Monday, November 13, 2006

Thoughts from Asia #1 - Quality

I want to share some thoughts from my Asian tour this past August. I undertook the tour as part of my job at Microsoft as Architect for MSF. I won’t be sharing any Microsoft proprietary insights. I did provide the VSTS product team with extensive feedback on the Asian market but you won’t be reading that stuff on my blog. However, here is the first in a series of insights.

Quality is Key. Everywhere I went in Asia, software process quality assurance was a key piece of the strategy. In Vietnam I met 100 person software companies with 5% of staff dedicated to software process quality assurance (often with a CMMI flavor to it.) In Singapore and Malaysia and Japan, I met groups keen to introduce Kaizen to their organizations. In Taiwan, I met teams who liked my MSF CMMI route to a kaizen culture. The message was clear. Asian software houses are following their manufacturing counterparts down a road on the pursuit of excellence and perfection and they want to do this by introducing some form of continuous improvement quality assurance program.

I’m parroting people like Bill Petersen at the SEI who has been saying this for a couple of years, but… I need to say it to, because I have a different (and perhaps wider and more diverse audience)...

Asian firms don’t just enjoy a cost advantage, and a ready pool of cheap, well educated, young and enthusiastic labor, they have a lust for success and a patience to get there through quality. It is not inevitable that all software work will migrate to Asia on cost grounds. However, in a world where we are more and more dependent on software every day, where we want reliability, security, and rock solid quality in our software products, Asian firms are better placed to deliver on that customer demand over the next two decades. It is therefore inevitable that a large share of the World software development market will migrate from rich Western nations in Europe and North America to better firms in Asia.

Next… the emergence of value (supply) chains in software development. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Kaizen, CMMI, MSF, Bill+Petersen, SEI

My Approach at Corbis

I’ve been at Corbis almost 2 months now. Almost 60 of my first 90 days are gone. So what am I doing? People have been asking me, what my approach is? Am I implementing Feature Driven Development across the organization? or perhaps an enterprise-wide Scrum initiative? or even MSF with Visual Studio Team System? and if so, which flavor, agile or CMMI?

These are all good questions. And the answer is none of the above. Why not?

I personally feel that if I try to prescribe a method and then drive a big change initiative to train everyone on using it while I use managers and the small process engineering group as enforcers, I will fail miserably. True a younger version of me, 6 years ago for example, would have chosen to drive an FDD prescription as a defined process to be followed rigorously. But not any more. I will fail if I try this again. Why?

There are two reasons. Those who watched my exit interview will know that I am committed to change Corbis engineering, increasing productivity and quality with reduced variation in the process and output, without losing any of the loyal staff along the way. This is a real challenge. In a recent exchange with Ken Schwaber in the Scrum Development Yahoo! group, Ken advised that some of the enterprise Scrum implementations have resulted in up to 30% staff turnover. Ouch! I can’t afford for that to happen.

I also have commitments to deliver some large projects along the way. I can’t not deliver them. I can’t allow them to be late or of poor quality because we happen to be retraining the workforce in a new method. In other words, the J-curve effect would be too deep and too long. Long, deep J-curves are a recipe to get junior executives fired. And I don’t want that to happen.

So, what am I doing?

I’m creating a Kaizen culture encouraging grass roots, shop-floor improvement suggestions within a structured objective framework of management metrics. We’re implementing work item tracking on Team Foundation Server, and reporting with SQL Reporting Services and transparency through the use of the Team Portal and by deploying the TeamLook (Outlook client for TFS from Personify Design). [Check out Juan Perez’ blog about TeamLook.]

To encourage the growth of the right culture, we’re starting monthly all-hands operations reviews, similar to those I describe in Chapter 14 of Agile Management. My directs have been working to devise the metrics they’ll be reporting at the ops review. The first one is on Dec 7th for the month of November. Improvement suggestions resulting from the operations review will be assigned to managers and actioned as Kaizen events and followed up in future ops reviews. Everyone on the staff will learn that management is committed to making them more successful and getting them what they need to improve productivity and quality with reduced variation.

We’ve also been retooling our sustaining process for minor enhancements and bug fixes. We’ve been doing that by implementing a kanban system for processing change requests. The implementation is a little different from the one implemented at Microsoft’s XIT department. The main difference is that there aren’t dedicated resources for sustaining but our commitment is to provide a sustained level of service and a guarantee of capacity. This was tricky to achieve but the kanban system really helped. Hopefully next year, I’ll be able to report the results.

What am I hoping to achieve with this new Kaizen culture? Gradual sustained improvement! Rather than a big bang to a defined and prescribed methodology, I’d like to morph the system gradually, identifying bottlenecks and areas of extreme variation and unreliability and designing improvement programs for them one by one.

This means I have no idea how it is going to turn out, but I’m sure that we’ll all have fun getting there. Corbis was already a great place to work, underscored by the large number of loyal long served staff. By introducing kaizen to the culture, I hope to enhance that even more. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Corbis, Kaizen, Kanban, Agile+Management, FDD, Scrum, MSF, Agile+Enterprise