The 6 Sigma Myth

Admittedly, I have very little direct experience with 6-Sigma. It reeks to me as a management fad, much like other "Quality" initiatives. I'm sure there's nothing wrong with the fundamental tenants of 6 Sigma, but sometimes it seems as if getting a couple of "6 Sigma Black Belts in the room should solve our problems!" (actual quote).

I had an interesting experience with a 6 Sigma-trained project manager once. We were getting ready to "go-live" -- that is to process data in our system. We did not have any of the connectivity ready, nor any of the automation. However, she found a loophole for calling the task done: Apparently the concept of "go live" was narrowly defined to be the ability to process data (which was complete). Therefore, the task of "going live" was done, even though at a practical level we were nowhere near that milestone.

It seems funny to me how stamping a label on these quality fads (which really seem to amount to writing down and agreeing to a project plan) immediately impresses business people.

Then again, maybe I've had a tainted experience or two.

For a final laugh, check out this screen shot. It's from a Six-sigma how-to page at the Six Sigma Guide website.

The Cure for Silver Bullet Syndrome

I had an invigorating conversation with a co-worker the other day. We were discussing the next generation of technologies for application component integration: Web Services and SOAA. As we got into the discussion, he made a statement to the effect that tools will help flatten out any difficult learning curve in implementing the architecture. This seems to be a fundamental flaw in thought at businesses worldwide, and thus is a worthy topic for consideration here.

What is it about software "tools" that allure? In my experience as a software engineer I have a great number of "tools" that I have had exposure to to "help" in the development process. Unfortunately, precious few actually were helpful, and more than a couple were complete disasters.

There was one tool, called Xenos d2e which was supposed to help our company mine print data so we could reformat the document with a new "look and feel" that conformed to the client's changing taste. This tool worked well enough -- given the page were static. Add too much dynamic formatting and the tool would loose track of its page markers. Of course that could be worked around by scripting code on the back end -- in REXX. Well, nobody knew REXX, so those tasked to work with this product had to ramp up quickly on the language. Then when the project transitioned to a new team the new team had to learn REXX to maintain the software. The tool was unhelpful.

Contrast that experience with a tool written by a colleague which did almost the same thing, though it was written without a back-end programming language. The tool did exactly what we needed -- to extract data from the input print stream based on defined markers. The difference? Even though the tool written by my colleague was less capable, it was designed to do exactly what was needed, took less overall time to learn and had fewer maintenance issues. This tool was helpful, and cost less on learning, maintenance and license fees.

In my current position, I deal with a certain source control package which has many integrated features and lots of bells and whistles. Unfortunately it cannot easily define multiple lines of development against a common code base, and therefore we have much difficulty in parallel development for small enhancements based on current production while doing major feature rewrites for upcoming releases. This extra management costs quite a bit of time and therefore is not efficient. And yet we gladly paid $20,000 for the privilege of being less productive than paying $0 and using Subversion, but lacking an integrated bug tracking function that we rarely make use of anyway.

Kathy Sierra over at Creating Passionate Users foresees an even more sinister issue. By hiding the implementation details, Kathy argues that we are training ourselves to not understand how technology works. One initial reaction might be that since the tool helps you get the job you want done, you don't need to know the underlying technology. This might be true for many end users, but it's extremely important for technology service providers to understand what's going on underneath the surface.

What were to happen if you suddenly had a client that was using a slightly different version of the technology? For instance, if your tool handled web services abstraction reasonably well, but your next 800 lb gorilla client used a web services handler from IBM that deviated from the standard in subtle but frustrating ways and your tool would be worthless.* If you never bothered to learn how to implement a web service without the tool, you would be stuck. Likewise if the spec was revised by the standards body and your tool's author had let the tool become obsolete. It's quite likely that your tool would limit your effectiveness in dealing with clients that had recently purchased their technology stack.

Don't let it happen to you! Use tools, sure. But be sure you know what's beneath the surface.

* I'm not saying that IBM has a deviant web services stack, but they're an easy target as their J2EE stack seems to deviate from the spec.

Need a project template to get going?

I think that one of the fundamental issues at my company is the lack of adequate documentation. Although we were acquired about 2 years ago by a large multinational corporation we still run our projects "fast and loose". To help tighten up this process we should begin developing project documentation. This site has a number of project templates which I plan to use to try to build our processes.

Software project management "cliff's notes" found

This week I was given an opportunity. My boss's boss asked me to be the "project champion" for a set of features that we (the company) would like to see in our application, but that nobody has time to actually do.

I recognize this as both an opportunity and a potential pitfall. It is an opportunity because this may allow me to gain enough influence to fundamentally alter some of the brain damage we've been inflicting on ourselves for the last few years.

This is a potential pitfall because it is just as likely that this is an empty label given to a sucker who is complaining to shut him up. With the label comes extra responsibility but no authority and failure ensues.

To explore the issue, and figure out what it means to be a project "champion" at my company, I decided to write a proposal. It might be a bit of a power play to massage my job function, maybe get a budget of my own and start hacking away at the afore mentioned brain damage, but at a minimum the process of thinking about what the heck would solve this problem.

Anyway, this is just a really long way of saying that I did a Google search for "project champion" and found notes from a course on software project management by the University of Glamorgan in the UK. Many of the principles there will be old-hat to anyone involved in software projects, but there are good sections on development methodology, planning and some of the corporate-political aspects of project management.

Whadda mean by Success?

Companies frequently claim they are seeking success. What is success? Most of the time and to most people, success equals making a ton of money. I think that is a rather narrow approach to success. Let me offer a different definition of success, one that is particular to B2B service providers.

Success is when significant value is created for all parties.

Profound, no? This means that your success as a service provider is directly tied to the value you create for your client. Furthermore, you have a vested interest in making sure you are providing the right service and the right product. And you also must understand that you must price to create value for yourself too. Perhaps this really ought to be obvious, but all too often we fall prey to one of the pitfalls mentioned below.

All too often there is a temptation to offer extended value for the client. This usually manifests itself as undercharging for services, or waiving service fees for value-added services. This can also be by overzealous sales staff promising what cannot be economically delivered. I'm working with a client now which is getting nearly all their services free, yet is extremely unhappy with us. Why? Because somewhere along the way, they feel they were promised services we don't normally render. When we came back to them and suggested that they might pay for these services, they escalated, and now we are giving them a number of services which are outside our scope of expertise. On top of that, some of these services we have not had great success in implementing, probably due to other kinds of incomplete communication of requirements, which compounds the client's unhappiness.

All of this sounds terrible, but reading until now, you might yet see opportunity for success. Not entirely! You see, part of the sales process assured the client their existing processes would not be impacted. So, the client's desire was to replicate their process work flow using our tools. Unfortunately, our system is not a work flow modeling system, and as such cannot easily accommodate deviations in the preprogrammed work flows. This leads to some very weird procedural hacks that the client must remember to do "just right" in order to replicate their processes. I think that while the client may get the system working, it will never be as successful as is possible.

Another counter example of a value equation gone wrong is when the vendor manages to capture the majority of the value for themselves. A few years ago I worked for a company that had adopted a new tool to assist in development of its core product. In fact, this tool really wanted to replace the programming staff. While this might be a laudable goal, the tool fell short on several counts. Management, however, persisted in requiring its use because the vendor had negotiated an agreement by which they were paid a minimum usage fee for a fixed period of years. That's right -- management had literally locked themselves into a net-negative value deal, and instead of eating the (rather large) fixed amount, they opted to persist in using the tool hoping that additional experience would make the warts disappear. The vendor had literally made it too expensive to not use the tool, and they had no incentive to improve the tool as the payments were fixed in a long-term arrangement.

So how should this process work? In a perfect world, I would like to see a discussion of what services can be provided, and for what reasonable costs. This discussion should include a complete review of the current business processes, and a mapping and gap analysis of business process to tool capability should be created. No more should wacky process hacks be allowed to gum up what would otherwise be a much more efficient system. The question "Why do you need to do that?" should be asked frequently. Answers to this question frequently show an underlying deficiency in an existing process which, when resolved, increases overall efficiency, increases value and locks in long term success.