Comments (0)

By Rich, August 30, 2010 11:25 am

In the world of private pilots the phrase “Box Canyon” has a special and dangerous meaning. Pilots unfamiliar with local terrain may be enticed to fly into a canyon to which there is no outlet. They find out too late and can neither turn around nor climb fast enough to get out, leading to their ultimate demise.

Sadly, this is an appropriate metaphor for many careers in the tech industry. A recent blog post on TechCrunch discusses Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age. I want to offer hope today to avoid this type of Box Canyon in your career.

The seeds of career destruction are often planted very early. Young hotshots are brought in to a project and quickly specialize in a given domain, technical area, or technology. They quickly begin to adopt a strange vocabulary about their career. They refer to themselves by such titles as “front-end developer”, “middleware developer” or “database developer”.  Sometimes it becomes even more specific such as “Oracle developer”, “Ruby developer”, or “java developer”.

Kealy and I recently presented at the Agile Roots conference in Salt Lake City and overheard a dinnertime conversation where two programmers were sharing their titles with one another. One said, “I’m a java developer,” the other, a “Ruby developer.” I looked at Kealy and said, “Isn’t it weird?” She said, “Yeah, why do they do that?” Our two dinner companions overhead this and asked what we thought was weird. Kealy said, “You refer to your job by a kind of technology.” They looked at her with a bit of an eyeroll, “Of course we do! What technology do you work in?” She answered, “Whichever one is right for the project.”

My personal pursuit in starting Menlo was to create what Peter Senge describes as a “learning organization.” There is a profound business purpose behind my goal: I want Menlo to be as relevant 10 years from now as it is today. The side effect of our approach is that every developer on my team is facile in all of the current technologies. This makes them incredibly marketable. The irony of course is they don’t want to leave. Sneaky, eh?

The unnatural competitive advantage this gives me is that I can flex any of my team members into any project without concern for the attributes of their resume. Lisamarie and I reflected that our entire industry is sadly stuck in this Box Canyon. If you look at the way jobs and resumes are posted on such sites as Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com, you will see people who match only specific skillsets and technologies. This perpetuates the problem.

My experience in leading technical teams over several decades is that professionals in our industry yearn to keep up and learn new things. Most never get a chance to do this in their current jobs. They must actually quit and move elsewhere to get these new experiences. It’s hard to even do this because their new employer wants to know how much experience they have with the new technology. It’s a sad and vicious cycle that ultimately ruins careers.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We have witnessed nine years of fun, energy, excitement, and career growth while working in all of the latest technologies. Old and young alike work side by side, transferring knowledge and making the team just a little bit better every day. This is possible for anyone who has the courage to organize their efforts in a different way.

Comments (1)

By Rich, August 16, 2010 11:43 am

Of all the things that make Menlo Innovations special, our High-Tech Anthropology® practice probably falls into the category of “most special.” It is our High-Tech Anthropologists® who first coined the mission “to end human suffering in the world as it relates to technology.™”

We fundamentally believe that there can and should be joy in software design and development. How does joy manifest itself for a software team? Beyond great collaboration, a fun work environment,  and team members you enjoy working with, there is one over-arching characteristic that defines joy: thrilling the end users of the software we design and build. Building software is hard work. Knowing that our hard work is improving the lives of others is the greatest single source of satisfaction for our team. I believe this is true throughout our industry.

The other day I got to feel this joy up-close and personal. I was doing Weekend Warrior work around the house and found myself in the Ace Hardware parking lot loading bags of topsoil into my Saturn VUE. I had to block-in another car to ease the loading process and as luck would have it, the owner of that car showed up at just the wrong time. I apologized and said I’d be be finished in a couple of minutes. His reaction was fun and unexpected. I was wearing a t-shirt from one of our top customers, Accuri Cytometers. He pointed at my shirt, smiled and said, “I use that product every day!” I commented that my company built the software that goes with the product he uses. “I love that software. You guys did a great job!”

I was reminded in that moment of the joy produced by great design.

I made sure to share that story at Monday’s daily stand-up. Everyone smiled. We’ve known for years that we did a good job, maybe even a great job, on designing and building the CFlow software for Accuri Cytometers. However, it never hurts to hear an unsolicited testimonial from a happy user.

Comments (0)

By Rich, August 13, 2010 11:43 am

was not choosing Menlo Innovations to do our software design and development.”

- a former prospect having coffee with me the other day.

Arrrggghh.

This is a common theme and there is no joy, no schadenfreude when I hear this.  My frustration does not stem from the lost revenue, losing to the competition or simply a missed opportunity.  The maddening part is that a good idea didn’t make it to market and the product wasn’t widely adopted.  There will be lost investor dollars and another company that one day soon will close it doors, or perhaps  just limp along rather than enjoy enough success to hire more people, expand into other markets, improve the overall state of the economy.

When I hear this lament from former prospects, I ponder why? There are a variety of reasons they chose another path two years ago.  Sometimes they have their own internal resources, sometimes they have an existing relationship, sometimes they just believe they can get things done less expensively.  Somehow, they decide they didn’t need what we had to offer.  We could see at the beginning that they were headed for trouble, but its way too self-serving to harp on that point.

So for those who are contemplating starting a software product effort, I encourage you to think about these things as you launch the effort to build the software product you dream about:

1.  Your budget may be wrong. You likely have a $number in mind for how much it will cost to build the software.  How did you pick that number?  What if you chose the wrong number?  What is the cost of being wrong?  Might you expend your entire budget and only be half done?  If you end up 50% done when the money runs out, the “market” will conclude you are 0% done!

2.  There may actually be strong evidence that suggests your budget is wrong. Have you thought about how much others have spent to build something similar?  Its amazing how much information is available to see how much others have spent on building something close to your imagined system.  Find that information and be mercenary about challenging your own assumptions about “how easy this is going to be?”

3.  Your plan has too many “Miracle Occurs Here” boxes in it. Designing and building solid, competitive software products that thrill end users is plain ol’ everyday hard work.  Miracles never happen when you need them, and each time they do, they are typically offset by “catastrophe occurs here.”

4.  Your plan to build a quality team is flawed. Too often the plan to build a great team starts with an e-mail akin to “Rich … if you know any good programmers who are looking for work, tell them we are building a team that’s going to bring an awesome product to market.”  How will you know they are good programmers?  How long will it take you to figure that out?  How will they organize the work?  How will you know they are doing a good job?  How long will it take to figure out if they are not doing a good job?  Who will do the “non-programming” work of project management, user experience design and quality assurance.  What approach will be used?

5.  Your plan lacks ruthless focus! Who exactly are you building this for?  Trying to be all things to all people means you will not serve anyone well.  Everyone will be frustrated.  Having a specific target end user audience in mind is critical to success.  Bad Example: This patient appointment product will be used by professional services firms such as doctors, lawyers and dentists.  Good example:  Dr. Alicia Zahn, DDS has her own small dental practice that she has run for 17 years.  She is frustrated with her current patient scheduling system because …

There are many other pathologies that lead to failure.  I will touch on those in future posts.

There is hope.  It can work.  Success is possible.  There can and should be joy in software design and development.  The ultimate joy is when a user stops you in a parking lot and thanks you for the wonderful software you built for them.

I wish you joy! in your efforts and results!

Comments (0)

By Lisamarie, August 4, 2010 6:00 am

If you’re going to the Agile 2010 conference, be sure to attend James’ Goebel and my sessions. At the very least, stop by and say hello!

Tuesday, 8/10, 3:30 – 5:00 pm

It’s All in the Cards (Presenter: Lisamarie Babik) in Asia 4

The hallmarks of a “good” story card are that it describes business value, can be estimated, and can be tested. When I’m asked how to write good story cards, I typically answer, “You start by writing a couple hundred bad ones.” Like all things, it takes practice to improve. There are, however, ways to write better story cards from the start. This session will explore the good, the bad, and the ugly of story card writing using examples from real projects and will give participants an opportunity to exercise their story writing skills.

Thursday, 8/12, 9:00 – 10:30 am

Coaching Introverts: Building on their Quiet Strengths (Presenter: Lisamarie Babik) in Australia 3

In an Agile workplace it certainly seems that extroverts have the run of the roost. It’s loud. It’s interaction-intensive. It’s focused on rapid results. The introverts on your team can end up feeling excluded, overlooked, or simply misunderstood. What’s a coach to do? This session explores how knowledge of Myers-Briggs personality types can help you decipher the interactions & friction within your team. Building on Jennifer Kahnweiler’s Four Ps we’ll delve into ways to bring out the inherent leadership potential of the introverted agilista to make their voices heard.

How long would a Stand-Up meeting take with 85 people in it? (Presenter: James Goebel) in Asia 4

If an 8 person standup takes 20 minutes, a logical assumption is that 85 people could take nearly 3 hours. But what if that wasn’t true? At Menlo a daily standup with 85 people typically completes in 15 mins. What other beliefs might be wrong? What if you delivered an installable CD every week? If you collocate many projects together? If everyone had storycards? If sponsors had to move index cards to authorize work? If devs, designers, and QA pair full time? If you eliminate email & meetings? Join us for hands-on exercises and learn why logical assumptions about agile might just not be true.

Comments (5)

By Rich, August 2, 2010 11:39 am

When I tell people the story of the transformation of my old team at Interface Systems, I often comment that problems I assumed were unsolvable began falling by the wayside. One I’ve written about before is the hiring of new people. I actually hated having to hire new people because my challenge was always “how do I get them productive before I demoralize them?”

Completely off my radar screen in those days was the notion of hiring an intern. In my managerial view, the effort to bring an intern up to speed felt both counter-intuitive and counterproductive to ever getting any useful work done.

At Menlo Innovations we bring in at least 6 interns per year. The majority of them come from a wonderful international internship program called IAESTE. At this time of year we are saying goodbye to the IAESTE interns who have been with us for the last year and greeting the new interns who will be with us for the next. I often include a conversation with the interns on a walking tour of Menlo. My favorite question to ask them is “How long after you arrived were you doing productive work on a real project?” Their answer is usually expressed in terms of minutes rather than days or weeks.

When I ask them to clarify for the visitors, they describe walking in our front door, being greeted by Carol (the Menlo Software Factory™ Floor Manager) and then being introduced to their pair partner. Their pair partner pushes the keyboard in front of them and says, “Let’s get working.” It happens that fast.

What is really fun to watch is how fast our team becomes enamored with these bright young minds. They are adopted quickly and become treasured members of our team. It is hard to say goodbye as we just did last week with Judith from Austria, however, the flipside is saying hello to Maruska (Slovakia) and Gary (Hong Kong).  Four more will be arriving in the next few months from Switzerland, Tajikistan, Croatia, and Macedonia.

We often win awards here at Menlo. One quality of many of those awards is our focus on diversity. The IAESTE program gives us an effortless way to enhance the cognitive diversity of our team.

Many who come to visit us assume we hire a steady stream of University of Michigan grads, given our downtown Ann Arbor location. While we have many Michigan grads here, they are a minority. Being a Michigan grad myself, I certainly appreciate the quality of the output of my Alma Mater, but I don’t want everyone here thinking the same way. Drawing from other universities and countries around the world gives us another significant competitive advantage.

The spirit and energy of our interns, whether domestic or international, adds to the joy of the Menlo Software Factory™. Student visitors often lament that torturous conversation with potential employers who tell them “Come see us when you have 1 or 2 years of experience.”

“Where are we supposed to get that?” they wonder. They can get it here at Menlo Innovations.

We are both better off for the experience.

Comments (1)

By Rich, July 28, 2010 2:51 pm

I gave a talk today on creating a culture for innovation. I made a comment during the talk that resonated with a lot of people. During the talk I reflected on a time of great change in my career when I moved my team out of their offices and cubes and into the big open space we called the “Java Factory.”

There was great resistance during this change; however, within 6 months I had successfully changed the paths in the carpet and now the team was far more productive and energized than I could have ever imagined at the beginning. A long time member of my team came to me one day and asked me an important question. He said, “Rich, when you embarked on this program 6 months ago there was no way you knew it was going to work out as well as it did. Why were you willing to take that risk?” He was right. It was an implausible risk for a guy in my position. I had the title. I was a VP. I had the seniority. I’d been there for 16 years. I was well-regarded by both my team and my peers, and yet inside I knew there had to be a better way of doing what we were doing.

After reflecting on his question, I answered, “It was quite simple. I came to a point where I realized that the risk of remaining the same was far greater than the risk of changing.” Once you cross that bridge in your mind, you run towards change and run away from staying the same. Sometimes the risk of staying the same is the far greater risk.

It’s a very powerful moment that not many of us ever get to experience. I was fortunate to be one of the few who did. These last 11 years have gotten me back to where I want to be personally. I’ve gotten back to joy.  I see it every day in this wonderful place we call the Menlo Software Factory™. The energy, the creativity, the imagination, and the innovation are at a level most only dream of. We get to experience it every day.

We’re not perfect, but we typically expose our imperfections more quickly than others and then work on those imperfections. We’re still trying to change the world from our little perch here in in Ann Arbor. The tours we do every day give us a chance to change minds and show people a different approach to organizing teams of people towards a common goal. We want to give permission to everyone who visits to take a moment and think differently about how they do what they do.

If you get a chance, come visit us. We always enjoy the chance to share our passions with others.

Comments (1)

By Rich, July 12, 2010 11:11 am

A question we get almost every tour is, “What is your attrition rate?” It’s a statistic we’ve never thought to track, so our answers are always anecdotal.  I tell them, “Over the years we’ve found that the right people go and the right people stay.” It’s probably a long term version of Jim Collins’ quote, “Get the right people on the bus, get the wrong people off the bus.”

Interestingly, we don’t achieve this by regularly firing people. We create a system that allows both new people and the existing team to evaluate each other and decide whether the fit is good.

I often find that the companies that pride themselves on a low attrition rate confide an insidious complaint, “Yeah, we can’t fire people here.” They go on to lament that there are “individual heroes” on their team who have been there for years, who have become obstacles to progress, and who stopped being “part of the team” years ago. They can’t be fired because they possess some special knowledge that the organization perceives as irreplaceable. Management fears them, staff avoids them. They become an island unto themselves.

Ironically this is more harmful to the person who isn’t being fired as their career is hurdling down a blind alley. They are working themselves slowly into an unemployable state.

At Menlo we work very hard to avoid these “Towers of Knowledge.” Because people come and people go, we strive to make Menlo a bird cage without bars. We make no artificial attempt to hold on to anyone. We wish them well when they choose to leave and we embrace them should they ever choose to come back. I think the difference is we strive to handle this aspect of our work culture with dignity. We are not always perfect at it, but we try to get better each time.

I was approached a couple of years ago by one of my team members who told me she was leaving to take another position. She was a bit teary-eyed while delivering this news. I asked her why she was leaving to go to one of the Detroit Three, and she told me, “I want to have some ‘big company’ experience on my resume.” I thought that sounded like a great reason and offered my encouragement. Her emotional plea to me was, “It’s only a 9 month contract. Can I come back when it’s over?” I said, “Absolutely! You know we love you here. When does your contract end? Call us two weeks before and we’ll try to get you back on the schedule then.”

She lasted four months before she called. “They’re not human here!” We had her back on the schedule the following week.

Her story of leaving this other job was fascinating. As soon as she announced she was leaving, security guards showed up with boxes and escorted her from the building. She never got to say goodbye to her co-workers.

I can’t understand why employers behave this way.

She was back here for two years before she left again for a higher paying position. Her needs this time were different.  Again, the reasons were rational and understandable. She continues to come back to visit for lunch & learns and other social engagements with the team. I anticipate she may join us again in the future, and we would embrace the opportunity.

So you tell me, what is our attrition rate?

Comments (3)

By Rich, June 28, 2010 2:19 pm

Today we had the pleasure of hosting 20 fourth graders from Ms. Stephen’s class at Cornerstone School (Nevada Campus). My, what important lessons we can learn from ten year olds!

We host a lot of tour groups here, mostly adults, mostly people in the work world. Every once in a while we host classes from elementary, middle, and high school. It’s such a blast to see the bright eyes, the curiosity, and the excitement of kids for whom the world is still a place of wondrous mystery. They always have such great questions.

My favorite question today was, “What is Menlo Innovations doing to help the State of Michigan?” In the 9 years of tours I’ve hosted, I’ve never had a more important or probing question. It generated a tremendous amount of discussion. I talked about hiring people, how that has helped them do things like buy homes, take care of their health, take vacations, buy cars, and generally become their own version of the economic stimulus package. I also talked about how the success we help our customers create means they can also hire people to do all of the above. What a great question!

I find these kinds of visits to be incredibly uplifting because I see the future in the eyes of these children. They’re still excited, they still have energy. Too often the adults who come to visit have lost that edge. I’m always proud when I get people re-energized about their career or their work life, but I always find myself wishing that more people could get to experience the joy that we have every day.

I asked the kids whether they wanted to work here some day.  All their hands went high in the air. One asked “How old do you have to be?”  When I said 18, you could hear their collective sigh for the eight years they have to wait.  I think they would start tomorrow if they could.  One asked if we had “internships!”  What 4th grader is already thinking about internships?!?  These kids from Cornerstone are special and delightful.

Fourth graders excited about work.  Fourth graders wanting to know about internships and when they can start working.  Fourth graders who want to know how I am helping the State of Michigan.  Fourth graders who knew that the word that describes the difference between checks we cash and checks we write is called profit! Fourth graders who knew that profit helps us pay for things and helps make the world a better place.

I hope I am smarter than a fourth grader every now and then!  The fourth graders from Cornerstone have set the bar pretty high for that to be true.  Thanks President Sanders, Mr. Bologna, and Ms. Stephens.  Thanks Cornerstone fourth graders!  You made my day!

Comments (5)

By Rich, June 21, 2010 10:36 am

I often hear the phrase, “We hire the best and brightest.” It leaves me wondering who hires the “worst and dimmest.”

In order to experience real success every team needs to determine how they can achieve extraordinary results with ordinary people. When I teach our Agile Explained class, I reference the six focus areas of Six Sigma. These include Environment, Measurement Systems, Methods, Materials, Machines, and People. My belief is most management teams first look at the people as the key to solving their most pressing problems.  “If we only had better people things wouldn’t be this bad.”

Don’t believe it. We have good people in our industry. The people in our industry are smart, dedicated, educated, and diligent. It’s not about the people.

When the Standish Group measures our industry and catalogs the top reasons software projects fail, competent staff often falls toward the bottom of that list. This resonates with me.  In fact, the Standish Group suggests that replacing your staff with even more competent people might only move your Successmeter by 5%.  Why? Because we already have competent staff on our teams. It’s not about the people.

One of the most intriguing stories I’ve heard along these lines is the story of the NUMMI Plant in Freemont, California, a joint-venture between Toyota and General Motors. Anyone who is interested in the effect of process on results should listen to this NPR story. This story outlines how in the 1980s the worst performing plant in GM history became the best performing plant.  Same people. Same machines. Same plant. Different methods and different measurement systems made all the difference.

We see the same effects here at Menlo. We often refer to ourselves as a refugee camp from an industry gone very very bad.  We are able to take members of  teams performing below industry standards and quickly assimilate them into our team. Their enthusiasm, energy, motivation, and productivity immediately rise. Same people, different process.

It’s not about the people. As you consider how you might make things better at your company, don’t start by looking at the people. Start by looking at yourself and then look at your process. The payoffs aren’t just in higher productivity and better quality, but also in a better life for you and your team.

We believe it is possible to have joy in software design and development. We hope the same for you.

Comments (0)

By Rich, June 18, 2010 10:25 am

I attended the Agile Roots conference in Salt Lake City earlier this week. It had a feeling of returning to an ancestral homeland. While I wasn’t part of the original Snowbird gathering in 2000, I am thankful to the group that gathered there to change our industry.

A tweet after my talk there said, “Impressed by @menloinnovation’s successful long-term record as an XP [Extreme Programming] contract programming shop…”

Yes, we are agile. Yes, we use Extreme Programming. However, neither of those are goals of the organization. They are tools to pursue a dream.

We believe that software design and development should be a joyful activity. For a good portion of my career it wasn’t. It got to the point for me that I either had to change or leave. I chose change.

The group that gathered at Snowbird in 2000 gave me the path to change. Thank you.

The tools of agile, Extreme Programming, Alan Cooper, Lean, Six Sigma, RUP, and PMBOK were simply means to an end. What I desired was joy, energy, creativity, imagination, quality, collaboration, work-life balance and enthusiasm, each and every day. Those tools gave me those things.

I was honored to be able to share those successes and passions with the gathering at Agile Roots. I have had the great fortune of experiencing that joy for the last 11 years. I hope in some way the talks from me, James, and Kealy and Ted will inspire others to chase a similar mission.