2018 was reviewing goals

Ever since I worked on a high-performing team in healthcare, working on clinical decision support software, I have been gainfully employed by companies that want to drink the kool-aid of lean/agile software development. They are interested in how that team achieved fast cycle times with zero defects (the original team designed and implemented a process that ran for six months with no bugs and which reduced cycle times from 8 days to 3 hours).

The result of these endeavours has been mixed, with success coming where organisations are willing to change and have a culture that is open to improvement. A common theme of these organisations is how they measure progress; those who focus on outcomes do better than those who focus on on inputs.

The starting point I am often presented with is named "Waterfall" and the goal I am given is "Agile", but the reality is consistently different. The starting point is more often chaos, and the end point something more akin to Lean/XP. The most common missing piece of the puzzle is discipline. The act of taking teams on a journey from chaos to discipline, though, has lost its shine. This has resulted in a re-evaluation of what I want to achieve in my work life.

Although I could comfortably repeat the process of making problems visible, highlighting issues by limiting work-in-process, and introducing the practices that make agility possible - there is a hollowness to this exercise in organisations that doesn't have a grasp of the economics.

It can be summed up best by Peter Drucker's famous quote:

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

I'm looking to take things beyond the "training wheels" cycle of leading teams out of chaos; I want to work across a wider set of disciplines in an organisation that wants to apply these ideas to more than software development. That's why I'm returning to a team that have already got to the good stuff. They are ready to do something special and I want to be part of that. Next year will be the first time I have returned to an organisation and I'm hoping for great things.

Watch this space!