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The no excuses culture

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Re: The no excuses culture

#111

Post by mindcrime »

watwut wrote: post #91
mindcrime wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In agile, individual developer does not have personal responsibility for anything. Where in the world do you get this idea? For one, there is no such thing as "agile", in the sense of a prescriptive methodology that would make such a declaration. There are just individual methodologies that claim varying levels of adherence to the Agile Manifesto[1]. And even then, the popular "Agile" methodologies like Scrum, XP, et…

That was my experience with agile. So, on earth in software companies :). But theoretically, agile methodologies I studied were about team responsibility. "Some say that teams are self-organizing and that you succeed or fail as a team" That is opposite of personal responsibility. There is very little space for making individual decisions and being responsible for them. If you like, you can force your vision, but whol…

That is opposite of personal responsibility. There is very little space for making individual decisions and being responsible for them.

I see it as a continuum, with a lot of room between "absolute autonomy and no responsibility to the team" and "slave-like adherence to someone else's position". In between there is a place where you take a position and have to sell the rest of your team on it and then once everybody buys in, the whole team does own the decision.

But I think here we're talking about design decisions, architecture and what-not. What I mean earlier was more about responsibility for actually delivering the things you say you're going to deliver. So if, on your self-organizing team, you volunteer to take on the task "Write Fromgizzit-A I/O module" then there is indeed responsibility around actually delivering the code in question, as opposed to coming in every day, spending all day reading HN, and not delivering anything.

Re: The no excuses culture

#112

Post by valuearb »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #93
RandomOpinion wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He was famously into management by fear. The article you linked to says precisely the opposite and is more in line with the blog post. LeMay made it clear that results were expected and got them.

LeMay almost started WWIII. I don't think he's a good example in this context. I'm in the "tone deaf management bullshit" camp. It starts with the assumption that your people are basically incompetent losers and it's up to you to stomp around and whip them into shape. It doesn't work in most areas, and it especially doesn't work in software dev. If your people aren't acting like responsible professionals, either your…

You just argued for Steve Blanks approach. Trust your people to work independently and bring problems to your attention in a timely manner. And if they can't do that, release them back into the wild.

I ran a 40 person development organization that never missed a schedule with that philosophy. Everyone empowered to bring problems up for help, everyone trusted to work independently.

Re: The no excuses culture

#113

Post by steve_g »

randomdrake wrote: post #16

This was a good post and an interesting idea with some nice conclusions. One of the commenters, however, nailed it and got to the heart of the difficulty: getting people to do what they say they will do . Period. Full stop. You can wrap excuses, or culture, or other corporate vocabulary around the matter, but it boils down to that fundamental thing of people doing what they are asked and delivering what they say they…

There's a difference between "getting people to do what they say they will do" and getting people to do whatever is asked of them. Part of the culture described in the article was honest capacity planning. The group didn't do whatever was asked; they honestly negotiated the workload. I don't think you can have a healthy no excuses culture without honest capacity planning.

Re: The no excuses culture

#114

Post by valuearb »

kenjackson wrote: post #108
randomdrake wrote: post #16

This was a good post and an interesting idea with some nice conclusions. One of the commenters, however, nailed it and got to the heart of the difficulty: getting people to do what they say they will do . Period. Full stop. You can wrap excuses, or culture, or other corporate vocabulary around the matter, but it boils down to that fundamental thing of people doing what they are asked and delivering what they say they…

I think this ignores the problem that in many cases you don't have a good estimate for a date. If the task is one I know well I can estimate well. But if the question is when some new functionality will be deployed, it's just a best guess. And for many tasks you simply don't know if it is going to work until the day of. Especially when you are trying to schedule aggressively.

All schedules are guesses. Just tell me when you first figure out yours is wrong, not when it's too late to help.

Re: The no excuses culture

#115

Post by mindcrime »

sprafa wrote: post #95
mindcrime wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Failure to create a safe work environment can erode trust and make for a toxic and fearful workplace. Having a safe work environment isn't the same thing as not holding people accountable.

No of course not. The whole problem that Steve is talking about here stinks of mismanagement of some sort tho, that isn't really fixed by telling people "stop giving me excuses on delivery day". Something is wrong with the whole organization, but he isn't able to figure it out, so he's telling people to put up or shut up. He's attacking the symptom, not the cause. Read on the Toyota Production System for alternative…

Something is wrong with the whole organization, but he isn't able to figure it out, so he's telling people to put up or shut up.

I think for any of us to try and go into specifics on that particular case, without a lot more information (unless we were there), is an exercise in pointless speculation. I think it goes without saying that all generalizations are flawed, and I'm sure the company did need more than just "stop giving me excuses". But a culture of no accountability can be a cause that needs to be addressed.

Read on the Toyota Production System for alternative solutions.

I devour everything on TPS / Lean / Kaizen that I can get my hands on. :-)

Re: The no excuses culture

#116

Post by valuearb »

watwut wrote: post #12
_m8fo wrote: post #9

As usual with business people, the author seems to believe their [simplified strategy] (no excuses) is what caused the outcome they describe. I think it's more likely from the article that the organization simply became more efficient as a result of said "no excuses culture", but it isn't actually the lack of excuses that did much. Why isn't it OK to just say "it's complicated; here's what we did" instead of trying t…

I think that successs had nothing to do with excuses and a lot more to do with "my groups inside of marketing had become dumping grounds for projects from both inside and outside of marketing – with everything being “priority one.” [...] We quickly put in a capacity/priority planning process." I bet a hat that it was primary the prioritization and planning process that did the trick.

I bet it wouldn't have been fixed without the ultimatum.

Re: The no excuses culture

#117

Post by valuearb »

ForHackernews wrote: post #17
GuiA wrote: post #7

"[Steve] Jobs imagines his garbage regularly not being emptied in his office, and when he asks the janitor why, he gets an excuse: The locks have been changed, and the janitor doesn't have a key. This is an acceptable excuse coming from someone who empties trash bins for a living. The janitor gets to explain why something went wrong. Senior people do not. "When you're the janitor," Jobs has repeatedly told incoming V…

This isn't really true at all. CEOs give excuses in their earnings reports all the time ('economic headwinds', 'unfavorable regulatory climate', 'manufacturing complications'). Sometimes investors will punish the share price, but only rarely does the board consequently penalize the executives, and only in cases of really severe screwups.

More good arguments for A No Excuses culture.

Re: The no excuses culture

#118

Post by kerkeslager »

Excuses happen because people don't want to be blamed. If your team had an excuses problem, it's a response to a blame problem: when a problem is identified, people aren't looking for solutions, they're looking for someone to blame.

Saying "no excuses" and "we're holding people accountable" might fix the excuses problem, but it exacerbates the blame problem. "Holding people accountable" is just blaming people harder and hoping that will pressure then into perfection. It might work for a little while, but it's unsustainable. People will crack. This is especially bad in this story because it's literally coupled with a threat of termination.

The real solution, I think, is to not play the blame game. Instead of "whose fault is this" you can just operate in facts: "what happened", "how can we fix it", "how can we avoid it in the future". Sometimes the facts reflect badly on someone ("he showed up high and made the wrong decision") but more often there's no blame needed to address the problem ("he made the wrong decision because nobody trained him"). Instead of creating a culture where people turn against each other to "hold each other accountable" for problems, you want to create a culture where people team up to solve problems.

The story here is a success story, but I don't think it can be attributed to the "no excuses" rule--I've seen similar policies fail miserably. Instead, I'd attribute their success to their encouragement to identify problems early and ask for help. But that probably could have been done with less friction if they had addressed the blame problem.

Re: The no excuses culture

#119

Post by dccoolgai »

Some blue collar guys I used to work with had a saying: "Shit rolls downhill". Years later, I realized that had a lot to do with the way orgs with bad management deal with tech/dev: everyone likes to talk about accountability when it goes downhill to the devs, but no one wants to talk about accountability for having a clue about what they want. You could plug in space heaters in a circle in a conference room and it would have about the same effect.

Re: The no excuses culture

#120

Post by watwut »

mindcrime wrote: post #111
watwut wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my experience with agile. So, on earth in software companies :). But theoretically, agile methodologies I studied were about team responsibility. "Some say that teams are self-organizing and that you succeed or fail as a team" That is opposite of personal responsibility. There is very little space for making individual decisions and being responsible for them. If you like, you can force your vision, but whol…

That is opposite of personal responsibility. There is very little space for making individual decisions and being responsible for them. I see it as a continuum, with a lot of room between "absolute autonomy and no responsibility to the team" and "slave-like adherence to someone else's position". In between there is a place where you take a position and have to sell the rest of your team on it and then once everybody…

Whole team owns decision is precisely lack of accoutability. They might have agreed, they might have choice between pretending to agree and circularly discussing the same detail for hours, they might have been afraid to disagree for political reasons. They might not consider it important. They might have been introverted geeks uncomfortable with heated discussions.

If you and code reviewer ends up not agreeing on something, then you are not responsible for delivering it.

But more importantly, agile tasks are max half day long, so your inactivity would be very fast recognizable and responsibility is limited by that. You are not responsible for communicating issues nor recognizing them, you are not responsible for overall deadline nor anything like that. The only thing you are responsible for is not slacking for half a day, everything else is taken for by other people.

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