kaizania white paper - the changing world of work

7/31/2019 Kaizania White Paper - The Changing World of Work

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1 © Kaizania (PTY).Ltd. 2009 - The Changing World of Work

The Changing World of Work

Impact on Delivering Software Products andServices




Introduction

The pace of change, change in all respects, is increasing every day. Industry, trade,financial markets, products, technology, society and all other aspects of human life

are evolving more rapidly than ever before.

How has the way in which humanity works, i.e. deliver products and services,changed? Is best practice of the last 20 years still best practice today? How are thesechanges in turn impacting the world of computing and software? To answer thesequestions, we must start our journey hundreds of years ago…

The Three Eras of Work

The manner in which humanity produces goods and services for consumption in the

market place has undergone three major changes, or revolutions, over the last 300years, the last of which is still in progress:

Craft Production Mass Production Flexible Production

We will look at each of these era’s and see how the practice of Project Managementevolved as it was simultaneously influenced by, and supporting, the world of work.

Craft Production History

Before the Industrial and Mass Production revolutions the overwhelming majority of human effort was directed to small scale agriculture. All non-agricultural goods wereproduced by craftsmen. The characteristics of craftsmanship are:

Complete goods are produced by individuals Every good that is produced is unique, crafted from scratch and made to

measure Skill is obtained and passed on through many years of apprenticeship Goods are purchased and consumed close to where they were produced,

usually in the same town or village

In some respects, goods of the time were of a better quality than today. If oneneeded a pair of shoes one went to a cobbler, or shoemaker. The cobbler madeexact measurements of each of your feet and subsequently produced shoes madefor you, and only for you. A craftsman did not need a manager or project manager totell him what tasks to perform on a daily basis to produce valued goods.




Influence on Project Management

The exception to this era of craftsmanship is civil engineering, where for manycenturies groups of people (master builders, masons, labourers) have been workingtogether using standard parts (clay bricks, granite blocks etc.) to build products formass consumption (buildings, roads, bridges).

There were essentially no project management related or any management relatedactivities outside the conduct of war and civil engineering. The experience gainedand lessons learnt during developments such as:

the re-organization of the Prussian army through the 19 th century by vonClausewitz and von Moltke

the building of the transcontinental US railway network and the associatedorganizational structures that evolved

the industrialisation of production

formed a basis for the principles of general management, as well as projectmanagement, established during the next era of human work.

Mass Production

History

The advancements in precision engineering, electricity distribution, electrical motorsetc. culminated in the development of Mass Production techniques, as led by HenryFord, Sorensen and others at the Ford Motor company from 1920-1945.

The principal characteristics of this era of work are:

intensified division of labour perfect inter-changeability of parts in the goods produced individual craftsmanship replaced to a large extent through:

o craft knowledge being systematically collectedo operations simplified into constituent parts and specified in great

detailo work stations for executing serialized, simple steps to produce and

assemble partso simplification and standardisation of taskso front-line workers rigidly supervised and expected to complete their

tasks with no deviation or input into the process long production runs and large quantity of outputs that are homogeneous vertical integration of industries, with single companies owning and

delivering entire product value chains




large management structures to manage 1000’s of workers and theincreasing volume of information to be tracked (accounts, inventory, rawmaterials etc.)

Before and during the changes brought about at Ford Motor company individualssuch as F. Taylor, H. Emerson, H. Gannt, Frank & Lillian Gilbreth etc. established themanagement practices of the next 50 years.

Influence on Work Management and Execution

The tools and characteristics of the project management profession that developedduring this period are Work breakdown structures, Dependency management, Ganttcharts, PERT charts, Critical Path Methods (CPM) etc.

The principles underlying these methods are very similar to what was done by HenryFord and associates:

Take a large problem Reduce it to its constituent elements Determine dependencies Estimate the duration of each Plan and/or build the production line Find/train individuals to execute the constituent tasks Control execution and maximise throughput

Gantt, PERT, CPM etc. are formalisations of the methods used on an informal basisby those that brought about the mass production revolution.

Managing work in Software Engineering

With the advent and growth of computing between the 1950’s -1980’s, engineersand project managers learnt from other, older industries such as mass productionand civil engineering. How did the thinking behind a mass production factory lineinfluence thinking in software engineering?

Phased production lines and dependencies:

what must be built gather requirements how must it be built designs/tasks/dependencies/project plans building it code, review progress, adjust plan refining it test

Find/train individuals to execute the constituent tasks

Business analysts System Architects




Developers Testers

Somehow most of what influenced how software projects were run, and are still runtoday, was based only on manufacturing, process control and civil engineering; notthe highly inventive product development phase that precedes high volume, efficientmanufacturing.

Applying the project management methods for well understood industries andtechnologies to software projects suffer from the following fundamental flaws:

Requirements are not 100% known upfront Technical Design is not 100% known upfront

Much of what was learnt during this era of work could be successfully applied tosoftware development, though some of what was applied was not effective in thesoftware industry.

Flexible Production

History

The search for more efficient methods of producing goods and services continued.Technology yet again played a significant role in changing the way work isperformed:

Computing

The advent of computing enabled the efficient and distributed storage, retrievaland processing of vast amounts of information. Money, designs, orders,contracts etc. can be moved around the globe at the speed of light, cheaply.

Vast amounts of numbers can be processed almost instantly to design, execute,control and report on any level of production.

Factory line automation

The majority of the small repetitive tasks executed in Henry Ford’s typicalproduction line have been automated through the use of robots and othermachinery.

CAD/CAM/CNC

State of the art in computing and automation is culminating in the fast growingindustries of Computer Aided Design, Computer Aided Manufacturing andComputer Numerical Control machines. A design is created in a computer and is




then fed into an automated production system where one or more computercontrolled machines build the product.

Transport

Improvement in transport technologies such as wide-bodied cargo jets,containerization, road networks and high speed rail have reduced the time andcost of circulating raw materials and finished products around the world.

These technologies have impacted almost every aspect of the modern world. Theprincipal characteristics of the current Flexible Production era of work are:

Shortened product development and replacement cycles Small-batch production Mass customisation Just in Time delivery Vertical disintegration moving to strategic partnerships Rise of the service and white-collar worker Multi-skilled, self co-ordinating teams Continuous improvement or Kaizen Lean manufacturing

The world w here 1000’s of workers execute small repetitive tasks as determined bycentralised engineering and project management departments is gone.

Influence on Management

The activity of management, and subsequently organizations, has been adapted tobetter suit this fast moving world by people such W. Edwards Deming, ShigeoShingo, Taiichi Ohno and others at companies such as Motorola, Toyota etc.

Quality

An expanded, and more correct, notion and understanding of quality is theunderpinning for most of these developments, as summarised by Deming’s formula:

In other words, the almost counter-intuitive realisation that increased quality leadsto increased productivity leads to reduced cost. Every activity is investigated on arepeating basis to make sure it is of highest quality, with the goal of delivering thehighest possible customer value.

Every activity that is not of value to the customer is waste, and subsequently of lowquality as measured by the above formula.




Continuous improvement

The process of uncovering non-value add activities and improving quality is arepeating cycle of Planning, Doing, Checking and Acting, in what is known as theDeming cycle.

The work done by many over the period from 1950 to today has resulted in themodern management and manufacturing movements of Six sigma, Lean, Theory of Constraints etc.

Influence on Product Development

Shortening product cycles and the resulting pressure to innovate has impacted hownew products are developed. Instead of a phased, serial approach where variousteams work in sequenced isolation, modern product development is characterisedby:

Product Vision and broad goals – not detailed upfront design Self-organizing project teams Iterative, overlapping development phases Cross functional and continuously learning teams leading to multifunctional

teams and team members Subtle control and leadership as opposed to command and control

To a large extent, the era of Flexible production is a combination of the elements of the era of Craftsmanship and the era of Mass Production. Humanity producing goods

and services through:




self organising, highly skilled teams of craftsmen working together using the powerful array of tools provided by the increasing automation of

computation and production

The world is still very much in the midst of the Flexible Production era. Those firmsand institutions that adopt, embrace and expand upon the principles will thrive inthe modern world.

Software Product Development impact

How does software product development as practised during the Mass Productionera compare to software product development suitable to the era of FlexibleProduction?

From 1990-2001 various participants in the computing industry were influenced bythe Flexible Production era developments in the non-computing world. Variousframeworks and methodologies were developed in isolation, such as:

Extreme Programming – Kent Beck Scrum – Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland DSDM – UK DSDM Consortium Rational Unified Process – I. Jacobson, G. Booch Lean Software Development – R. Charette, M&T Poppendieck Crystal methodologies – Alistair Cockburn

Feature driven development - Jeff De Luca, Peter Coad

During 2001 the leaders in these movements came together and created the AgileManifesto to summarize and jointly promote the adoption of Flexible Production erapractices, values and principles in the software development industry:

The Agile Manifesto

We value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and toolsWorking software over comprehensive documentationCustomer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items onthe left more.

Signatories: Kent Beck, Mike Beedle, Arie van Bennekum, Alistair Cockburn, Ward Cunningham, Martin Fowler, JamesGrenning, Jim Highsmith, Andrew Hunt, Ron Jeffries, Jon Kern, Brian Marick, Robert C. Martin, Steve Mellor, Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland, Dave Thomas

Impact of Agile on Project Management




Software product development must accept and adapt to the fact that:

Software Product development is repeated invention Perfectly planned invention is not possible

The differences between non-Agile management and development and Agilemanagement and development are many, significant, take time to implement andassimilate, and is challenging in terms of change management.

A comparison of non-Agile vs. Agile practices and principles:

Mass Production Era Flexible Production EraTop-down control Mix of top-down control and self-

organizing teamsManager as thinker Manager-as-coordinatorWorkers as implementers Workers as thinkers/implementersLine vs. staff – thinkers separated fromdoers

Thinkers as doers

Division of labour Accepted responsibility / volunteerismExhaustive Requirements gathering Product Vision, Release planning, Just in

Time RequirementsRoutine, physical work Dynamic, knowledge workTask driven Goal driven, meaning, purpose, team

satisfaction on achieving goalsWork breakdown structures Feature breakdown structuresDetail project plan development Release and Iteration PlanningPredictive long term detail planning Constant adaptive planningDirect, manage, monitor, control Facilitate, inspect, adapt, leadChange control Ranked product backlogPredictable software engineering Software craftsmanshipGantt charts Release plansInflexible requirements, flexiblecost/duration

Fixed iterations of cost and duration,flexible requirements

Manual build, test, release Automated build, test, releaseQuantity emphasized over quality Quality emphasized over quantityGeared toward efficiency andrepeatability

Geared toward adaptation and reliability

Centrally planned and gatheredrequirements, systems and order

Emergent requirements, systems andorder

Commands CommitmentsManage and control Lead




Thought Experiment

Consumer Goods Product Leader vs. Traditional Software Project Management

The following thought experiment comparing how some of the best performingcompanies in the Flexible Production Era execute work in comparison to how someof the worst software projects are being run will help to illustrate the fundamentaldifferences.

Consumer Goods Design and Development

The product development phase of the consumer product industry is characterisedby:

Product Vision

We want to build the world’s best, most user friendly MP3 player ever allowing acustomer to store all their music on the device

Technical vision

The player will store music on a hard disk, and not on flash memory

Design vision

Nothing much yet – we just know it must be easy to use, sexy and appeal to theupwardly mobile.

What happens next?

Teams working together closely, led by a hands-on, passionate Chief Engineer, dothe following:

Drawings are made, discussed, lessons learned, discarded, redone, repeated Paper/clay/plastic models are built, discussed, lessons learned, discarded,

rebuilt, repeated Core technology prototypes are built, tested, lessons learned, redesigned,

repeated All teams work together closely – all learning from each other

As the project progresses the casing, hardware, keyboard, screen and software areimproving and working together – to be combined eventually into a first workingprototype – tested, discussed, lessons learned, redone, repeated.

In summary:

an iterative process




involving all key elements and people all components integrated regularly tested lessons learnt repeat

Once the product has been fully developed, then the much more rigid, variance andfault intolerant mass manufacturing process begins.

The result:

Work start : February 2001Product released : October 2001Success? : World beater

Software development applied to the consumer industry?

What would the above process look like if it was managed in the way large softwareprojects have been managed over the last three decades?

It starts with the same Product Vision. Then over a period of many months:

meetings are conducted to discuss all aspects of the product in detail – casing, keyboard, technical core, screen, software and how all these will worktogether

documents are written capturing in detail what was agreed in meetings documents are circulated, more meetings are had to discuss disagreements repeat until every aspect of the product has been captured on paper and

agreed

All that remains now is to build it …




Find an internal or external engineering team Force them to tell you exactly how long it will take to build each component

and get it all working together to hand over to manufacturing for massproduction

Create project plans showing exactly what each person will be doing everyday over the coming months as the product is built

Some possible next events

The product manager sees the first casing that an engineer accidently let slipout – it does not feel right in his hands, somehow smaller than he expected.Hmmm.

The screen does not fit in the casing properly, since the casing had to bechanged to fit the battery inside it, since the battery life was shorter thanexpected, since power consumption of the newly developed disk ……

Change control board overwhelmed. Tension, blame game, moraledisappeared.

Law suits…??

Software Product Development Future?

Are Agile techniques correct and non-Agile techniques such as Prince2, PMBokincorrect? Will Agile techniques replace all others over time?




NO, not at all.

Different techniques apply to different projects and situations. The reasons whyPrince2, PMBok, Gantt charts and other techniques were suitable to themanagement of certain types of work are just as applicable today as in the past.What we have learnt though is that they are not applicable to all types of work.

PMBok, Prince2, CMMi AgileWell understood problem domains Unclear problem domainsStandard, repeating tasks Non-standard, non-repeating tasksKnown durations, known solutions Unknown durations, Unknown solutionsSuitable for Infrastructure rollouts,Upgrades, Data centre moves etc.

Suitable for Software development,Product Development, Invention

SummaryThe world changes, processes change, people change, best practice changes. Thatwhich has gone before was the best that could be done at the time. Where we areand where we are going is an ongoing refinement and improvement of what wehave learnt in the past.

We are in the Flexible Production era. Software Product Development must adapt tobest support the way in which work is done. Agile is the embodiment of the FlexibleProduction era values, principles and practices as applied to software development

and project management.

Agile requires significant change in many respects. Change is never easy, change isnever fast, but we owe it to ourselves to adapt and be the best.

Reaping the benefit of Agile methods

Kaizania assists companies in making the transition from Mass Production era basedworking to Flexible Production era working through training and coaching. Pleaseallow us to help you produce greater value at higher quality with lower cost.

For more information please contact Kaizania at:

Email: [email protected] Tel: +27 12 991 0269www.kaizania.co.za

Arrie van der DussenManager: Agile Business [email protected]

Lionel Bisschoff CEO - [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]










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