just mutinied and he doesn’t trust VSP’s project manager Paul. 

His only hope is someone called Craig Houdini (who’s surname will change in draft 2.0, I promise) who studied VSP for his MBA and wrote a report criticising how Steve’s deparment built software and making a recommendation on how to fix things.  Eleanor, Steve’s boss, seems to have bought in to the report.  So have Phil and Anne, two of Steve’s close friends and must trusted and competent employees.  But, Steve hasn’t read the report yet (he passed the original onto his methodology department and heard nothing more of it and he’s been too busy rescuing VSP to read it since then). 

This chapter kicks off as Steve returns to his office after convinces his mutinying staff to return to work.

Scotland only: Invite for Agile Training Session

I'm pleased to announce that Agile-Coach Rachel Davies will be presenting two agile training sessions in Edinburgh on Tuesday, 26th of April, 2005.  (Rachel will be our guest speaker at Agile Scotland on Monday the 25th).

Session 1: Morning - Test Driven Development and Refactoring

Hands-on technical training course for programmers teaching TDD (a core practice of XP that means automated unit tests are written before the production code) and Refactoring (another core practice of XP that uses a stepwize approach to clean up code).

Session 2: Afternoon - Agile Tracking

Agile Tracking a session for team-leads and project managers who want to learn agile techniques for keeping the team on track. Includes hands-on exercises for running stand-up meetings, tracking velocity and building information radiators.

Cost: £60 for one session; £100 for both sessions (plus VAT).

Location: Edinburgh City (details to be finalised)

About Rachel: Rachel specializes in coaching teams in agile software development. She has experience in managing teams, requirements analysis and programming in several languages. Rachel is a presenter at and organizer of industry conferences and a serving director of the

Agile Alliance. Her largest engagement to date was at Egg internet

bank where she provided coaching to all Egg internal IT and teams at outsourcing partners, Keane and Lostwax. Recently, she has been working with teams at pharmaceutical companies Roche and GlaxoSmithKline.

Rachel has facilitated requirements gathering and retrospective workshops at organizations in domains as varied as: bioinformatics, digital TV, drug safety, financial services, harbour board finance operations and government support of community waste recycling initiatives. Rachel is principal consultant with Agile Experience (www.agilexp.com ) and can be contacted at rachel@agilexp.com.

Next Steps:

Please contact me (Clarke Ching) at agile.scotland@gmail.com to make a booking (or for more details).

We've tried to keep the cost of the sessions as low as possible but this means that we will have to make a go/no-go decision, dependant on numbers, by 25th of March. In other words, please book as soon as possible.

Clarke Ching
www.clarkeching.com