PTM triplet for continuous improvement

As per Wikipedia, Continuous improvement process (abbreviated as CIP or CI), 
"is an ongoing effort to improve products, services, or processes. These efforts can seek "incremental" improvement over time or "breakthrough" improvement all at once.”

This post talks on how the PTM triplet is important for continuous improvement. PTM stands for practices, tools and metrics.

Agile practices as such may seem little cumbersome since it is required to have multiple checkpoints to ensure sanctity of the product under development. This can be made effective and efficient with tools usage. Hence, tools become an integral part of agile WoW (Way of Working). Usage of tools is a double edged sword. Though it helps in making job easier for team members, not having the right tools may in turn cause an opposite effect and later become an overhead for the team. Thus, it is important to identify and use right tools. The practices and tools are closely coupled in Agile WoW.

Usage of right tools help team in deriving proper metrics. These metrics helps the team with a feedback system on how the system is performing. Regular and timely feedback is critical for any system to change. i.e. for its continuous improvement.

Below is a high level view on PTM triplet:

Practices: Backlog grooming, daily standup, scrum of scrums, retrospectives, weekly releases, automated builds and test runs

Tools: Visual boards, redmine for bug logging, Hudson for hourly builds, static analyzer /code review tools, scripts for automation

Metrics: Lead time, cycle time for measuring team effectiveness, # of build failures in an iteration, # of reopened issues

The important point is to use the right tools, measure the right metrics and change things that do not work regularly.

Why capability models and certifications could be flawed!! By Design :)

Most organizations claim to be at various levels of maturity levels and certifications. These capability models and certifications do convey the process focus these organizations aspire to achieve, which is definitely a differentiating factor. However, these are just not enough, since there is a basic flaw to these models. Let me explain this.

Especially for larger organizations, for evaluating its maturity level, few projects or teams are selected and evaluated whether they comply with defined processes. The experts evaluate these teams, and accordingly certify the organization to be at a particular maturity level. The fun part is that the selected set of teams/projects could account to a very small group in an organization. And based on this evaluation, the organization is either certified or not certified.

Customers when they look for maturity levels, look at the organization maturity level, because that is what these certifications mean. What they are not aware is the capability level of team that they are going to partner with. They do not know or really not look at how good they are. They go by the organization capability level. And this is the simple reason why these certifications are not a good measure on team’s capability and may not work.

Instead, we need to focus on team capability. There needs to be a means of evaluating team’s capability rather than organization’s capability. As a customer, when I know that the team with which I will partner is the best available, I know I am going to get the best returns on my investment.

The capability models and certifications focus on a top down approach; instead what is required is a bottom up approach. If each team in the organization consists of great people, then that makes it a great organization. So the focus has to be at team level or rather at the individual level. 

Work Life Integration

We are all familiar with cliche "work life balance" and almost all talk about it. What I have observed is we really don't know when we are balanced, because this is always an act where either side goes up or down. We get confused on where to put right focus in the act of balancing out work and life.

Recently, I attended a discussion where I saw a paradigm shift on this view. The speaker was talking about "Work Life Integration" rather than “work life balance".  I felt this was a very powerful concept. When we focus on balancing work and life it always becomes a compromise. It is not win-win when we go for compromises in life, we always loose.

With Work Life Integration, we look at how we get the best out of our everyday life, keeping both work and personal life moving smooth. I have observed that it is practically difficult to follow a strict regimen of 9:00am to 6:00pm working hours and then 6:00pm to 9:00am to be completely dedicated for personal purposes. We are social beings and it is not easy to switch modes at the tick of a clock. There are many days where we are interrupted with personal stuffs during work hours and vice versa. When they happen, we just cannot keep a closed eye towards them. We need to attend to these, be it work or personal stuffs. The beauty of Work Life Integration is that we find best timings of the day that will help us focus on priorities of our life and then actually putting it into practice. For example, in my case, I mostly start work early and I prefer to have a silent time during mornings where I am mostly undisturbed. This helps me putting more focus on important stuffs. Since I prefer less distractions, being early at work helps me get more stuff done.

Above example is something that works for me. For each of us, we need to understand what will work for us the best and accordingly organize our day. This will help us become more productive and ensure that we achieve what we want to achieve in life.

For me, it is not “work life balance”, rather it is “Work Life Integration”. Just think over this.