Extreme Enthusiasm

Summary: my friend Federico Gobbo argues about the wisdom of pushing hard for Italian citizens to learn English.

Segnalo questo post del mio amico Federico Gobbo, che affronta l’argomento dell’insegnamento della lingua inglese, e di come, quanto e come sia saggio spingere in quella direzione.

I’m reading The Toyota Way by Jeffrey K. Liker. It’s changing my mind.

When I started this book, I thought, well, this book is a compilation of interviews and stories, so there is no real meat, it’s not really teaching the methods they are using in Toyota. I thought it was a pretty fluffy book. Was I wrong!

It’s true that the meat of the book are stories that the author experienced himself, or were related to him. It’s not true that there are no practical hints on how to apply Lean Production; there are many examples of how to do that. But that’s not the point. I mean, Toyota makes cars, I make software. The actual practices are meant to solve their particular problem. What this book shows is how getting good at management comes from a shift in the way you think. The wealth of examples in the book pushes the reader to a different way of thinking.

The Toyota Way is also a depressing book. Perhaps half the stories in the book are about how American companies tried to apply The Toyota Way and failed miserably. This speaks about the importance of being serious in what you do. The Toyota people are dead serious. Which is not to say they don’t have fun… If your idea of fun is to stretch your capabilities to the limit, keep learning and getting better.

There is another feeling that comes to me while reading. The Toyota company is what in Italy is called “primo della classe”. This expression means “the boy or girl with the best grades in their class”, and carries a negative connotation. This says a lot about the way people thinks in Italy; the idea that someone can be better than me, or maybe *a lot* better than me is met with hostility. Our thinking is, “they are first because they spend countless hours on the books; if I did that I would get the same grades, but I won’t bother”. Ha! Do I have what it takes to really spend this effort? I probably don’t.

So these Toyota people come across as “primi della classe” because they are really good. And there are companies out there that are way better than the norm, and still are not as good as Toyota; which shows that there is a long path of improvement. This realization can be either exciting or depressing; it’s our choice :-)

As I keep reading the book, it takes me a lot of time as I’m taking notes, and all the while I think how the principles of the Toyota Way would apply in my situation. For instance, the book says that Taiichi Ohno insisted that when you walk to a plant, you should see immediately if everything is OK, or there are problems.

Translate that to software development. How would you do that? Good question! Agile developers do many things to make the development process visible; the cardwall, the burndown chart, the velocity chart are good visual indicators. But can we do better? Translate “plant” to “a workstation with a pair of programmers at work”. Can you see that their work is processing smoothly? One valuable insight is recognizing that the pair might block on a problem, just like an assembly line can jam. How do you see when a pair is blocked? (Hint.) What do you do when a pair is blocked? Do you treat this block as seriously as you would for a defect in the product? Do you try to understand the root cause of the block, so that it doesn’t happen again? Do you measure how many such “incidents” happen in a week? Do you measure how much time is spent working smoothly, and how much time is spent blocked on a problem?

One day I was discussing with Josh (not his real name) a problem we have with the customer. The problem is a very common one: priorities keep changing, every day we receive new “urgent” tasks, we have lots of work-in-progress, and it’s difficult to get the customer to approve or give feedback on what we did.

Josh did not agree with me on the nature of the problem. He said that he respects our customer as Product Owner; he accepts the priorities, and any new task they give us is properly recorded in the backlog. But Josh, I said, I’m afraid that the day-to-day priorities they give us are not what the customer really needs. The boss of the person that gives us priorities may not be happy with the results we are getting. Josh replied, “if what we do is not what their boss wants, then let it be. It will come up at some point.”

What is Josh thinking? It may be that his reasoning is “it’s not the best course of action for us to rock the boat with their boss; your worries might be wrong, perhaps the priorities are right after all. And if you are right and the priorities are wrong, well, the best course of action is to let this problem emerge.” That’s my best interpretation of what Josh thinks.

The other interpretation is that Josh is delegating responsibility to the customer’s product owner. If the PO gets priorities wrong, we’ll fail, but it will not be our fault. It’s another way to say “You just tell me what I have to do and then I do it”. This goes against the principle of taking responsibility for the outcome of a project. The reasoning is that if the project fails, we can show that we did all that was required of us. But being “right” in a failing project is not a great outcome.

What’s my conclusion? I found two interpretations for Josh’s reaction. They are both valuable; I resolved to talk to Josh further, to see if there is anything else behind his words. And I resolved to discuss the issue of priorities with the POs.