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Keep on Trucking at Scrum Australia

By Ed Wong

In my previous article, I gave my impressions of my 2 days at Scrum Australia. As I mentioned, I ran a session which was an experience report of my time with Toll Global Logistics, helping out Risto Pearce, their Technical Development Manager, and his teams. Here is how it went.

Goal

Our goal for the session was:

To give an insight into to implementing and using Scrum in a corporate IT environment, and particularly the management perspective.

Format

We wanted to not just stand at a lectern with some slides, so we decided to go for a fireside chat format. You can see a prominent example of this, in the video below:

I played the role of Walt Mossberg/Kara Swisher, with Risto as the Bill Gates/Steve Jobs figure.

You can see the structure, and the questions that we prepared for the session in this Google Drive document. The Prezi that you can see at the top of this post, was used to add some visual interest, allowing me to dive in and show some photos to illustrate some of the points being made.

Selected highlights

We didn’t stick rigidly to the questions, as we wanted to keep things fairly informal and to be able to, depending on audience questions, explore different routes, Choose You Own Adventure style. This means that what is in the document, isn’t exactly what happened on the day. My summary below, blends elements of both to give you an idea of what transpired. There’s more detail in the Google Document.

Starting up and training

Risto was fortunate to have good support from his organisation; he said they are supportive of new processes and technologies that can provide the company with competitive advantages

There are so many advantages with Agile for delivering on time, responding to change and minimising rework that it was easy to make a business case to support it.

Is the cost of doing business inefficiently or ineffectively greater…yes.

He stressed the importance of training for his team and also for himself:

If I’m supposed to make decisions about agile I needed to be do the same training as the team

Risto said that he had known agile/Scrum for a while, but had an impression that it was for people that didn’t like writing specifications or following process. The reality, as he sees it, is that it as disciplined as any other development technique that he has ever used before.

Implementation

When it came to putting the training into practice, he said that:

We chose an existing project that was well understood so we could apply agile techniques, to make sure we stayed on track.

Although, he also said that there is something to be said about getting all teams to dive right in, so that they are learning together, and aren’t our of sync.

When asked about how he communicated different ways of working to the management team:

The real issue is getting the management team to be comfortable with a process that doesn’t require detailed requirements up front to work. Once you take them through it and get them involved, they quickly understand just how much insight they have over the product being developed

Gripping the pen

When asked how using Scrum changed what he did as a manager he had an interesting analogy, likening past management as holding a pen palm side down; you keep control by gripping tightly. With agile approaches, you hold the pen palm side up, allowing you to relax your grip but still provide support; giving you opportunity for regular inspection but not forcing solutions on the team. Reduced micro-management frees up time during Sprints to allow a manager to look at big picture items, and help to remove barriers for the team.

On Coaching

Risto’s view is that Scrum is simple to learn the basics of, but there is a lot of “devil in the detail”. Trying to work this out on your own takes time that is reduced by having someone who can guide you through it.

Having an agile coach completely mitigates this as they help guide you through the minefield which means you get to the other side without blowing up too many. I couldn’t imagine professionally introducing Scrum without an agile coach or experienced staff.

Conclusion

When asked, “How has what you have done improved the way you work?”…to paraphrase, his response was:

Everybody is generally happier with the way things work

Job done!

Thanks to those who attended the session, and who joined in the discussion. We seemed to have a decent level of feedback at the end of the session, with a majority of people getting value out of it.

Finally, thanks very much to Risto for collaborating with me in putting this session together.

What we can learn from the lean car plant, NUMMI

By Ed Wong

“In remembrance of NUMMI” by Hugo90 on flickr ¹

The car in the photo above is a a Chevy Nova that was produced in Fremont, California, at a factory that was known as the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., or NUMMI. If you think it looks a bit like a Toyota Corolla, you would be right, for reasons that will become clear.

The story of NUMMI is a fascinating one, and I first came across it when the NPR radio series, This American Life, broadcast an episode about it. You can listen to the whole one hour episode in the embedded player, below. You can also go to the This American Life website to listen to the episode in 2 halves, or read the transcript. I come back to listen to it every few months, because it can tell us a lot about the nature of change, quality, empowerment, motivation, and culture in organisations.

Culture change

NUMMI was formed in 1984, from the ashes of a plant that GM had closed in 1982. General Motors reopened the plant, employing many of the same workers who had staffed, according to the United Auto Workers union, the former worst performing plant in the US. Employees of the defunct factory regularly drank on the job, had very high rates of absenteeism, and performed deliberate acts of ‘anti-QA’ sabotage, such as putting empty bottles inside car doors to annoy customers.

GM and Toyota had formed NUMMI as a joint venture to satisfy imperatives for both companies; GM needed to learn how to manufacture small cars cost effectively, with high quality standards, and Toyota to learn about producing cars in the US in the face of changing import laws.

Some of the American workers were sent to Japan to learn the Toyota Production System, and the results were remarkable. In a massive turnaround, NUMMI almost immediately began producing vehicles to quality standards that rivalled the Toyota factories in Japan that they had learnt from. The emphasis on quality inherent in the TPS, meant that employees became empowered to do things such as stopping the production line when they saw a problem, rather than allowing defects to build up and have to be fixed at a later stage.

“I believed that the system was bad, not the people” – Bruce Lee, union representative

Initially, the reemployed workers hated the idea of change, until they started going to Japan to view Toyota’s system at work. They were amazed at how empowered workers were in the Toyota Production System, and that people were expected to continuously improve, as a team.

“They had such a powerful and emotional experience, of learning a new way of working, a way that people could actually work together collaboratively, as a team” – John Shook, Toyota trainer.

The changed way of working and management, handed the NUMMI workers the opportunity to build in quality and to be engaged in problem solving and making improvements.

As Shook noted in a piece for MIT Sloan Management Review:

What changed the culture at NUMMI wasn’t an abstract notion of “employee involvement” or “a learning organization” or even “culture” at all. What changed the culture was giving employees the means by which they could successfully do their jobs.

‘No Problem’ is Problem!

The ability to highlight problems and fix the cause without placing blame on individuals, is a key learning. If fingers are pointed, people will have a tendency to pass the problem “down the (production) line” to make sure that there aren’t personal repercussions; asking “why” and not “who”. The American culture was, when asked how things were going, to respond “No Problem!”. However, the Toyota view was that saying “No problem”, was a problem itself. There are always “problems”, that if solved can spark improvement.

As Shook said when concluding his article:

The famous tools of the Toyota Production System are all designed around making it easy to see problems, easy to solve problems, and easy to learn from mistakes. Making it easy to learn from mistakes means changing our attitude toward them. That is the lean cultural shift.

What happens at NUMMI, stays at NUMMI

When GM tried to take the successes experienced at NUMMI to its other factories in the USA, it was generally a failure; at least for the first 10-15 years! Initially, GM sent 16 managers to California to start NUMMI, the ‘Commandos’, with the idea that they could go back to other parts of the company. However, there was no ‘master plan’ beyond that to extend this to other parts of such a large and complex organisation.

People at other plants didn’t have the same motivation to take on different ideas as the NUMMI workers had. “It’s a lot easier to get people to change if they have lost their jobs and then you offer them back”

To make real change, GM managers had to leave the US, and overhaul operations in Germany and Brazil, in the mid-90s. It took a decade and a half, a generational transformation, until there was a critical mass of people sufficient to change the whole of GM. To the point that by the early 2000’s, GM had what they called the “Global Manufacturing System”.

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Keep on Trucking at Scrum Australia

Goal

Format