Constant Random Change

A simple tip to start the first work week.

Forget the “Golden Rule”.

Everyone has different motivations in the workplace. Some are there for the money. Some are there for the titles and recognition. Some are there for the sense of achievement that comes with closing a deal or finishing a project. Some are there for the learning experience to prepare them for their next job.

It is a common mistake when dealing with co-workers to think that what motivates them is the same as what motivates us. You can’t bait fish with cake, nor can you entice people with worms.

So the next time you need to ask something from your subordinates, or the next time you need to convince your boss to do something, put things in that person’s perspective instead of your own. If you can’t, make an effort to find out more about those persons in order to make it putting yourselves in their shoes easier.

The Empire State Building was built in only 410 days, on schedule and 18% under-budget even without computers to handle the schedule.

PERT, like the Waterfall Model, was never meant to be used in real life.

Just two of the lessons you’ll learn about management in Mary Poppendieck’s presentation The Tyranny of “The Plan” recently hosted on InfoQ.

I’m just lucky I’m not in a traditional project while watching the presentation. Hehehe…

Here’s a lesson I picked up from a presentation I watched yesterday:

In the US, eggs are graded by the USDA as AA, A, and B grade eggs. Most consumers don’t know what these grades mean.

Curious folks could easily figure that one out by going to Wikipedia:

• U.S. Grade AA eggs have whites that are thick and firm; yolks that are high, round, and practically free from defects; and clean, unbroken shells. Grade AA and Grade A eggs are best for frying and poaching where appearance is important.
• U.S. Grade A eggs have characteristics of Grade AA eggs except that the whites are “reasonably” firm. This is the quality most often sold in stores.
• U.S. Grade B eggs have whites that may be thinner and yolks that may be wider and flatter than eggs of higher grades. The shells must be unbroken, but may show slight stains. This quality is seldom found in retail stores because they are usually used to make liquid, frozen, and dried egg products, as well as other egg-containing products.

When you think about it, these grades don’t really matter to consumers. All of them are perfectly edible. Very few people will notice the difference after they’re cooked. For most consumers, what matters more is the size of the egg and the freshness of the egg.

Another similar example is the grading of tomatoes. The USDA grades tomatoes by their color and their appearance.

The problem with this is that this metric won’t work on heirloom tomatoes (what some might argue as superior to typical tomatoes).

Also, this metric doesn’t state whether the tomato has a crap load of pesticides/fertilizers on it that would help it achieve that level of color and appearance.

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Now think of metrics used in your company: are they really relevant? or are they just there to provide a false sense of security?

I was supposed to rant about the inefficiencies and waste in my experience as a volunteer in a repacking center for relief goods last Tuesday. After a 4 hour blackout, though, my desire to rant dissipated so I’ll keep this short and simple:

The real bottleneck in repacking relief goods is the loading of the trucks.

A small truck can hold 300-500 packs for distribution. Unless the center has a fleet of 10 or 18 wheeler trucks (which is highly unlikely), the realistic number of outbound packs per hour is less than 1,000 packs.

That is one pack every 4 seconds, a rate that can easily achieved by a single assembly line consisting of only 20 people. (6 assigned to clothes segregation, 3 in rice packing, 1 assigned to soap packing, 5 people packing in series, and 5 people to restock their supplies)

And here we come to the whole point of the rant I didn’t make:

There is no reason why relief goods repacking centers with over 50 people on hand should produce inconsistent and poorly packed relief goods packs as there is enough time to introduce quality in the system.

Streamline the whole assembly line, get the extra people to do quality checks, increase the frequency of breaks… just do anything that can improve the quality of the packs. Remember that those packs are headed to flood victims: a poorly made pack can unknowingly add insult to injury.

After reading various books and magazine articles on management, many clueless managers suddenly become prone to making grave mistakes based on a certain fallacy:

High morale leads to high productivity.

When these managers hear how successful companies manage their employees, sometimes even going to great lengths to provide morale boosting perks, they think that if they do all of that to their employees they’re going to see a drastic improvement in productivity.

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As mentioned in the previous post, Deming influenced a number of 21st century management techniques. Most of them have already ascended to buzzword status like “Six Sigma” and “Total Quality Management (TQM)” and should be familiar to those working in corporations and bibiliophiles browsing books in local specialty bookstores.

Instead of enumerating and discussing all of those approaches to management, I’ll just give an overview on the management technique that encompasses most of them: Lean.

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Whenever you’re reading books or watching presentations on management, two names are bound to show up.

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For anyone who has experienced working in a corporate environment, reading books about 21st century management can be really depressing. Rapid Development made me feel really down (especially since it was just lying there in the office bookshelf with no managers or senior developers reading it), but it wasn’t as bad as The Essential Drucker: that book affected me so much that at one point I closed the book and didn’t touch it until I felt better.

Here’s an excerpt from Peopleware, another book on managing software teams, discussing something about productivity. See if it could make you put your face in your hands and groan:

Historians long ago formed an abstraction about different theories of value: The Spanish Theory, for one, held that only a fixed amount of value existed on earth, and therefore the path to the accumulation of wealth was to learn to extract it more efficiently from the soil or from people’s backs. Then there was the English Theory that held that value could be created through ingenuity and technology. So the English had an Industrial Revolution, while the Spanish spun their wheels trying to exploit the land and the Indians in the New World. They moved huge quantities of gold across the ocean, and all they got for their effort was enormous inflation (too much gold money chasing too few usable goods).

The Spanish Theory of Value is alive and well among managers everywhere. You see that whenever they talk about productivity. Productivity ought to mean achieving more in an hour of work, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an hour of pay. There is a large difference. The Spanish Theory managers dream of attaining new productivity levels through the simple mechanism of unpaid overtime. They divide whatever work is done in a week by forty hours, not by the eighty or ninety hours that the worker actually put in.

That’s not exactly productivity—it’s more like fraud—but it’s the state of the art for many American managers. They bully and cajole their people into long hours. They impress upon them how important the delivery date is (even though it may be totally arbitrary; the world isn’t going to stop just because a project completes a month late). They trick them into accepting hopelessly tight schedules, shame them into sacrificing any and all to meet the deadline, and do anything to get them to work longer and harder.