Decluttering the company | Hacker News Reader

Decluttering the company

economist.com

30 pointskevin14 comments

Interesting article. Currently where I work, a $10 bn IT company with 150k+ employees, this is a huge huge problem. The top management wants to bring the entire company under a single umbrella of processes, management practices etc. So far they have only caused problems.

Just to give an example, last year, most of the projects in the company were transitioned to Agile mode from the traditional waterfall. To enforce Agile, they MANDATED using White boards! There are audits in place where people check for each project if they use a white board. I tried arguing with the auditor "Our team is distributed, there are 3 members here, 3 in Mumbai, 2 in Chicago and 4 in NY. The physical white board does not make sense for our project. We maintain a digital whiteboard (in Atlassian's Greenhopper)."

I was met with a barrage of phone calls from managers who forced me to use a physical white board. I tried explaining , but apparently a process is a process.

I've been involved with the Agile movement since before the term "Agile" existed, so I can say with some authority that your managers are idiots twice over.

First, I do encourage to start with physical boards, but that's because I encourage teams to work in the same place. Agile methods work best with low-latency, high-bandwidth, always-on communication, and by far the easiest way to get that is by sitting in a dedicated team room. But if it's impossible for the team to be together, yeah, a white board just won't cut it.

Second, the point of all of the Agile approaches is to have teams continuously improve their process in response to local conditions. There is no single Agile process. There are common starting points, and that often includes a white board or a card board because those are very flexible tools that everybody feels comfortable adapting. But if the whole company is supposed to be doing exactly the same manager-dictated process, then it is definitionally not Agile, because of points 1 and 4 in the manifesto. [1]

On a personal note, I want to offer you an apology. It makes me sad that something with such promise for liberating employees and making work better has turned into just another stick to beat employees with. That is the exact opposite of what a lot of the early Agile people intended. I'm very sorry that we weren't more diligent in preventing the movement from getting co-opted by existing power dynamics.

[1] http://agilemanifesto.org/

Thanks! Another funny thing they talk about is velocity. It's the holy metric for managers. "Why isn't your velocity increasing anymore?" Asked one. I said "Because if we keep on increasing velocity, soon we will hit the speed of light." I had no better response.

Also, they tend to compare velocities between teams. Story point estimation technique is fundamentally subjective, and cannot be a point of comparison between two different teams. It's a difficult life, but I get by.

Yes, every bit of that is wrong. If managers put upward pressure on velocity numbers, they will get numbers that go up via point inflation. The right managerial question is: "What can I do to help you solve problems identified in this week's retrospective?"

Sadly, modern MBA-style management has some fundamental notions that work against Agile approaches. So you are probably in for more difficulty as they decide what has a higher priority. Feel free to email me if I can be of further service in discussing this.

Sure thanks. You have been of great help!

One of the fundamental tenets of the Agile Manifesto is People over Process. Interestingly, that point was lost on those managers. Next, they are going to want to talk to you about your flair.

That very true. Agility refers to flexibility and freedom from silly processes, or at least those processes which do not contribute to the product. Now, I get to code only 20-30% of my day. Rest goes in updating white boards for all team members across geographies, providing status to managers who are not on team, creating detailed status reports for each associate in team, creating defect sheets and fish bone diagrams for auditors etc. etc...

That sounds like Charlie Stosses laundry (an ISO 9000 branch of SIS)

Nitpick: I think the Laundry is supposed to be the sole surviving remnant of the SOE which will playing a huge part in winning WW2 lost the peacetime battle with the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, AKA MI6).

It's worth noting that the SIS seems to have produced quite a few authors (Graham Greene, John Le Carre) who wrote about the intelligence service they thought should have existed rather than the amateurish, Soviet spy-riddled organisation they actually worked in.

SOE was always part of SIS though there was always a lot of internal politics about who should run SIS FO vs Amy and Navy.

Cant make up my mind on Le care's take on the secret service not sure if he was the old pining for the empire stereotype or the new more professional.

An interesting response to this comes from the Lean Manufacturing world. He calls this a Lean "fairies and unicorns" story, and points out that none of this matters unless it actually improves value delivered: http://www.mfg-leadership.com/2014/08/08/so-you-decluttered-...

That makes sense to me. Too often these sorts of virtuous changes are done because a) everybody experiences the problem, and b) the proposed solution is politically useful to somebody. That doesn't mean the changes actually make anything better, though. It can be the corporate equivalent of the fad diet: creating a feeling of action without making any long-term improvement.

The rule to limit meeting sizes is interesting. There's nothing more irritating than sitting in a meeting you have no reason to be in just because everyone else is there, especially when you're eager to get something done! Conversely, nothing derails a meeting quite like someone who has something off-topic but important on his or her mind. Limiting the size of meetings should, in addition to giving people more time to work, make the meetings themselves more focused and efficient. However, there's a price to be paid. Sometimes the best ideas come from the person who has the least reason to attend the meeting. Also, it's often advantageous for everyone to have a big-picture view of what's going on.

I wonder if a different form of meeting structure might be a good middle ground. Perhaps meetings should have "principal" members and an "audience". Call a meeting with a sharp focus and as few principals as possible. The principals are expected to speak the most and form the consensus. The audience still has the ability so speak, but not to bring up new topics, and don't necessarily have to agree with the outcome for the meeting to conclude. If a meeting is meant to cover different topics, the principals could change for each topic.

I suspect this format of meeting would be difficult to get people to buy into. However, depending on a company's needs, rigidly limiting meeting sizes might not always be worth the cost.

Allowing some one to go of topic and derail the meeting is a sign of a poor chair or more likely some one who's never had any training in how to run meetings and unfortunately a lot of people in our industry have no experience of how meetings should be run.

Having an agenda an sticking to it is key and also if a meeting is going of the rails people need to step up and take ownership and stop the derailment.

The problem with de-cluttering is that a large portion of the workforce depends for it's livelihood on institutional clutter. They become professionals at navigating, maintaining and extending said clutter and moving this group out of the way is very very difficult.

See also the article on 3 day work weeks posted on HN. This one of the largest reasons it ain't gonna happen just yet.

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