Designing for cohesion
The whole may be greater than the sum of it's parts, but for this to be so, it only happens by design. Often developmental approaches or environmental factors can cause the whole to be considerably less than the sum of its parts. One cannot expect to throw a random bag of stuff together and have something useful emerge.
This is especially true when innovations or unprecedented applications of technology are at play. Yet often, for a system, the emergent properties of a system - such as reliability, fitness, usability, scalability, durability, and throughput - are what determines whether the system will be successful or not in operation. Such properties will only hit these targets through disciplined attention to details, effective solution design, and iterative refinement.
The legacy problem
Author Clayton Christensen describes how disruptive technologies shape the competitive landscape for companies within their respective markets in this classic book. In it, he describes how companies introduce new products into the low end of markets and eventually displace their high-end competitors and the technologies that those competitors employ to service their customers. The book describes a nearly inescapable pattern in which successful companies, with established product lines, try - and usually fail - to keep from being pushed aside by newer, cheaper products that are offered by smaller, more nimble companies. These new entrants do not initially appear to provide much competition, since they only serve a small portion of available customers. However, over time, their products improve, extend their reach, and become a serious threat, since they are based upon updated approachs, and are not bogged down with the many constraints of servicing older customers. Even the best-managed companies, paying attention to customers and continually investing in new technologies, are susceptible to this pattern, no matter what their industry, simply because it is so hard to get momentum from inside a company that displaces an existing product line of a successful business. Read more »
Elementary, Dear Watson
Computers process enormous volumes of digital content. Much of this content is unstructured text that is created by we, the people. Computers have not been able to process our created content in the same way that humans do (or try to) - by parsing it for it's meaning. The pursuit of systems that can do this - interpret, process, and respond to unstructured, direct language requests, over a broad range of topics, has been a holy grail for artificial intelligence researchers, with considerable recent progress. In this pursuit, the classic test is called the Turing test, for Alan Turing's recognition that once it is not possible to distinguish whether a computer or a human is responding to input typed into a terminal, our place in the world will have changed.
Useful planning by design
The longer a project takes, the more it will cost. More importantly, such delays typically bring increased levels of rework. As this rework must be absorbed by the team, they will become less efficient in delivering value to their customers. As they become less efficient, their products will thus become less affordable for their customers, and the number of customers may decrease. Unfortunately, with fewer customers, there may be fewer resources available to support the remaining customers. And with fewer resources, it may also take longer to deliver value to those customers. And you can see where this is going, right?
The only way out of this dilemna is to shorten the time and resources it takes to accomplish a benchmarked amount of work. A focus on the rate that such work can be performed is often the most important strategy for an organization to increase value to its customers, and differentiate it from competition. Streamlining your throughput can generally only be achieved by anticipating your customer's needs during planning, becoming more agile in performing the activities which you perform to design and develop your products, adopting an intense focus on disciplined execution, and proactively eliminating the constraints which cause delays and waste to occur. Read more »
Confronting uncertainty
We are surrounded by uncertainty. We rush to the airport, through unpredictable traffic, only to discover that the regularly scheduled flight we arrived early for has been delayed indefinitely. We watch last year's championship team fail to even make the playoffs this year. We invest in graduate school for our children, only to discover that they may be as likely to go bankrupt as get rich from the experience. Along the way, we may notice the frequency that we are impacted by uncertainty in time and outcomes. This insight may motivate us to attempt to answer a basic traveler's question: Should our journey or our destination be more important to us? Read more »
Connecting individual and organizational competencies
Organizations often pursue competency-based management techniques in efforts to understand and secure a competitive advantage within the markets which they serve. The competency assessments which are initiated by such organizations will only be useful if the definition and effective application of the underlying elements of these competencies (i.e., its ontology) are sufficiently robust.
A guiding principle for such organizations is suggested by the Software Engineering Institute's value proposition for the CMMI:
The quality of a product is largely determined by the capability of the process which is designed to produce it, and the maturity of the organization in implementing that process.
Communicating concepts of operations
Concepts are powerful symbols of meaning in communications. They allow us to organize our knowledge and understanding within a particular context, and provide a framework for us to structure the objects which are involved in delivering value through a set of interactions over time. Concepts help us to integrate individual observations and phenomena into viable hypotheses and theories about the world. As we use them to communicate these theories, readers can then validate aspects about a system with their own beliefs and understandings, and assess the potential value of changes which are proposed, under consideration, or available for their usage. Read more »
More rowers, fewer coxswain
When performance issues arise with teams, the underlying belief is often that these issues have resulted from a lack of adequate direction. In response, businesses often add extra layers of oversight and encouragement to reinforce this direction to the workforce, and clarify what is expected. Too often, and especially when done in haste, these additional levels of review and pressure are implemented while there are still overlapping and fuzzy allocations of responsibility. This often results in inconsistent and poorly communicated direction, which can confuse the people who have to actually make progress towards achieving the goal, and further erodes their efficiency. Unfortunately, since they are the ones already behind schedule, this may hurt, rather than help, their efforts to move in the right direction more quickly and more effectively. Read more »
In praise of checklists
We live in a world of increasing complexity, where even the best of the best can struggle to accomplish all that is expected of them. This book describes one of the most basic, yet underutilized, techniques that is available to help in such situations: the checklist. Read more »
The quest for predictability
There is an understandable desire from project leadership, sponsors, and customers for predictable performance in our projects. Such determinism enables other business actions and decisions to be reliably coordinated based upon these outcomes.
Most of us are invested in the faith that such predictability will be achieved by following plans we create for these endeavors. But in the real world, achieving such outcomes is nearly always more complex than we originally anticipate when we craft these plans.
In the new book, A Checklist Manifesto, the author Atul Gawande describes how difficult navigating this complexity can be:
Two professors who study the science of complexity—Brenda Zimmerman of York University and Sholom Glouberman of the University of Toronto—have proposed a distinction among three different kinds of problems in the world: the simple, the complicated, and the complex. Simple problems, they note, are ones like baking a cake from a mix. There is a recipe. Sometimes there are a few basic techniques to learn. But once these are mastered, following the recipe brings a high likelihood of success.