Monday, March 27, 2006

Txt as an Exploitation Method

I’ve been behind in reading the Economist since I was traveling. I just picked up this week’s edition and randomly opened it and my eye was caught by this article [Sorry, E+ content] about the medical uses of mobile phones and text messages - specifically using text to remind patients to attend doctor’s clinics and hospital outpatient clinics.

Medical resources such as doctors are a capacity constrained resource. The Theory of Constraints would teach us that we want to maximize the exploitation of that resource and we must decide how best to do that. In several health authorities in England have discovered that using text to remind patients to attend has reduced missed appointments with a general practitioner by 26-39% and hospital appointments by 33-50%. However, a similar study in Holland where missed appointments accounted for only 4% of the total did nothing to improve attendance but simply added annoyance to the people already attending.

This is a very good use of step 2 in TOC - decide how to exploit the constraint - in this case through the use of text messaging to improve attendance but note that the tactic only works in situations where non-attendance is poor. Trying to squeeze that extra 4% out of appointments in Holland might be unrealistic - people miss appointments for all sorts of reasons. The text message serves only to fix the forgetfulness but can’t fix other issues such as a puncture, a missed bus, a traffic jam and so forth.

Before you decide how to exploit the capacity constrained resource you need data and you need to analyze the proposed exploitation tactic against the data to predict the potential gain against the cost of the exploitation tactic - sending text messages might be cheap but in Holland it had an intangible cost - customer dissatisfaction. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, TOC

Sunday, March 26, 2006

Seattle’s For Me

Last night I took my buddy and fellow Seattle blogger Jim Benson (a closet muso who can claim to have formed the first punk rock band in Nebraska in his youth) to see the closing night of Belle and Sebastian’s Scotland’s For Me, North American tour. I seriously considered calling this post, “Scotland’s Not for Me” but decided it was too negative. I think it is wonderful that a group can stay in Glasgow and ply their trade worldwide and achieve success. For them staying in Scotland works for their personal and combined hedgehog concept - something they can be world class at (writing and playing songs); something they are passionate about; and something that drives their financial engine.

For me, staying in Scotland just didn’t fit my own personal hedgehog concept. And trust me I tried. As anyone who knew me back in the early ‘90’s can testify, I was a vocal advocate of high tech startups based in Scotland and a regular on the Scottish business and venture capital cocktail party scene. It wasn’t enough to work in the IT department of some local financial firm or manufacturing company. I wanted to create a World class software business in Scotland. In the end, I didn’t have the energy to keep trying. When Jeff De Luca called it was time to pack up my bags from my contract job in IBM’s PC company IT department - the job I was doing to pay off the debts I’d built up while working for buttons in startup companies and head off to build a new life overseas.

Nowadays, when someone asks me, “Why do you live and work in America?” (Americans may not have noticed but their country isn’t the most popular amongst foreigners from the “old continent”) I reply quite simply, “I’m in the software development business. I live in Seattle and I work on Microsoft’s Redmond campus - their World Headquarters. I get to do a job at which I am World class and for which I am deeply passionate. What could possibly bring me back to Scotland?” So nowadays, Seattle is for me. In many ways it reminds me of Glasgow. Similar size population. Alki beach feels like Largs. The Olympic mountains look like Arran and the Puget Sound resembles the Firth of Clyde (but running North rather than South). The key is that there is software work here - World class software work that I can get passionate about. Oh and the weather is rather better too Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Belle+Sebastian, James+Benson, Jim+Collins, Seattle, Glasgow, Scotland

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Lean vs. TOC - No Conflict

I have to comment on Pascal Van Cauwenberghe’s interesting post on the conflict between Lean’s focus on reducing waste and TOC’s focus on improving the bottleneck in a process flow. I feel that Pascal’s post is based on a misunderstanding of the Five Focusing Steps in TOC. The 3rd step tells us to “subordinate the rest of the system to the decision in step 2” and step 2 “decide how to exploit the bottleneck.”

What is generally misunderstood here is that the exploitation of the bottleneck nearly always involves changes elsewhere in the process or system. These changes often involve the elimination of waste because no one wants the waste to be processed through the constraint. In addition, subordination almost always involves the removal of policies that create waste. [Note: Eli Goldratt no longer uses the term “policy constraints”, policies that affect the performance of the bottleneck are outdated subordination decisions and must be changed in the subordination step.] I demonstrated these ideas recently by taking an updated version of my XIT Sustained Engineering paper from the TOCICO in Barcelona to the Lean Design and Development conference and recasting all the exploitation and subordination steps as waste reduction instead. [So I guess I have to post that presentation up now, huh? another day perhaps] Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, TOC, Lean

Connecting your Career with your Passions

Last night I met Curt Rosengren who calls himself a passion catalyst at a book tour party for Gus Lee author of newly published Courage, organized by Lisa Haneberg, a fellow Seattlite and author on management topics - of which much more in another post after I’ve read the book. Meanwhile, Curt helps clients to connect their careers with their passions to make themselves a lot happier at work and consequently at home too. Passionate, happy people are more productive and as managers we need to encourage our staff to find their passions and connect them with their career goals.

My site has attracted a whole lot of new readers in the last 6 months. Readership has doubled and it has probably quadrupled since I posted one of the true gems on this blog, Personal Hedgehog Concept. Now would be a good time to go back and read that, if you’re interested in building your success through the intersection of your passions, your abilities and your economic drivers. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Gus+Lee, Courage, Lisa+Haneberg, Management, Jim+Collins

Sunday, March 19, 2006

Postscript on SEPG

Glen used my appearance at SEPG as an opportunity to reiterate his position that agile techniques need to be used as point solutions inside a CMMI framework process. Glen’s welcome to his opinion on the matter but it doesn’t reflect what we’ve done at Microsoft. Agile methods are about feedback loops and continuous improvement, they are also about quality assurance throughout the lifecycle with test-first/test-driven techniques and very small batches of integration testing. The CMMI is a quality assurance framework design to drive continuous improvement. Agile embraces the essence of the CMMI. And hence, we did agile first and then mapped it to the CMMI model. I believe that this is future. If you are designing a process to map to the CMMI model this year, and you aren’t doing it with an agile method, then you’re behind the curve. At Microsoft, it wasn’t enough for us to drive quality on its own, we wanted to drive high productivity because that is what our customers expect from us. To deliver a highly productive CMMI method we had to start with an agile method. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, CMMI, SEPG