Agile Development Blog

Last week, 10 of us from Rally product development, sales and coaching attended the Lean Software and Systems Consortium’s 2010 conference in Atlanta.  For me, the learning highlights of the conference were in the Systems Engineering track  led by James Sutton. To kick-off his talk on Lean Systems Engineering, James used a number of compelling stories around different systems and what guide them.  As part of his introduction to systems, he played this hilarious Dave Snowden video about how you plan or act based on one of 3 systems in which you might find yourself -- Chaotic, Ordered and Complex.

David Snowden -- Cognitive-Edge -- Ways to Plan a Party

James, a Systems Engineer, Principal with Lockheed Martin, is an invested member of the Lean SSC board as well as a technical advisory member.  He is the deepest expert that I have ever met in the field of systems engineering. And he has a wonderful gift for bringing multiple resources to bear in helping people understand and care about systems. For a Civil Engineer and Computer Science major like myself his talk and track were the definition of a prop-spinning geek nirvana.

Systems are guided by the pressures that form them

The point of view that James imparted on us was to understand that there are fundamental systems in which we operate. They are not value-based; one is not better than the other. They just help us set context and inform us about the world around us. Why should we care about this? How you approach your product and project development depends on which system  you find yourself in. And, as it turns out, the system you find yourself in is largely guided by one of four compelling pressures. That is, you will recognize the system in which you operate based on what is driving you to act.

There are four fundamental pressures that guide us: abundance, scarcity, desperation, or conformity. And each leads to a different system context. To illustrate this, James led us through the story of four different nations following the second World War.  Each nation, responding to different drivers, led to advances in different types of systems management approaches in use today.

• United States -- Abundance -- Systems Engineering

• Japan -- Scarcity -- Lean

• England -- Desperation -- Chaos Theory

• USSR -- Creativity and Conformity -- Patterns of Inventiveness
  

The Four Systems

Given this sense of what guides particular systems, James explained that we live in a world of four fundamental systems: Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaos.

Cynefin

Once you recognize what system you are in, you discover what principles and practices will best serve you in that system. But systems tend to not be static. So, James presented what agent or pressure might cause you to move to a different system and therefore what tools and practices would guide your thinking and actions for transition.

For instance,  if you are in a Simple system and are moving into a Complicated system, Lean Manufacturing and Analytical Systems Engineering are your best tools and guides. If, however, you are in a Complex system verging on Chaos, you’ll work best relying on the perspective originated by Dave Snowden: Cynefin, the Welsh word for “the place where you hold multiple things.” Cynefin serves Complex systems well as it emphasizes emergent behaviors and, what Snowden refers to as “sense-making.”

The history and vision from this talk became almost a grand unifying theory for me. It all made great sense. If you are a  systems engineering fan, do not miss the recorded version of this talk when it becomes available.

Thanks Lean SSC

While 6 speakers and several attendees from Europe were prevented from attending the conference due to the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud, the Lean SSC rolled with the punches and pulled off an excellent event. The folks able to attend and the over 40 sessions offered created an electric buzz both in the air and on Twitter. Given the caliber of sessions, hallway discussions, and Open Space,  I am sure there will be many posts that emanate from attendees. And no doubt new ideas will be growing that were nurtured by the conference. Kudo’s to the Lean SSC board for creating a space for this excitement and emergence.

About the Authors:

My name is Jean Tabaka.

I live in an Agile and Lean world where we take a “stop the line” mentality for granted.  I am encouraged to give my observations and recommendations about continuous improvement. I’ve been learning to create my own reality, to continue learning and to find my strengths in cross-functional work. I passionately read about, talk about, and practice Agile and Lean principles. These principles continually inform how I can create benefit for my company and how I derive benefit from my company.

I’m the lucky Tabaka.

My father, Jim Tabaka, was a life-time white collar worker for GM, starting fresh out of University of Illinois with his mechanical engineering degree.  He worked 12 hour days, on his feet the entire time, walking the plant floor, making sure cars kept coming off the line at all costs. He retired at age 55 with a great pension and unbelievable health benefits.

My brother Tim Tabaka is a retired GM blue collar autoworker. Well, retired is the euphemism for, “Would you please leave early so that we can bring in a younger, less experienced, cheaper workforce?”  During his time at GM he worked any shift he was told to work. He even moved to a different, older plant. Why? He needed the job and they wanted to replace the older workforce with a cheaper, younger workforce.

My nephew, Andrew Tabaka is a current GM autoworker. He came in under-skilled and now works a night shift for a GM subsidiary building brake assemblies. Andrew is one of the people Tim trained on his way out. Andrew is 24 and this is his first job. I suspect he intends it to be his life-time job. Well.

I’ve never worked for GM but learned to drive a stick-shift on a Chevy Corvette (yes!) And, while growing up, my dad used to take me to visit the plant where he worked in St. Louis. The acres of parking lot outside the plant were for all the cars that had rolled off the line but could not be shipped to a dealer. Too many defects.

Get the picture? We have been and are a GM family.

And I’m telling you this for a reason.

In 1984, GM and Toyota entered into the NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing Inc.) agreement to co-run an auto plant in Fremont CA. NUMMI made big news at the time. It took an existing, highly dysfunctional GM workforce and turned them into one of the most productive auto plants in the US. A documentary about this recently aired on Ira Glass’s “This American Life”. What a story, too fantastic to be made up: the complete turn-around of a failing GM plant to a thriving joint venture. The documentary recounts 30 disgruntled, unmotivated GM employees traveling to Japan to work with Toyota employees to learn “The Toyota Way”. It features commentary from Jeffrey Liker (author of “The Toyota Way”) John Shook (author of “ Managing to Learn”) as well GM line workers and GM management. The power punch of the Ira’s story? GM never replicated the success at the NUMMI plant.  Several theories about this failure are postulated at the end of the documentary. It is up to the listener to form their own conclusions.

Two weeks ago, as a coda to the documentary:

The Fremont NUMMI plant had its last Corolla roll off the line. NUMMI was shut down, this time for good. It was the first factory ever shut down by Toyota.

I care both personally and professionally about that darn NUMMI plant. The Ira Glass documentary about NUMMI’s turnaround and GM’s failure to replicate struck a deep chord for me. I called my brother Tim that evening to get the real scoop. I had heard him recount what his life was like in a GM plant and I wanted to hear it from him again.

The truth is the NUMMI success DID have an impact on GM outside the Fremont plant. Prior to the NUMMI conversion, life in the Oklahoma City plant where Tim worked was miserable. As in the story “Rivethead” by Ben Hamper about GM plant life in the 1970’s, alcohol abuse, absenteeism and nervous breakdowns were common place at Tim’s workplace. He lived the life documented about the Fremont plant prior to the Toyota venture.

Life with the Andon.

In the late 1980’s though, Tim told my about how things were changing, amazingly so. A “stop the line” mentality was adopted at their plant. Use of an “andon” was introduced. One tug on the andon was the alert to call over for some help; a second tug was “stop the line” we need more time to fix this. Tim was one of the people who roamed the plant floor prepared to assist when the andon was pulled once so that it wouldn’t have to be pulled again. Every station had its own andon “song”. (Apparently the “Baby Elephant” song became the bane of my brother’s existence.)

Life was so much better (the “Baby Elephant” notwithstanding). Workers were encouraged to stop the line and fix problems versus pushing cars through. Teams were brought together to offer suggestions for how to improve the work processes and the flow within the plant. Quality went way up and defects went down. Morale and motivation went up. Alcohol and drug abuse went down (this is anecdotal from my brother, not based on an actual study.) And for Tim personally, plant life improved dramatically. The new system played into his strength: being a cross-functional team member, challenged and rewarded for doing his work.

Back to the NUMMI story and what GM ultimately adopted.

Fair enough. I have my brother Tim as an example of an autoworker who benefited (well, except for the darn “Baby Elephant” team’s issues). But I also have a father who, as a GM executive was expected to tirelessly follow and communicate the GM line. It took its own deep toll on him. And I have a nephew who continues to work as a very replaceable night shift cog in a different plant in the GM machine. GM has declared bankruptcy for any number of reasons. And now, my mother’s benefits, my brother’s pension, and my nephew’s pay are in peril.

My name is Jean Tabaka, daughter of Jim Tabaka, sister of Tim Tabaka, and aunt of Andrew Tabaka. My father never benefited from Lean thinking. My brother had a wonderful brief taste of it. And my nephew is now somewhere in an odd stew of Lean and non-Lean practices.

I’m the lucky Tabaka. Lean has brought me a lot and taught me a lot in my Agile world. While Lean may be most closely affiliated with the Toyota Production System; and while it may be assumed that failure to adopt the TPS was GM’s ultimate demise, I believe the Lean lessons have continued to grow, spread, and morph as a result of both success and of failure in Lean adoptions.

GM, Toyota (yes Toyota), NUMMI, the Oklahoma City plant and others all have their stories of success and failure. Each had their approach to Lean adoption. Like Tim Tabaka and NUMMI, we have our lessons to learn from Lean in our software world. Lean is not the panacea. The TPS cannot tackle all issues. Agile is not the panacea. No one methodology can guarantee product success in all situations. Our continued belief in checking the value of our adoptions is critical. Our conviction to pay attention to failure modes as well as success is key. If you don’t believe me, ask my brother Tim.

Today we announced Rally’s acquisition of AgileZen, a visual project collaboration tool that manages work using the Lean concept of Kanban. AgileZen is a simple, elegant project collaboration tool that supports software development by providing a Web-based Kanban board.

Our definition of Kanban

If you aren’t yet familiar with Kanban, there are lots of great resources out there. The simplest description we could come up with for Kanban and Scrum is in our press release, but we welcome your thoughts and additions:

Kanban literally means “sign board,” and in Lean it is the signaling tool for visualizing and tracking work as it flows through various stages of a process. A Kanban board does this by exposing bottlenecks, queues and waste in a process so that teams can deliver high quality, high value work. Both Scrum and Kanban methods focus on early value delivery, and both provide transparency into the work in progress.  But Kanban can operate with a different planning and delivery cadence than Scrum and emphasizes different metrics.

What does this mean for Rally and the industry?

We believe that Kanban is a simple but natural extension of Agile software development. It will invite more teams into Agile and provide more runway for mature teams. But most importantly, it will help us extend Agile beyond development teams to create an Agile business. The AgileZen team has been effective in all of these areas. We are in heavy learning mode and, at least in our view, the entire industry is still figuring out how Scrum and Kanban work together and which methodology is better fit for various projects.

Welcome Nate and Niki Kohari!

Nate and Niki Kohari, co-founders of AgileZen, have built the best Web-based Kanban board out there, and we have the utmost respect for their product, company and brand. We are incredibly excited for them to join our North Carolina office.

What does this mean for AgileZen?

First, you should read Niki’s blog post. Not much has changed for AgileZen users. Together, we’ll continue to support the AgileZen solution as a low-cost Kanban-focused project collaboration tool, and users can access support as they always have.  If you aren’t familiar with the AgileZen product yet,  check out their free product.

Join us at the Lean SSC Conference in Atlanta next week!

The Rally and AgileZen teams will present our products and coaching services at the Lean Software & Systems Conference 2010 in Atlanta April 21-23. Ryan is also speaking on Plan-Do-Check-Act. We look forward to seeing you there!

About the Authors: Ryan Martens is a goat cheese maker,  founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Jean Tabaka is a wine enthusiast, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

We compiled our carbon footprint data for 2009, and the CO2 per 100 paying users continues to decline.  In 2008, we emitted about 8.2 tons of CO2  per 100 users.  In 2009, that number dropped to about 7.8 tons of CO2 per 100 users. (We include building utilities, employee commuting, air travel, IT, hosted operations and SaaS vendors in our total carbon calculation)

Unfortunately, the total tons for our business and tons per employees continues to increase as we are growing in both employees, offices and people that travel on airplanes.  In 2009, we expanded the use of virtualization (VMWare), HD videoconferencing (Lifesize), desktop videoconferencing (both Google and Skype) and located more of our sales and field services employees into their territories.

As we look to 2010, we are beginning to work with our landlord to do longer term planning with regard to solar options for our Boulder facility.  We are also making major upgrades to our hosted operations and testing/staging platforms to support our growth and the growing mission critical nature of our application.  I expect our total CO2 to increase, our CO2 per employee to flatten and CO2 per 100 users to continue to decline as users, employees, airline miles and servers all go up in 2010.

Some of the e-waste collected at our recycling fair

To end on bright note, we ran our electronic recycling fair again.  This year 8 pallets of CRT, TV, computers, servers and amplifiers left our offices and homes headed again for local recycling at Luminous Recycling in Denver.  Total weight of the 8 pallets was 3,984 pounds. This year we did it around St. Patrick’s day and held a Biggest-Loser-style competition in our game room with green beer on tap.  Though the race was tight between one of our engineers, an accountant and our CFO, I am proud to announce that engineering team of Mike and Susan won the competition this year with over 450 pounds of e-waste diverted to local recycling.

To read more about our carbon footprint, you can read my post and comments from 2009.