Are you productive or just sub optimizing?

I’ve previously posted a number of blog posts where I discuss the dangers of measuring individual productivity. If you believe in The Theory of Constraint, the questioning of this type of measuring becomes natural.

Mendelt Siebanga gives some well put examples of why he also thinks it’s contra productive with measuring individuals but he also discusses how you can increase productivity. A short, well put blog post.

Using our kanban board for continuous improvement

Why do you use a kanban board? Why do you use a scrum dashboard? Really? Think about that. And then think again?

Do you track your workload? Do you calculate if you’re going to complete the sprint objectives? Do you use it to divide the work or fetch your tasks?

And why do you manage projects? Is to have something to do? To be able to track progress? Or divide work or just to feel that you’re in control of what is happening?

What ever is your reason if it’s one of the above, I state that this will not help you in the long run. Because this objectives will not improve your work.

This summer I read The Goal and learnt about The Theory Of Constraints. As always, I recommend you reading the complete book, but here is your five minute version.

All processes have constraints. You cannot remove all the constraints in the process, because if one step stops being a constraint, a new step becomes the new constraint.

A process with step 2 as the constraint

If step 2 becomes more effective, the risk is that the constraint is moved to the next step. So, you cannot just map your process, “remove the constraints” and be happy about your highly effective process. You need to work this continuously.

So, the objective is to constantly improve your process so that the effect of the current constraint is minimized and so that new constraints are identified. But how is that done.

Well, first you identify your current process. All the steps are mapped and then you see where there is some queuing going on. And here comes your Kanban board. Or your scrum board. Or what ever tool you’re using.

Here you follow the value stream of the process and by having a visual tool, you can identify your current constraint.

For example, let’s say that you’re going waterfall. What happens (probably) is that a queue forms at the testing steps. When people finally get to test stuff, a queue of bugs will start to form. And it can form quickly. The step to take then is to try to even the identifying of bugs. Hence you get continuous testing during the process. But then something else starts queuing. And you then use the board to identify that and to improve those steps.

A mistake, according to The Goal, is that we spend too much time optimizing the steps that are not a constraint. But by doing so you just add to the queue. So, if you have a problem with testing not being done, making the software coding faster is not increasing the productivity of the whole process.

I’m really excited to be working with this in TUI Nordic. We’re an organization who is working with lean values and empathic leadership, so this will fit nicely into the culture of the organization. Will it be easy? Hell, no. But a real challenge, yes.

Why Estimate is a bad word

What is an estimate?

According to Dictionary.com the verb means:

1.
to form an approximate judgment or opinion regarding the worth, amount, size, weight, etc., of; calculate approximately: to estimate the cost of a college education.

2.
to form an opinion of; judge.

and the noun means

4.
an approximate judgment or calculation, as of the value, amount, time, size, or weight of something.

5.
a judgment or opinion, as of the qualities of a person or thing.

6.
a statement of the approximate charge for work to be done, submitted by a person or business firm ready to undertake the work.

So, why is that a bad word? Well, I don’t think it’s really a bad word, but in the case of software development, the use of the word results in some serious problems.

Case 1: A developer leaves a task unfinished, that is not according to Definition of Done. The reason is that he’s run out of time according to the estimate so he drops it or finish it with lacking quality.

Case 2: A developer starts working on “something else”. The reason is that he finished what he was supposed to in less than the estimated time and felt free to spend the rest of the time with that other stuff.

Case 3: A project manager gets upset that a project is late. The reason is that he feels that the project is late because things took longer than the estimates.

So, why is estimate a bad word? It’s because it can cause people being pushed into not completing the tasks or not doing the things that have the highest priority. It causes confusion.

And if you consider a project where Case 1 and Case 2 are common, what happens? It causes some stuff to be bug infested which probably causes later delays and you’re never able to make up the time since when the developers are faster than the estimate, instead of moving on to the next item, they fill up the time with other stuff. Observe that I don’t assume that they are surfing the web or just idling, perhaps they refactor or something else. So, it is often good stuff, but not the most important stuff. And it does not help in catching up. So, what does this lead to; Case 3. If the project delivers poor quality and unfinished work and never makes up the time, of course the project will be delayed.

So, what word is better? Planned? Don’t think so, even if Microsoft Project use that word. This word most definitely leads to all these cases. Assumption is no better. When you think about it, you just have to realize that the word will lead to misunderstandings. So, what do you do?

Well, to handle Case 1 & 2 you need leadership and here I think that Kanban is a real savior. You cannot just drop the work and you cannot use the estimate as “your time”.

But what about that project manager? When it comes to the project manager’s need for planning, it’s important for him to realize that an estimate is a guess. A good or a bad guess. And when you’re guessing, you need to know the value of the guess. I like working the PERT analysis when this is a big issue (isn’t always??). You give three estimates; an optimistic, a probably and a pessimistic. Here is an excellent presentation on PERT analysis by Ricardo Vargas.

Pert Analysis in Projects

View more documents from Ricardo Vargas.

You can also add a value of risk to the estimate. So, when you estimate something, you estimate the size and the risk. And you would be stupid if you don’t realize that if you have a big task with a high risk, you cannot take that estimate for granted.

Measuring productivity

You get what you measure

So true, so true. These famous words from Mary Poppendieck point at an important objective of anyone interested in their work.

But there is a risk to these words. Because you can be lead to believe that you can measure everything you want.

I want my son to love me. So, following Mary’s words I should probably measure his love. This should ensure me success in getting his love.

Sounds goofy? Well, to most sane people this sounds crazy. I cannot take out a chart and plot my son’s love for me.

But how about productivity? In the agile community I’ve read a couple of discussions about if you can use velocity to measure productivity. I don’t like this idea much. I use velocity for predictions and my priority. Story point estimates are in my world a relative value of size, and if I start measuring how many dots they complete every month, they are not sure to start making their estimates bigger. I still don’t measure productivity but I’ve also lost my chance of predicting my upcoming deliveries.

So, how do I measure productivity of the developers on my team? Well, I measure it by how happy my users and stakeholders Do they feel that the investment was worth it. But, but, you might say: that is too vague! And I say that just this is what matters. If the customer is happy about the investment. Can they make the money they hade anticipated or save the cost they were counting on.

And frankly, I have a hard time finding a good measurement of productivity. I can just look back at my role; project manager. What is a productive project manager? Is it the one who makes the most Gantt chart bars? Or holds the longest steering groups? How does a project manager know if he’s been productive a day? For me it’s a feeling. Some days I can have had this ten minutes meeting which clarified a lot of stuff which will save us a lot of coding time or make us reach our goals. But a numeric calculation, I don’t know.

It was perhaps easier when I was a test leader. And yet not. A productive tester does not find a lot of bugs, he prevents them from occurring in the first place. And how do you measure that? Yes, you can measure the decline in bugs, but how do you know if a specific tester was the reason.

So, to summarize; I wouldn’t feel productive as a project manager if I was asked to measure the productivity of team members.