existence, refactored

Here’s a lesson I picked up from a presentation I watched yesterday:

In the US, eggs are graded by the USDA as AA, A, and B grade eggs. Most consumers don’t know what these grades mean.

Curious folks could easily figure that one out by going to Wikipedia:

• U.S. Grade AA eggs have whites that are thick and firm; yolks that are high, round, and practically free from defects; and clean, unbroken shells. Grade AA and Grade A eggs are best for frying and poaching where appearance is important.
• U.S. Grade A eggs have characteristics of Grade AA eggs except that the whites are “reasonably” firm. This is the quality most often sold in stores.
• U.S. Grade B eggs have whites that may be thinner and yolks that may be wider and flatter than eggs of higher grades. The shells must be unbroken, but may show slight stains. This quality is seldom found in retail stores because they are usually used to make liquid, frozen, and dried egg products, as well as other egg-containing products.

When you think about it, these grades don’t really matter to consumers. All of them are perfectly edible. Very few people will notice the difference after they’re cooked. For most consumers, what matters more is the size of the egg and the freshness of the egg.

Another similar example is the grading of tomatoes. The USDA grades tomatoes by their color and their appearance.

The problem with this is that this metric won’t work on heirloom tomatoes (what some might argue as superior to typical tomatoes).

Also, this metric doesn’t state whether the tomato has a crap load of pesticides/fertilizers on it that would help it achieve that level of color and appearance.

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Now think of metrics used in your company: are they really relevant? or are they just there to provide a false sense of security?

I was supposed to rant about the inefficiencies and waste in my experience as a volunteer in a repacking center for relief goods last Tuesday. After a 4 hour blackout, though, my desire to rant dissipated so I’ll keep this short and simple:

The real bottleneck in repacking relief goods is the loading of the trucks.

A small truck can hold 300-500 packs for distribution. Unless the center has a fleet of 10 or 18 wheeler trucks (which is highly unlikely), the realistic number of outbound packs per hour is less than 1,000 packs.

That is one pack every 4 seconds, a rate that can easily achieved by a single assembly line consisting of only 20 people. (6 assigned to clothes segregation, 3 in rice packing, 1 assigned to soap packing, 5 people packing in series, and 5 people to restock their supplies)

And here we come to the whole point of the rant I didn’t make:

There is no reason why relief goods repacking centers with over 50 people on hand should produce inconsistent and poorly packed relief goods packs as there is enough time to introduce quality in the system.

Streamline the whole assembly line, get the extra people to do quality checks, increase the frequency of breaks… just do anything that can improve the quality of the packs. Remember that those packs are headed to flood victims: a poorly made pack can unknowingly add insult to injury.

After reading various books and magazine articles on management, many clueless managers suddenly become prone to making grave mistakes based on a certain fallacy:

High morale leads to high productivity.

When these managers hear how successful companies manage their employees, sometimes even going to great lengths to provide morale boosting perks, they think that if they do all of that to their employees they’re going to see a drastic improvement in productivity.

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As mentioned in the previous post, Deming influenced a number of 21st century management techniques. Most of them have already ascended to buzzword status like “Six Sigma” and “Total Quality Management (TQM)” and should be familiar to those working in corporations and bibiliophiles browsing books in local specialty bookstores.

Instead of enumerating and discussing all of those approaches to management, I’ll just give an overview on the management technique that encompasses most of them: Lean.

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Whenever you’re reading books or watching presentations on management, two names are bound to show up.

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For anyone who has experienced working in a corporate environment, reading books about 21st century management can be really depressing. Rapid Development made me feel really down (especially since it was just lying there in the office bookshelf with no managers or senior developers reading it), but it wasn’t as bad as The Essential Drucker: that book affected me so much that at one point I closed the book and didn’t touch it until I felt better.

Here’s an excerpt from Peopleware, another book on managing software teams, discussing something about productivity. See if it could make you put your face in your hands and groan:

Historians long ago formed an abstraction about different theories of value: The Spanish Theory, for one, held that only a fixed amount of value existed on earth, and therefore the path to the accumulation of wealth was to learn to extract it more efficiently from the soil or from people’s backs. Then there was the English Theory that held that value could be created through ingenuity and technology. So the English had an Industrial Revolution, while the Spanish spun their wheels trying to exploit the land and the Indians in the New World. They moved huge quantities of gold across the ocean, and all they got for their effort was enormous inflation (too much gold money chasing too few usable goods).

The Spanish Theory of Value is alive and well among managers everywhere. You see that whenever they talk about productivity. Productivity ought to mean achieving more in an hour of work, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an hour of pay. There is a large difference. The Spanish Theory managers dream of attaining new productivity levels through the simple mechanism of unpaid overtime. They divide whatever work is done in a week by forty hours, not by the eighty or ninety hours that the worker actually put in.

That’s not exactly productivity—it’s more like fraud—but it’s the state of the art for many American managers. They bully and cajole their people into long hours. They impress upon them how important the delivery date is (even though it may be totally arbitrary; the world isn’t going to stop just because a project completes a month late). They trick them into accepting hopelessly tight schedules, shame them into sacrificing any and all to meet the deadline, and do anything to get them to work longer and harder.

While I was going through Rapid Development looking for the backhoe story for the previous post, I came across the graph above.

Looks familiar, huh?

It’s practically the same productivity-to-time graph as the one in the Satir Change Model.

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No Silver Bullet tells us to be skeptical about claims of tools that can provide drastic improvements in productivity. What we can instead hope for from productivity tools are minor, yet still significant, improvements.

However, both lowering our expectations and going with proven technologies aren’t enough to receive productivity benefits when introducing a new tool. Many companies still fail because of a certain classic mistake: Lack of Training.

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It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.

- Niccolò Machiavelli, “The Prince”

Anyone who has tried to institute change in an organization would eventually have to deal with the scenario mentioned in the above quote. It does, however, get worse than that.

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Here’s yet another nice bit of information I found while browsing Wikipedia last year. I’m sure many of you would be able to relate to the scenario described below.

From Parkinson’s Law of Triviality:

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (also known as the bicycle shed example, and by the expression colour of the bikeshed) is C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1957 argument that organisations give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.

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The concept is presented in C. Northcote Parkinson’s spoof of management, Parkinson’s Law (1957). Parkinson dramatises his Law of Triviality with a committee’s deliberations on a nuclear power plant, compared to deliberation on a bicycle shed. While discussing the bikeshed, debate emerges over whether the best choice of roofing is aluminium, asbestos, or galvanised iron, rather than whether the shed is a good idea or not. The committee then moves on to coffee purchasing, a discussion that results in the biggest waste of time and the most acrimony.

A nuclear reactor is so vastly expensive and complicated that people cannot understand it, so they assume that those working on it understand it. Even those with strong opinions might withhold them for fear of being shown to be insufficiently informed. On the other hand, everyone understands a bicycle shed (or thinks he or she does), so building one can result in endless discussions: everyone involved wants to add his or her touch and show that he or she is there.

So the next time your boardroom meeting degenerates to a “pissing match” over trivial things, you now have a less vulgar term to describe it.

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Further reading: Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is?