

Decluttering the company - kevin
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21610237-businesses-must-fight-relentless-battle-against-bureaucracy-decluttering-company?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/declutteringthecompany

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sidcool
Interesting article. Currently where I work, a $10 bn IT company with 150k+
employees, this is a huge huge problem. The top management wants to bring the
entire company under a single umbrella of processes, management practices etc.
So far they have only caused problems.

Just to give an example, last year, most of the projects in the company were
transitioned to Agile mode from the traditional waterfall. To enforce Agile,
they MANDATED using White boards! There are audits in place where people check
for each project if they use a white board. I tried arguing with the auditor
"Our team is distributed, there are 3 members here, 3 in Mumbai, 2 in Chicago
and 4 in NY. The physical white board does not make sense for our project. We
maintain a digital whiteboard (in Atlassian's Greenhopper)."

I was met with a barrage of phone calls from managers who forced me to use a
physical white board. I tried explaining , but apparently a process is a
process.

~~~
wpietri
I've been involved with the Agile movement since before the term "Agile"
existed, so I can say with some authority that your managers are idiots twice
over.

First, I do encourage to start with physical boards, but that's because I
encourage teams to work in the same place. Agile methods work best with low-
latency, high-bandwidth, always-on communication, and by far the easiest way
to get that is by sitting in a dedicated team room. But if it's impossible for
the team to be together, yeah, a white board just won't cut it.

Second, the point of all of the Agile approaches is to have teams continuously
improve their process in response to local conditions. There is no single
Agile process. There are common starting points, and that often includes a
white board or a card board because those are very flexible tools that
everybody feels comfortable adapting. But if the whole company is supposed to
be doing exactly the same manager-dictated process, then it is definitionally
not Agile, because of points 1 and 4 in the manifesto. [1]

On a personal note, I want to offer you an apology. It makes me sad that
something with such promise for liberating employees and making work better
has turned into just another stick to beat employees with. That is the exact
opposite of what a lot of the early Agile people intended. I'm very sorry that
we weren't more diligent in preventing the movement from getting co-opted by
existing power dynamics.

[1] [http://agilemanifesto.org/](http://agilemanifesto.org/)

~~~
sidcool
Thanks! Another funny thing they talk about is velocity. It's the holy metric
for managers. "Why isn't your velocity increasing anymore?" Asked one. I said
"Because if we keep on increasing velocity, soon we will hit the speed of
light." I had no better response.

Also, they tend to compare velocities between teams. Story point estimation
technique is fundamentally subjective, and cannot be a point of comparison
between two different teams. It's a difficult life, but I get by.

~~~
wpietri
Yes, every bit of that is wrong. If managers put upward pressure on velocity
numbers, they will get numbers that go up via point inflation. The right
managerial question is: "What can I do to help you solve problems identified
in this week's retrospective?"

Sadly, modern MBA-style management has some fundamental notions that work
against Agile approaches. So you are probably in for more difficulty as they
decide what has a higher priority. Feel free to email me if I can be of
further service in discussing this.

~~~
sidcool
Sure thanks. You have been of great help!

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wpietri
An interesting response to this comes from the Lean Manufacturing world. He
calls this a Lean "fairies and unicorns" story, and points out that none of
this matters unless it actually improves value delivered: [http://www.mfg-
leadership.com/2014/08/08/so-you-decluttered-...](http://www.mfg-
leadership.com/2014/08/08/so-you-decluttered-and-simplified-so-what/)

That makes sense to me. Too often these sorts of virtuous changes are done
because a) everybody experiences the problem, and b) the proposed solution is
politically useful to somebody. That doesn't mean the changes actually make
anything better, though. It can be the corporate equivalent of the fad diet:
creating a feeling of action without making any long-term improvement.

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beloch
The rule to limit meeting sizes is interesting. There's nothing more
irritating than sitting in a meeting you have no reason to be in just because
everyone else is there, especially when you're eager to get something done!
Conversely, nothing derails a meeting quite like someone who has something
off-topic but important on his or her mind. Limiting the size of meetings
should, in addition to giving people more time to work, make the meetings
themselves more focused and efficient. However, there's a price to be paid.
Sometimes the best ideas come from the person who has the least reason to
attend the meeting. Also, it's often advantageous for everyone to have a big-
picture view of what's going on.

I wonder if a different form of meeting structure might be a good middle
ground. Perhaps meetings should have "principal" members and an "audience".
Call a meeting with a sharp focus and as few principals as possible. The
principals are expected to speak the most and form the consensus. The audience
still has the ability so speak, but not to bring up new topics, and don't
necessarily have to agree with the outcome for the meeting to conclude. If a
meeting is meant to cover different topics, the principals could change for
each topic.

I suspect this format of meeting would be difficult to get people to buy into.
However, depending on a company's needs, rigidly limiting meeting sizes might
not always be worth the cost.

~~~
walshemj
Allowing some one to go of topic and derail the meeting is a sign of a poor
chair or more likely some one who's never had any training in how to run
meetings and unfortunately a lot of people in our industry have no experience
of how meetings should be run.

Having an agenda an sticking to it is key and also if a meeting is going of
the rails people need to step up and take ownership and stop the derailment.

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jqm
The problem with de-cluttering is that a large portion of the workforce
depends for it's livelihood on institutional clutter. They become
professionals at navigating, maintaining and extending said clutter and moving
this group out of the way is very very difficult.

See also the article on 3 day work weeks posted on HN. This one of the largest
reasons it ain't gonna happen just yet.

