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 (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 (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.

Comments (0)

By Lisamarie, May 11, 2010 6:00 am

Awhile back I received an e-mail from a headhunter asking if I was interested in joining their Agile leadership team. I shared it with Rich, then politely declined their offer. I didn’t think about it again until I was talking with Rich later that week.

He said to me, “I didn’t leave work that night worrying that you were going to go because I knew that’s not where your passion lies. And if it is, then it would be right for you to go.” It turned out to be a great launching point for a conversation about what it is that we do at Menlo, and why we do it.

It all starts with Passion. Passion for the work we do. Passion for sharing what we do with others.

When we started exploring all the ways we share our passion, we started scribbling on an index card.

In reflecting on the things we discussed, I have to admit that I was a little surprised. After all, we’re a custom software design and development firm — what does all this other stuff have to do with software design or development? What do we get out of public speaking, tours, books, training, this blog, Twitter, etc… ?

For me, it’s that I get to share the joy and passion I have for my work with other people. Really, it’s that simple.

I’m fortunate in that I’m asked to do a lot of public speaking. I’ve traveled around Michigan, around the country, and even around Canada and Latin America sharing what I’ve learned over the years, particularly what I’ve learned from the Agile movement and how we apply it here at Menlo. Always the reaction is the same: disbelief that work can be joyful, tons of questions about how we make it work, and finally a glint of hope in their eyes as they really start to grok what they’ve heard.

That’s why we write this blog. That’s why we wrote our book. That’s why we tweet. We want to restore belief in joy.

Joy is infectious. Pass it on.

Comments (0)

By Rich, April 29, 2010 9:56 am

At Menlo we combine High-Tech Anthropology® with agile software development. We find that agile teams allow us to deliver our projects faster and with better results – including increased adoption of the software by the user community.

I’m often asked, “Shouldn’t we spend more time writing requirements?” The subtext to this question is “If creating usable software is so important, shouldn’t we spend more time getting the requirements and user interface specification perfect before writing even a single line of code?” The obvious answer would seem to be yes, spend months or years, however long it takes to get the requirements right. Unfortunately, this answer is wrong. Too many times I’ve heard the story of a “year long specification process” that ended in no results at all.

“We had one of those kind of projects”, lamented a student once at a class I was teaching. “We spent $18M and a year developing the specification and when we got done, we threw it away.” Sensing the entrepreneurial opportunity, I quickly responded that I would be happy to write the next throwaway spec for half that price! “That’s only the half the story” he went on. “The first time we spent $30M with the same results.” I asked if the story was really accurate and another student replied “Rich, the real question is, which one of our four projects that failed like that was he referring to?”

One organization spent close to $100M to gather requirements, that resulted in no working system. There are many reasons efforts like this fail. One I would like to focus on today is that fact that many organizations spend too much time and money writing requirements without getting working systems in front of real users. This is one problem that agile software development seeks to solve.

Users vote with their keyboards. If they don’t like a piece of software or if it doesn’t produce better business results, they won’t use it. If user’s don’t use it, sales people won’t be able to sell it (at least not for long). This is also true for in-house IT projects where “selling” the results of the project can still be a difficult proposition.

What we’re ignoring in all of this is human nature. It’s why anthropology is such an important element. Anthropology is the study of human behavior. Without studying the humans, the machines cannot be programmed properly. And we can’t just ask the users what they need, because they can’t always express it. This is an important point worthy of repeating – the users don’t always know what they need! We must observe them and then show them what we discover as we go along. Early on, we may be wrong no matter how well we listen. We may be wrong because the users only discover their real needs incrementally, as we tease it out of them with early mockups, prototypes, and incremental releases. Only as they see and work with real systems will their true needs be fully revealed.

The results can be stunning. We’ve seen competitors literally exit a market upon the release of such a product design effort. We’ve seen users thrilled and businesses achieve a dominant position in their chosen market.

“Shouldn’t we spend more time writing requirements?” No, most of you are already spending too much time writing requirements without getting feedback from real users. Instead, embrace an agile development process that allows you to get feedback by putting real working results in front of real users. This isn’t easy, because it’s so different. It’s difficult to break the mold of our old behaviors. But it is possible. We just need to start acting differently, now!

Be encouraged, be courageous, be strong, and be agile.

Comments (0)

By Rich, April 12, 2010 9:35 am

There’s a common question I get with first time visitors to Menlo. It usually occurs about an hour into the walking tour. It’s something along the line of, “How did you come up with this?” My typical response is that Menlo was born out of 16 years of pain. As I have described in earlier posts, my early career looked quite successful from the outside, but inside I was very frustrated.

Thus began my search.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, I was simply convinced that I would know it when I saw it. I began reading many books, but not books on software development, rather books on organizational development, teamwork, and management.

In 1999, it happened. I saw the future and I began running towards it when I was first exposed to the ideas of extreme programming (XP) by reading a wiki by Kent Beck. The final mental tumblers fell into place for me later that year when I saw an ABC News video about a Palo Alto industrial design firm called IDEO. The picture in my head was now crystal clear.

I went to the executive team at Interface Systems and showed the video. When I told them this is where I’m heading with my team, their reaction was both surprising and encouraging: “Rich, how soon do we knock down the walls?” It took six months from that point to transform my team to a new way of working. I got another 18 months to refine the archetype before the Internet bubble burst.

Those two years convinced me that I had discovered a new model for designing and building software. I had built a great engine room; sadly it was inside the Titanic. I knew I could build another great engine room. What I needed was a new ship: Menlo Innovations.

There are many times visitors, unfamiliar with our historical roots, will ask, “Rich, have you ever heard of a company called IDEO?” It’s always a proud moment for me when that happens because I feel we’ve captured the real spirit of a company for which we have great admiration.

Last Thursday, it finally happened. Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, stopped by for a brief visit after he gave a talk here in Ann Arbor.

“It feels like home,” was his first comment upon entering our space. It was a proud moment for me and perhaps an important confirmation of the spirit that we intended to create so many years ago.

We still have a long way to go to have the kind of impact that IDEO has had in the world. They continue to inspire us with examples of great design combined with an amazing company culture.

Thank you, IDEO. Thank you, Tim.

Comments (0)

By Rich, April 5, 2010 11:19 am

One of our more enjoyable activities here at Menlo are the near-daily tours we give of our space to those who are curious about how we operate. One particularly memorable public tour occurred a couple of years ago. The tours are always highly interactive, with lots of questions and discussion about our unusual approach. This particular tour was memorable because one visitor in particular sat unusually silent throughout the entire tour. It didn’t take me long to notice that this particular visitor was both quiet and passive.

That doesn’t happen very often.

I figured the tour and the discussion just weren’t interesting to him.  Finally it happened. About 2 hours into the Q&A, as I was describing our vacation request “policy”, he blurted out, “Stop! I can’t take it any more!” and stop I did.

I looked at him and said, “What’s up, Scott? What’s on your mind?” He said, “I can’t take it. I don’t want to go to work tomorrow knowing there’s a place that uses this much common sense. I don’t want to believe it exists because it will make my day tomorrow that much more difficult.”

I could see it in his eyes. His passiveness was not about disinterest, but rather about disbelief. I’ve kept in touch with Scott. He has since changed jobs, but I believe he was forever changed by his experience here that evening.

You see, common sense is anything but common. Treating people the way they want to be treated and the way you would hope others would treat you — with respect, dignity, and understanding — is vital. So is acknowledging that they want their work to be meaningful and they want a life outside of work.

The process and methodology we use inside the Menlo Software Factory™ has many industry labels: agile, extreme programming, iterative and incremental, visual, test-driven, user-centric, flexible, even democratic. We have laughingly considered trademarking Common Sense™ as the official name of our process. Quite frankly we don’t really care what it’s called. We are far more interested in the positive effects it has for the people who work here, and how those effects translate into great results for our clients.

We’ve had hundreds of visitors in the last few months who we believe are seeking the same “common sense” that Scott saw a couple of years ago. We are blessed to be able to enjoy this rare “common sense” and are delighted to share it with others.

We’re not certain why it is called “common sense” given how seemingly uncommon it is. Our hope is that we can play some small part in putting the “common” into “common sense.”

Comments (2)

By Rich, March 11, 2010 11:56 am

Not.

We received a comment the other day on the Do Cubicles Kill post where an assertion was made that one of the key challenges with adopting agile is that you can only make it work with experts. The implication of this statement is that you can’t make it work with mere mortals.

Our experience is just the opposite. We have found more challenges in trying to integrate “experts” into our team regardless of their experience with agile. Given we’ve been practicing agile for nearly 9 years, it’s probably worthy of exploring this topic and reflecting on how we make it work without only experts.

What are the ingredients? Here’s what we believe we do that helps make this work.

We invented and practice Extreme Interviewing. During this process we screen first for kindergarten talents — do they play well with others, know how to put away their toys, do they not swear or bite — then for technical talents. This allows us to be very intentional about our culture.

We practice pairing, all day, every day and we’ve expanded pairing beyond programming. It’s the most powerful managerial tool I’ve ever discovered.

We choose who you are going to work with for each iteration. This was a tool we used when we were first teaching the team the value of pairing. They later came to us and asked us to continue the practice. They valued avoiding the social awkwardness that might happen if they were the last kid on the playground and no one wanted them on their team.

We maintain experts within earshot. We love having experts in various technologies and techniques. We also love having experience on the team. We expect our experts and experienced team members to be good mentors. Our goal is to not have our experts work in their area of expertise, but be available when needed (i.e. they’re working in other domains with their pair partner). This means our experts also get to learn new things, which keeps them growing and learning.

Our weekly kickoffs, estimation, and show & tells ensure that the entire project team has a common understanding of the work being done across the entire project.

The most thoughtful process we go through every week is resource planning. This is where we decide who is going to be on which projects, and who is going to pair with whom. This is an opportunity for us to ensure we’re getting cross pollination across projects, across pairs, and throughout the organization. Essentially this means we get cross-training and mentoring for free, every moment of every day. Most teams dream about “continuous improvement.” We get to experience it.

We practice on-boarding new talent every year through our internship program. We bring in 6-8 interns each year from around the world. This gives us an opportunity to check how we’re doing in terms of teaching our culture and practices to new people.

Finally, this is made a lot easier by co-locating and working in an open space. As we’ve joked before, it is true that we do not use e-mail to communicate with each other, we use High-Speed Voice Technology™. This creates an energy and enthusiasm that keeps all the other pieces working well together.

We understand the concern that many have that agile can only be done with experts. We would never consider building such a process ourselves because of the peril of dependency on individual heroes. For those who wish to see a working alternative, stop by for a tour. Many people do.

Comments (3)

By Rich, February 18, 2010 7:00 am

We hate meetings.

I often describe Menlo as a refugee camp for an industry gone bad. Approximately half of our team has worked a substantial portion of their careers in traditional software development environments. Menlo is anything but traditional.

As we described in an earlier post, our open and collaborative work environment often gets a “Wow!” reaction when people arrive for the first time. They notice the lack of barriers, the noise, the smiles, the energy of our team. Most wrestle with the idea that software development can actually be done in such a noisy environment, but they are intrigued with the focused energy they see as they look at my team.

At some point during the walking tour, I demonstrate our all-company meeting technology.

“HEY MENLO!”

“HEY RICH!”

And the place goes dead silent in an instant.  All eyes are pointed at me as they wait to hear why I have called this particular all-company meeting. No one has left their chair, no one has gathered in a conference room, everyone is sitting in rapt attention waiting for the meeting to begin.

I then use this opportunity to introduce our guests, and end the meeting by thanking the team for their attention. They go back to work and total meeting time is less than 20 seconds.

This all-company meeting technology is not for me alone. Anyone on the team can call an all-company meeting at any time. I’ve even had guests brave enough to try it themselves.

Just so we’re clear, this type of meeting happens less than once a day.

As I’ve said before, I know when I’m connecting with my tour visitors when they groan and laugh at just the right moments. This is usually one of those moments because they are contemplating the cost of an all-hands meeting at their company. Our meetings are started and over before most companies could get everyone gathered in one room.

It’s at this point that visitors are beginning to grasp the power of what they’re seeing. They cannot yet imagine the cultural shift that would be required within their organization, but they are already beginning to think, “I want something this powerful where I work.”

We use this same technology when calling project team meetings. “Hey Dawson!” is the way to call a meeting specific to everyone working on the Dawson project and everyone else in the room ignores the request and continues working.

It even works on an individual level. “Hey Carol!” is the way to call a meeting with an individual — though two people are unlikely to continue to yell across the room, and will instead come together after the initial “call.”

There are many components to “Hey Menlo” meeting technology. A big open room, with no walls or cubicles. Air. Vocal cords. Tympanic membranes. Auditory nerves. A team that is willing to work in such an environment. It’s powerful in both its efficiency and its conservation of team energy.

Stop by for a visit and I’ll show you how it works.

Comments (3)

By Rich, February 11, 2010 8:00 am

Growing up in Southeastern Michigan, a visit to Greenfield Village was an annual rite of summer for me as it was for many other kids growing up near Henry Ford’s historical park. Two exhibits I found fascinating were the Wright Brother’s bicycle shop and the Menlo Park, New Jersey lab of Thomas Edison.

This youthful experience had an impact on me far beyond anything I could have ever imagined at eight years old.

Zoom ahead to 1999 and the Java Factory at Interface Systems. This radical experiment on my part was a combination of team, process, project management, and workspace.  The entire company at Interface began to take notice, and one day while IBM was visiting, our VP of Sales asked the visiting IBM VP if he would like to see our process at work. It was the first official tour of the Java Factory at Interface Systems. When Ed, the IBM VP, exclaimed to my peers on the executive team that this was the most amazing thing he had ever seen, I became tour director at Interface Systems for every one of our clients, partners, and prospects.

Having a bit of Irish storyteller in me, I began to enhance the tours with little anecdotes. At some point I embellished these anecdotes by commenting that this was exactly the way Thomas Edison worked in his Menlo Park, New Jersey lab.

I had no idea if this was true. I was only recalling those youthful visits to the Greenfield Village recreation of that lab. That was in fact my only connection to Mr. Edison.

Then the NASDAQ crashed, the Internet bubble burst, and for the first time in my career, I was out of work. The amazing experiment at Interface Systems was a great success, but it was no more. I had built a really great engine room. Unfortunately, it was inside the Titanic.

I could build another great engine room. I needed a new ship.

So I got together the people who helped me create it in the first place and we founded a company that would be centered around those principles that we’d had 2 years to archetype at Interface Systems. It was now time to name the company. Recalling my tours at Interface Systems and my references to Thomas Edison, I thought it would be clever to connect our company name to Mr. Edison.

Clever verbal anecdotes on walking tours is one thing. Baking that story into the name of our company, your web address, and your business cards, is quite another. I needed to become a student of Mr. Edison, quickly. I began reading books. I was stunned by the parallels between my experiences at Interface Systems and the experiences of Edison and his team at Menlo Park.

I was now convinced that this was no coincidence, but rather a compelling revisit to one of the most prolific invention factories in the history of mankind.

A couple of years after starting Menlo Innovations, a visitor stopped by. He said, “My wife told me I had to meet you.” I asked, “Why is that?” He said, “You have all these Edison connections and I just wanted to give you a book.”

He handed me a copy of Edison: A Life of Invention by Paul Israel. I excitedly said, “Yeah! That’s one of the books I read when deciding to name the company.” I then had an oh-my-gosh moment when I realized he was the author of the book. He said, “Yeah. I’m Paul Israel. I run the Edison Papers project at Rutger’s University.” Paul is probably recognized as the world’s foremost expert on Thomas Edison. He is dedicating his career to assembling all of Edison’s papers and artifacts.

Paul now visits Menlo once or twice a year. I have had him here with William Pretzer, a former historian at Greenfield Village, and John Bowditch, a former curator of the Henry Ford Museum. I’ve had the pleasure of watching these three men bring Edison back to life as only historians can, while sitting in our space at Menlo Innovations. These gentlemen have confirmed that we have captured the magic of the Menlo Park, New Jersey lab experience.

I’ve also come to know, through this Edison connection, Sarah Miller Caldicott, the great grand-niece of Thomas Edison and author of the recent book Innovate Like Edison. We are honored to be mentioned in this book and I have had the pleasure of co-presenting with her at innovation conferences.

In William Pretzer’s book Working at Inventing: Thomas A. Edison & the Menlo Park Experience, Pretzer describes Henry Ford’s goal in creating Greenfield Village (it’s official name – The Edison Institute):

“[Greenfield Village] would use the past to encourage visitors, especially the young, to aspire to great achievements of their own. While Ford’s goal for the Edison Institute may have been extremely optimistic, it embodies a faith that remains compelling in a society that appears to have lost confidence in its future.”

Menlo shares this vision. The near-daily tours we give are intended to inspire others in our industry who have lost confidence in their future. We also host many school kid visits from pre-schools to middle schools to colleges, seeking to inspire them to great achievements of their own.

Thank you, Mr. Ford, for inspiring the eight year old in me so many years ago. Your dream and your goal are kept alive every day in this wonderful environment we call the Menlo Software Factory™.

And happy birthday, Mr. Edison.