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Tag Archives: Industrial Logic

Safety – Easier Said Than Done

19 Jan

Safety.  Number two on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – right after eating and breathing.

Safety.  The primary focus of Alcoa’s famous rise from the ashes.

Safety.  The gateway to excellence in software development.

(Lack of) Safety.  The first of the four invisible impediments to high performance teams.

Safety.  Something that is completely internal.  Some people feel safe in a burning building.  Others are afraid to walk across a busy street.  In the last year, our focus at Industrial Logic has been safety as a gateway to excellence.  And the more we explore, the more it resonates.  The more it is surprisingly true.

For me, I’ve had a really long weekend.  I made a mistake at work that upset one of my colleagues and may have negatively affected our standing with a client.  Bummer.  It happens.  But it was the weekend.  And I’m 10 timezones away so it has taken three days for us to get together and talk about the problem.

However, since Friday morning I’ve been stressed.  I haven’t been able to focus.  And I have used a huge amount of energy to continue doing work that needs to be done for an upcoming deadline.  If I weren’t feeling so unsafe, I’d have been able to focus and would have been done by now.

And the interesting thing is, I know rationally there is nothing to worry about and even if there was there is very little I can do at this moment.  But my rational mind doesn’t mean very much to my emotional fear.

So, the question is, how do you feel safe?  How do you readily get from feeling emotionally unsafe to relative safety?  For me, it has always been (relatively) straight-forward: I man-up and face my fear.  If I’ve upset someone I pick up the phone and have a conversation.  If I’ve broken something, I do my best to fix it.  And so on and so forth.

But what works for one person, doesn’t always work for another.  And what about when you find yourself in my position this weekend when something isn’t immediately fixable or that person isn’t available for a conversation?

That’s what I’ll be focusing on over the next two weeks.  I’ll be reading up.  Having conversations with people who know this much better than I do.  And learning to more effectively create safety for myself and share what I learn with others.

Because Safety really is important to our work together.  And without it things break down and we become so much less effective than we can be.

 
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Posted by on January 19, 2014 in Uncategorized

 

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How Do We Manage Changing Priorities?

09 Jan

There are generally two parts to changing priorities: 1) how they fit within the mission of the team and the project – that is are they really changes that need to be made, and 2) the ability for the team(s) to respond to this vision.

For the first part to be even possible, there must be a clear direction and alignment of the team around the purpose and goals for their project.  That is called the mission in chartering as used by Industrial Logic.  Or, as the shared task, as defined by Christopher Avery.  No matter what you call it, everyone needs to be aware of where we are going together.  With that knowledge, they can review their current backlog of work, change priorities appropriately, and say NO to things that no longer fit in this shared understanding.

The second part, is the technical ability for the team to choose very thin vertical slices of functionality and take those to completion.  Saying vertical slices is easy.  To be able to do them effectively pulls in almost every major skill from the agile toolbox:  writing effective user stories, test driven development, behaviour driven development, working effectively with legacy code, and perhaps continuous deployment.

There are several areas that will affect the ability to manage changing priorities effectively:

1)     Degree of alignment within the entire team.  This serves as the backdrop for all the work we do in the future.

2)     An effective product management group that is engaged with the team.  Product owners must be skilled at creating effective user stories and working well with the rest of the team.

3)    Visibility of current state is important to be able to make decisions about when to change priorities.  This is as easy as saying we will post our work regularly on physical information radiators.  The difficulty is in building the habit that comes through repetition and creating a safe culture that encourages sharing even bad news early.  Tools may or may not be considered at this point depending on the needs of the teams on the ground.

4)    Reduce work in progress and prefer finishing to starting.  This is difficult and also needs a habit.

If you have these two major areas, then you will be able to recognize and respond to change effectively.

 
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Posted by on January 9, 2014 in Uncategorized

 

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