Friday, June 30, 2006

Coming soon - Lisa Brummel interview

Today I met Lisa Brummel, Microsoft’s Senior VP for Human Resources. I got to visit the executive floor and chat with her for an hour about management, leadership, agile development, work environments, measurement, metrics, rewards, and bell curve distribution. The full interview will be posted here in a couple of weeks.

Better Together - Team by Skill Level

While I was traveling this week, I read Richard Farson‘s Management of the Absurd. Farson is a psychologist by trade and many of the insights in this, his earlier book, are derived straight from his earlier psychology results. There were several that caught my eye and I thought I’d blog this one first.

In flat structures with highly empowered, self-organizing teams (Farson calls these highly participative teams) the team members will tend to attack and weed out the strongest (or stronger) member(s), often the leader. In hierarchical structures, with command and control structures, the members will tend to attack and weed out the weaker members.

This result has tremendous implications for team assignment and resource allocation for agile managers. It essentially says that agile teams (or work groups) should be selected for a very similar skill level. For example, if you are a manager with 24 staff - 4 of whom are stars, 4 are weak players and the rest are good solid journeymen engineers - and you have to get 6 projects done, then you should group all the good people in to a single team and all the bad people in to a single team. The natural inclination is to spread the good people across the projects and spread the bad people across the projects. However, Farson’s result suggests that this will lead to dysfunction on the team and a likelihood that the team will pick on, single out and attack the strongest member. Definitely not a behavior we want to encourage on agile teams in a high trust environment.Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Faron+Richard, Management, Organization+Team, Psychology

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Openings on the MSF Team

We’re looking for some new people to join the MSF team here in Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters. If you are passionate about software engineering and software development lifecycle methodologies and process and you believe that you can be part of team that is inventing the next generation of software engineering methods and productivity then I’d like to hear from you.

If you believe that Team System is a revolutionary product and that with Team Architect, Software Factories, Domain Specific Languages, Patterns and Practices and MSF, Microsoft is taking the thought-leadership position in the industry and you’d like to be part of it then we’d like to hear from you.

We’re looking for a Group Manager/Lead Program Manager, a Process Engineer, a Lead Developer and  Lead Tester to join the existing MSF team members as part of the Visual Studio Team System business unit. If you are interested in learning more, drop me an email. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSF, Microsoft, VSTS, Jobs

Good versus Bad Variation

Good versus bad variation was a theme at last week’s Lean Management Summit in Chicago. It has clearly been a focus in Don Reinertsen’s recent work. [I hear he has a new book coming out soon. One book every ten years or so. Don prefers to write only a few books but capture a dense mix of high quality new material each time.] And Brad Appleton was talking about it too recently. I’ve talked about it too in the past. And then this morning Martin Geddes sends me a link to this piece from Confused of Calcutta which has some good basic advice that sums up the consensus at the Lean Management Summit:

• Organizing for routine work: Drive out variation
• Organizing for innovative work: Encourage variation

The post goes on to grind on some old and outdated views of manufacturing. For sure manufacturing has a focus on driving out variation. However, it isn’t true to claim that assembly lines are only capable of producing Model T Ford’s in black. In fact, modern manufacturing facilities are very flexible and modern automobiles are offered in as many as 30 billion configurations. It is in fact unusual for an assembly line to turn out more than a handful of cars in a single year that are in fact identical.

It was this vision of manufacturing that inspired Jack Greenfield in his vision for Software Factories. The idea, that we can capture the routine development work and encapsulate it as a reusable package of assets in something we [at Microsoft] call a Software Factory that can be deployed in to an application development project at minimal cost and effort thus enabling the development team to focus on the truly innovative and differentiating features in the design, is one that will greatly improve quality, reliability, and productivity in software engineering.

This concept can be tied to my ideas on strategic planning and product mix selection, that suggest we can divide a product mix into “table stakes” (or commodities), differentiators and spoilers. The commodity features are the ones we want to encapsulate in a software factory. Confused of Calcutta suggests that commodity features should always be developed as open source projects. Again at Microsoft we wouldn’t completely agree with this. Often open source projects are created as “spoilers” to spoil a profitable market for someone else. Instead, we see the role of Software Factories enabling a supply chain for commodity reusable application development assets. Software Factories enable capitalism and the development of a supply chain in our industry similar to the supply chains that exist for other industries like automotive. Sure some commodity components may be developed as collaborative industry initiatives. Some of those will be open source, but the key here is that it doesn’t always have to be that way. There is a capitalist alternative that potentially enables an exchange of value between horizontal market creators of commodity components and vertical or niche market operators delivering differentiated product and services. Technorati tag: Microsoft, Software+Factories, David+Anderson, Lean, Jack+Greenfield, Visual+Studio+Team+System, VSTS, Brad+Appleton, Innovation, Strategic+Planning, Software+Engineering

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Customizing MSF Process Templates

We’ve finally released the documentation guide for customizing MSF process templates. I’d like to thank Allison Bokone for her hard work puting these together. You can get them from the MSDN Library here. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, MSF, CMMI