How Much Do Little Things Add Up To?
I’ve been told I’m a bit of nut with some of my observations. I don’t think this one is so nutty. The other day I had to go to both of my banks and deposit some cheques through their bank machines. I noticed when I deposited into Bank #1′s machine a receipt was generated and spit out automatically (even though I didn’t ask for one) and the little roller thingy that grabs your money started operating as soon as I finished typing in the amount.
Then I went to Bank #2 and their bank machine prompted me if I wanted a receipt (which I said no) and they had a notification that prompted me to press continue when I had my deposits in the envelop and was ready. The roller thingys started when I pressed continue.
So my observation is, how much operating cost does Bank #2 save in receipt paper as well as the process for refilling it? Being a bank I will assume the process is heavy and costly to refill the receipt paper container in the machine. I wonder how much Bank #2 saves over Bank #1 every year by saving paper and process in re-filling the machine. How much extra power do those little roller thingys use on a yearly basis for Bank #1?
Many companies I’ve worked with as a consultant and regular ol’ employee have a hard time grasping the concept of constant improvement in small increments. I’m usually met with “It’s useless to not do the whole thing…” type of mentality. Companies that really get it know how to have Kaizen events and understand taking on small and incremental improvements yields great results over time. The flip side is the perception of progress instead of actual progress because so many (and usually large) improvements are talked about which makes people feel good.
How do you approach improvements in your organization?
People Create Your Culture
Last week I ran a trial run of a session Don Gray and I are working on at XP Toronto. This session was a result of a session we did at AYE this year about MBTI and corporate culture.
Hypothesis: Is there a way to increase the odds of a successful change by understanding your organization culture from Schneider’s culture model and how the MBTI (temperament and function pairs) of the people involved in the change fit into each of the four culture types.
Here’s how I ran the session:
- Brief introduction to MBTI so people can become familiar with the model. I use my type (ISTP/INTP) to describe the model. For this session we feel function pairs (how people process data and make decisions) are better suited than temperament. The four function pairs are ST, SF, NT, NF.
- Exercise to help people figure out their MBTI function pairing. I assumed most people wouldn’t know their type so 4 statements were given and people decided what statement most closely defined their stance.
- People split into 4 groups based on their function pairing and created a mission statement and described what a successful ‘agile adoption or transformation’ would look like.
- Each group de-briefed
- Each person wrote their function pairing on a sticky note and posted them on the Schneider culture quadrant where they felt most reflected the type of organization they would want to work in. The culture types were not given, only descriptions of them.
- Group discussion
Overall the goal of this exercise was to see how MBTI function pairings and temperament related to organizational culture. The exercises were planned to not introduce bias by giving participants the labels of the function pairs and organizational cultures.
Here’s a picture of the Schneider culture quadrants and each participants function pairing sticky (click to enlarge):
Observations:
- Crowd bias: given this was an XP Toronto meetup, the group agreed crowd-bias came into effect where most skewed towards Cultivation and the ‘possibility’ axis.
- During the exercises, each function pairing group seemed to come up with a mission statement that aligned with the values of their function pairing. For example, the NF group’s statement was “am someone who is guided by my passions and beliefs, has a sixth sense about people, and works to ensure harmony in the workplace” Their mission statement was “In our organization we work to common goals, make the best possible work environment to maximize our people’s potential“
- The “NT” group didn’t finish composing their mission statement. The NT pairing is all about ideas and it’s common for lots of idea generation without a firm decision compared to other groups.
- The “ST” group had the least number of ideas and they were more firm and concrete. The ST group also finished all the exercises much quicker.
- The “ST” group debated about having highly specialized people vs more general specialists.
Virginia Satir Change Model:
We also mapped temperaments to the Virginia Satir change model and discussed how different temperaments are affected differently by change. SJ (sensing/judging) want to remain in the status quo to protect the group. NT’s (Intuitive/Thinking) tend to want to progress through the change as fast as possible and react with more ideas to changes that have yielded no results yet. SP’s (Sensing/Perceiving) want to move through the change as fast as possible to find the next problem to solve. NF’s (Intuitive/Feeling) want to make sure everybody is ok while the change is happening.
Combining the Schneider Culture model, MBTI and Virginia Satir change model can be an effective way to create awareness around an organization and it’s people to increase the odds of a successful change. I’ve often heard the Agile community say things like “change is hard”, “culture is important” and “one-size-agile doesn’t fit all”. I think the intersection of the these models is the “why” behind those statements.
I want to offer this workshop again to collect more data, if you are interested, please contact me!
How Much Can a Missing Test Cost You?
I went to a local electronics place with a friend at lunch today so she could buy a TV that was on sale. When the person at the counter rang it in, the price of the TV was ok but the “environmental fee” was $2,500 instead of $25. Oops. So naturally the people in the store blamed the idiot who entered the environmental fee data. Being the nut I am, I started wondering what could have happened. As I see there, there could be quite a few problems here:
- the data may have been entered correctly
- the data input screen may have made the data entry person believe they entered it correctly (perhaps there was validation that wouldn’t allow the operator to enter “25.00″ so they entered “25″ and there was some error that transposed the zeros incorrectly
- maybe the person entered “2500″ and forgot the “.” and there wasn’t a check to say “are you sure you want to add a “$2500 fee”?
- maybe once the item was scanned, the fee being displayed was being rendered incorrectly
- maybe the person entering the data was working on 12 things at the same time and simply messed up
- Maybe the data was added with a bulk script and there was no test to validate it
- maybe there wasn’t a test in place that could have caught the error before it was deployed
- maybe there wasn’t a conversation that a clearly out-of-boundary error wasn’t a big enough deal to worry about (I’ve never heard of a $2500 fee for electronics before!)
- maybe it was the data entry person’s last day and he really wanted to mess up this company
There could be many more possibilities, my point is there is much more going on than “the idiot who entered the fee incorrectly”. There could be numerous causes and a possibility for a large loss of sales revenue.
It gets worse. The people in the store didn’t add that fee, it was added automatically when they scanned this item. The people in the store cannot correct the environmental fee price. The people in the store called head office and “the guy was on lunch”, which is where we would have liked to have been.
So in my brain I see software doing something the user didn’t intend for it to do (add a fee), wouldn’t allow the operator to correct it and gave the operator no course of action to correct the problem with a customer who was prepared to plunk down a few hundred dollars right there. Were other stores affected? This was a chain store so I will assume their POS devices are accessing a centralized system. How many items do each of these stores sell that have this fee and how many customers would have been turned away until the problem was fixed?
And what really happened anyway? Was it a data input error? Was it a system problem? Who knows and it’s un-likely we’ll find out. All we know is we need to go back and pick up the item in a pain-in-the-ass-area of the city to get to and we wasted our lunch.
I’m probably nuts but I know how I would handle this problem, what would you do?
