Create Space for People, Teams and Organizations to Win

Over the past several years, I have appreciated the value achieved when applying lean and agile principles. Some of the positive outcomes we achieved

• Better deliverables. Happier customers
• Motivated people and teams
• Better decisions
• More people making decisions
• People and teams owning problems and outcomes

So as a leader, these are great outcomes. These alone could be the motivation for why I or anyone else would pursue applying and practicing lean/agile principles.

A few years ago, I was working through an organizational growth problem. It was hard, messy, and political. It fit the phrase I use a lot: "It would be easy if it was not for all the people." So why do it. It was in this meeting the tag line came to me on why I do it.

Create space for people, teams, and the organization to win.

This phrase anchored a forward looking position for me that was bigger than the current situation. The book Remarkable expands on this further with the concept of value creation. In all things, look for outcomes that provide value to all involved. It represents the essence of being a servant leader.

Life is short. Take on an abundance mentality. Look to create success and value for those around you.

Plan to Win

The phrase technical debt has gained a lot of traction in the past few years. It has reached the point that executives and others with little development knowledge use it regularly. Using it and being willing to pay to remove it are two different things. I am at least glad that it is on the table for discussion. Technical debt alone only takes into account the view of the organizations technical product capabilities. This is valuable but it does not stand alone. The surrounding and supporting organization creates the arena for development and contributes significantly how technical debt is created and managed.


Businesses want to make money. Technical debt creeps into a product at the early stages and my not have any immediate customer or cost impact. As the solution grows in adoption, technical debt will be exposed and customer and cost impacts will show up. Paying for deferred technical debt is like a bad loan. The compounded deferred debt cost grow in a non linear fashion. The longer you wait, the more it costs. When you plan to win, organizations factor in the cost of technical debt and tie it to the strategy. The brother or sister to technical debt is organizational debt. Organization debt, like technical debt, impeded the businesses ability to react and adapt. Also like tech debt, the longer it is ignored, the more costly it is to remove.


Organizational Debt - Any capability needed to make the organization successful that operates at less than its optimal level. Below are some areas capabilities that an organization needs to be successful along with an example or two of technical debt.

• Leadership Strength (EBIT only focused. Lack of bench strength)
• Market Strategy and Planning (Failure to adjust to market changes)
• Decision Making (Highly political environment. Having meetings are better than decisions)
• Technical Talent Development (Reward the heros. Failure to move out low performing people)
• Execution on Plan (Lack of accountability. Mediocrity is tolerated)
• Ability to Course Correct (Mistakes are ignored and will likely happen again)
• Functional Areas (Dev, QC, Prodm, ...) that believe they are great and operate separate from the other functions.

Ability to Adapt

For organizations to grow and remain effective, they must groom and manage both technical debt and organizational debt.

The graph above shows the impact of organizational debt on the ability for organizations to make changes in their capabilities. Like technical debt, putting off addressing organizational debt costs more over time and the cost curve is not linear.

So when planning to win, be sure to factor in your organizational debt and adjustments. Start with the multiplier areas and make your first adjustments there. These will be the areas the direct future changes. 

Leadership

One key area is leadership. Make sure you have the right leadership team in place. As I have mentioned in previous posts, the Five Dysfunctions of Team book provides a decent foundation to get the current leadership working together. This is needed to find out of the current team can meet the organizational needs. Create a clear plan and let the team execute. Practicing for controlled experiments with failure as a possibility allows for coaching and mentoring. For those leaders that do not jump in and grow, it may be time to make some changes. I believe a leadership team needs to serve one another. Leaders should be good at what they own and look to help make those around them successful. Organizations that move to agile and Scrum will flush out the selfish and hoarding leaders. The team should be more concerned about the results. Leaderships main goal is to create an environment for success and remove the barriers that are in the way.

Talent Management

Hiring and keeping the right people creates a difference maker for an organization. Bring on people that match both the current and future needs for your organization. If you are a maintenance organization and plan to stay there, then do not look for cutting edge technologists. 

Look for and reward people that are smart, capable, servants, and team players. This will provide a level of resilience in your organization. Like in leadership, we want to avoid the heros and find people that are good at what they do and willingly help make others around them be successful.

Sometimes leaders avoid providing honest feedback to team members. They may be afraid they will leave or we cannot do without this person. Both may  be true and are leadership flags that your organization is too fragile. Avoiding holding people accountable not only hurts the individual it hurts the team around them. It creates an expectation of mediocrity.

Some level of turnover in talent helps keep an organization healthy. As a leader, I view my job is to provide the best place for people to work, treat them well, hold them accountable and grow their career. People will leave and when it is done well, most will leave on good terms. By focusing on growing people, you will in turn improve your ability on bringing new people into the organization. You will move from a scarcity view on talent to an abundance view on talent.

Organizational Operations

Plan it, measure it and improve it. No matter where you are at in the organizational building process, begin planning, begin measuring and begin improving on it. This act alone will bring awareness to people that what they do matters and it will be examined. Agile provides a great framework for all levels of the organization to be involved. Agile very nature is to plan, measure and improve. For organizations with strong leadership and good talent, agile operations provides working data for growth and change in small iterative and manageable segments. 

The operations piece, when done well, provides a good hook into what kind of leaders and people you have in your organization. It will help expose the hoarders and the low performers and elevate the strong leaders and performers. In the end, we get paid when we delight our customers to the point they are willing to pay.

This is where your leadership strength comes into play. You will need the right kind of leaders to grow and move the organization. This can be messy at times. Improving at times means breaking down and building back.

Background Posts

For those jumping into the blog, you may want to read the following earlier posts.

Everything I Needed to Know ....

Define and Own the Problem

Follow the Solution to Your Customer(s)

Practice Continuous Improvement

Provide Professional Growth

Practice Teamwork

Provide Accountability

Where to Start ...

Need to Be Somewhere Different

So we have talked about the six principles, when executed well, that will lead to success. So you are in the middle of your organization and you want to be somewhere different.

Maybe the market has changed, maybe your leadership has changed, maybe you want to enter a new market or maybe your company has been acquired. Any of these situations will create space for change. In order to get through it well you need to know two things.

1. Where are you today?
2. Where do you want to go?

Types of Organizations

To help with this, I will describe some different types of organizations. Each of these organization types will require different types of org structures, talents and leadership. The principles discussed will still hold. The style will be different. You can use the following organization types to determine where you are today and also where you want to go.

Harvest (Maintenance)

The harvest organization is all about keeping the existing customers happy (to a degree). The product is proven and its value proposition is well established. Customers know what they have and like it. Organizations in this mode will provide support and fixes for customers to maintain the current value.

There is no plan to modernize or attack new markets. Cost and metrics drive most decisions and are balanced with customer satisfaction. These organizations manage to the margin. Organizations here risk  slipping into technical and third party debt that could force unnatural acts for the organization. Examples include loss of support for third party component, obsolete OS, loss of knowledge on key parts of the system and single points of knowledge failure in the organization to name a few.

Ride it Out (Maintenance with some features)

Ride it out is a lot like the harvest org with a little bit of spice. This organization will push features out on top of its maintenance product. It will do so in the name of customer satisfaction and also for sales. The sales part could be legitimate or it could be a carry over momentum in the organization from that is just what we do.

This organizations is also at risk of neglecting its technical debt in favor of pushing features. Organizations in this mode will usually shift into Harvest mode.

Saturated (Adding Features to Established Product)

The saturated organization, in most cases, has ridden the growth wave. That momentum and the need to squeeze out the remaining sells will lead this organization to create features to close deals. Not all of these features make sense and may cause the organization pain. This organization may have accumulated some organizational and technical debt along the way. Making money covers up a lot of issues. When the money and growth starts to slow, these organizational and technical debt items may become amplified.

Staffing may exceed expense ratios for R&D investment percentages. Reductions may occur and leadership turnover is likely.

Extend (Innovate on top of existing product)

The extend organization will look to create new revenue by integrating new value into their product or solution. This could come from partnering with other vendors, it could come from acquisition, and it could come from create new value on top of the existing product.

This organization could spring up to extend the growth curve of a product or business or it may spring up after the saturation adjustments play out.

Game Changer (Enter a new market)

Entering a new market creates the opportunity to extend financial and business growth  It requires research, investment and expertise. These skills are different than the skills needed in any of the previous described organizations. The game changer is best introduced as the current product is reaching maturity.

Chaos vs. Predictable

No matter what type of organization you have, it will fall on the continuum of chaotic to predictable. Healthy organizations need to strike a good balance between structure and flexibility. 

Healthy organizations will have the following

• Planned and well executed work
• Strong practice of continuous improvement
• Well structured and supportable code
• Knowledge base for training and support
• Unit tests and other technical support that will help others maintain the code
• Automated builds and deployments
• Servant leaders
• Strong regression support with automation
• Metrics at development, qc, services, and support that impact org behavior

Organizations that struggle will have the following

• Manage by fire drill. React
• Growing technical debt
• Tribal knowledge that is decaying
• Blame game. Selfish leaders
• Either little process or over process that is used to cya
• Need for heroes
• Lack of meaningful business metrics

Healthy organizations will have a better shot at maintaining what they have as well as being able to move and adapt with change.

Provide Accountability (Principle 6)

You may want to read my initial post for perspective
Everything I Needed to Know

Accountability (The Multiplier)

Providing accountability shows that your care enough about your mission and your people to get involved and make things happen. Accountability provides the backbone to the other five principles. Practicing accountability multiplies the effects of the other principles.

I am sure we have all had the opportunity to see a child in full tantrum mode and a parent or adult all to willing to give in to make the pain go away. Though the pain may go away temporarily, the child has been rewarded and now knows that a nuclear tantrum will get him/her what they want. And I am sure we have all stood in judgement of the situation knowing that we would and could do better. Without accountability, our people, our teams and our organizations will have its own form of tantrums.

Create the Right Environment

Effective accountability requires creating the right environment. Accountability works best when expectations are set and understood. Without the right expectations, applied accountability can demoralize a person, team or organization. For example, a fixed scope delivery date mandated by leadership without evaluation of team based estimate and planning creates the wrong type of expectations. Regardless of how the project turns out, the people basically did as they were told. Their accountability was to do as they were told.

In order to create the right type of expectations for accountability, following the first three principles is a great start. Defining a problem clearly gives people the clarity they need to execute which leads to clarity of ownership. Definition of the problem will always require an understanding of the customers and what their success will look like. And finally, practicing continuous improvement means that the bumps on the way must be examined and acted upon. Maintaining is not good enough.

Accountability Moves People and Teams from Apathy to Engagement

Lack of accountability parallels apathy and apathy is the beginning of the end for your team or organization.

Many people do not like applying accountability because it involves conflict and can be uncomfortable. Leadership requires one to lead through this. Though accountability can be hard, as leaders we must move from apathy to engagement. Applying accountability provides a strong upside. Most people will not like the initial parts of accountability but at the core, people need this honest feedback to grow and thrive. When done with respect and good will for the person, it will, in most cases, be received well and end positive. Either way, the person or team needs to respond to the feedback and chose to be in or out. You will avoid apathy.

A Story

I once had a senior architect on one of my teams. A talented and capable person. This person out executed just about everyone in the organization at the individual level. This person was frustrated with the results from other team members and wanted "justice". I explained, that as a senior level architect, you need to be a multiplier. Your job is to make those around you successful. This can be done through training, setting technical patterns/standards, design reviews, code reviews and process changes. I am more concerned about the overall team delivery results than the results of one (we must follow our delivery to our customers).

We went through the job description for a senior architect and used it to set expectations for the role. We agreed on some next areas of improvement and we agreed on how I and other leaders need to make changes to support this person in the senior architect role.

The road was difficult. This person exceeded at individual level execution, but had a hard time being the multiplier for the team (and as a side note, the team was technically capable and reasonable). We had many conflicts, discussions and coaching sessions.

The senior architect ends up leaving and that was tough. Myself and other leaders experienced some first hand on the job training for what we need for our organization in the way of a senior architect. I heard later that the senior architect that left appreciated the honesty and feedback and that was helpful in his new role (this person was not appreciative during the engagement). The leadership team did go on to hire several other architects and this experience gave each of these leaders a clearer vision on what the organization needs out of this role.

In the middle of this, I would be lying if I said I knew it would work out. All I knew is that not providing the accountability and direction would be harmful to the team and organization. We would be endorsing apathy. You have to thoughtfully lead to make positive changes. This requires action.

Some Things to Try

• Introduce agile to one or more of your projects. Self managed teams.
• Tighten up your execution and support of agile
• Attend iteration reviews
• Attend standups
• Verify that retrospectives are taking place and that actions items are being completed
• Examine your existing job description for your people
• Create job descriptions if you do not have them
• Use the job description to help set correct expectations with team members
• Help them succeed in their role
• Provide frequent feedback (focus on finding the positives and coach through the negatives)
• Year end reviews should not be surprise
• Look to create team based ownership. Allow for controlled opportunities so they can learn.

The Principles

1. Define and own the problem 
2. Follow your work to your customer(s)
3. Practice continuous improvement
4. Provide professional growth
5. Build and practice teamwork
6. Provide accountability

Practice Teamwork (Principle 5)

You may want to read my initial post for perspective
Everything I Needed to Know

An Example from Baseball

 Below are the World Series participants from 2007 to 2012 along with their team salaries and the max team salary in MLB. Here are some stats:

Year	Winner	Team Salary Rank	Runner Up	Team Salary Rank	Highest Team Salary
2012	SF Giants	8th ($117M)	Detroit Tigers	5th ($132M)	$197M
2011	St Louis Cardinals	11th ($105M)	Texas Rangers	13th ($92M)	$201M
2010	SF Giants	10th ($97M)	Texas Rangers	27th ($55M)	$206M
2009	NY Yankees	1st ($201M)	Philadelphia Phillies	7th ($113M)	$201M
2008	Philadelphia Phillies	12th ($98M)	Tampa Bay Rays	21st ($43M)	$209M
2007	Boston Red Sox	2nd ($143M)	Colorado Rockies	25th ($54M)	$189M

• The winner on average paid $74M less in payroll than the highest paid team
• The runner up on average paid $119M less in payroll than the highest paid team
• How the above 12 teams salaries compare to the rest of MLB
• 50% pay in the top third of the league
• 25% pay in the middle third of the league
• 25% pay in the bottom third of the league

So what can one conclude or infer from this data. Money alone will not win a title. Money will buy top talent and top talent alone will not guarantee a title. There is more and it is magical. We have all seen it, we all want it and at times we are afraid of it. The it is TEAMWORK. We want it because we want to win and we are afraid of it because we must surrender part of ourselves to the larger goal. This requires trust and vulnerability.

The teams above won because they combined together to be better than the sum of the individuals. They captured the magic in the form of a team using teamwork. Many love the idea of teamwork, but fall short of getting there. Why?

Build Team By Removing Anti Team Thinking

In short, I believe selfishness, leadership style, and a focus on the short term limit many organizations from becoming team oriented. Lets start with selfishness.

Selfishness

Leaders need to place the value of teamwork above themselves and the individuals on the team. This means creating space, rules, principles and rewards that support teamwork. Saying it, holding an offsite, sharing your feelings will not magically make it happen. The book Five Dysfunctions of a Team does a good job of pointing out the ingredients needed for a strong team and some steps to get there. It must be built into the culture and the leadership

Selfishness - The Hero

The hero is the enemy of being team. These are people that derive great value from being the savior. They hold key knowledge and are reluctant to share. They manipulate circumstances to highlight their heroism. They like hearing how much they are needed. The hero is truly selfish and subscribes to the scarcity mentality. There is not enough greatness for all, I must protect it for myself. People around this person will struggle to grow and though they may be labeled a team, they will not win like a team.

Selfishness is even worse when you take it to the role or departmental level. When blame or discussions revolve around statements like its developments fault, or product managements fault, the organization looses sight of the customer and delivering value. They are not operating as a team and like the baseball teams, they may spend a lot of money, but will not make it to the big game.

From a development process point of view, agile succeeds on self managed teams. Agile promotes teamwork in backlog grooming, sprint planning, daily stand-ups, reviews and retrospectives. Agile, in its true form, will not reward the hero. When one company went to agile, one of the key people (the hero) went to HR and complained that he/she did all the work and did not wanted their review to be tied to the team. In this case, the person has challenged the mission of the organization. Will the org bow down to the hero or will it risk moving forward for the multiplier principle of teamwork.

Leadership Style

As stated above, teams succeed when individuals willingly give their creativity and passions to a mission larger than themselves. They are committed to serve the team and work to win at all cost. For the individual, this requires a level of vulnerability and trust. Leaders needs to protect this. You cannot scream team and then turn around and undercut it. Leaders need to create space and rewards that recognize the team more than individual accomplishments. I have heard from people at review time or in a 1 on 1 discussions how great they did and how valuable they are. I ask them, are we making our goal and show me how you are making people around you better. This throws many people off and the reality is many cases they are great (just individually great). Leaders need to promote that greatness along with the willingness to serve and help those around them be great as well. We succeed or lose as a team.

Focus on the Long Term

When focusing on the short term, we will tend to do what it takes to maximize the outcome. Beg borrow and steal for today and worry about tomorrow later. Team thinking can be deconstructed quickly in this kind of environment. It matters not what the team said they could do, they are mandated to make a date, do it a certain way all in the name of results for today. It is much harder to better define the problem and give the team space for controlled opportunities. In agile, it is common for teams to fail their first 3 or 4 sprints. You will need to look beyond the short term to give teams chance to form. For teams, it is more about how you finish than it is how you start.

In closing, teamwork, along with professional growth and accountability, are the multiplier principles. These are the principles, when executed well, create high performing organizations. Do not under estimate the power of a talented team, with a big hard problem, and the organizational support to make it happen. Watch the movie Apollo 13 for a great example of teams rallying together for a great cause.

Some thing to try

• reward teams for team successes. Public recognition, team lunch, a thank you.
• look to diffuse hero behavior and move to team ownership. This may mean some tough conversations with some of your "best" performers.
• set goals at the team level based on team delivered results
• reward team behavior even if the results needed to be better and help give the team what it needs to be better
• do not be afraid to take some chances
• work through team training like Five Dysfunctions of a Team

------

“Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” Vincent Lombardi

The Principles

1. Define and own the problem 
2. Follow your work to your customer(s)
3. Practice continuous improvement
4. Provide professional growth
5. Build and practice teamwork
6. Provide accountability

Provide Professional Growth (Principle 4)

Practitioners and academics have argued that an engaged workforce can create competitive advantage. These authors say that it is imperative for leaders to identify the level of engagement in their organization and implement behavioral strategies that will facilitate full engagement. In clear terms, they describe how leaders can do that.  

WHAT ENGAGES EMPLOYEES THE MOST OR, THE TEN C’S OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT 

To say it on a lighter note, a CEO was asked how many people work in the company. The CEO's response was about half.

A disengaged employee or team member places many stumbling blocks for the team and the organization. First, they harm themselves. They have settled for less than their given talents and potential. They become numb. They lose creativity and trade it in for “I do as I am told” mentality. Second, they can block others and make it harder for others to be engaged. It takes five to ten positive comments to overcome one negative comment. In the same fashion, a disengage employee will require some multiplier of motivated and engaged employees to overcome the one disengaged employee. This pattern is even worse when you consider teams or organizations that become disengaged.

Move From Do As Your Told To Unleashed Creativity

So providing professional growth creates an environment of engagement. People tap into their gifts and talents. They release passion and energies that cannot be forced or managed out. It happens when people care, trust is high and people feel supported.

As a leader, I have heard the question many times: what do you want me to do? I wish it was that easy and I wish I was that informed and that smart. I know that if you do what I want, I will get a dim version of what is in my head. I will lose the creativity of others and the opportunity to learn from them. The better question would be what do you want to do and how can you help with our mission. People need to own their own growth. We as leaders need to create space and support for them to grow.

Creating space for experiments with tough love feedback provide great opportunities for people to grow. In one of my assignments, I had a person that differed on me on how to structure a team and integrate some contractor resources. I felt strongly on my position and knew I was right. I had the choice to force my will or allow the controlled experiment. I worked with the person and we agreed on the needed outcomes for the teams. We also worked through the risks and concerns. With that, this growing leader was on his way. It was so not done the way I would do it and it was very successful. We both win. The business gets strong delivery, the leader has grown in experience and confidence, and I have become more humble. In the case when it does not go as well, the item of controlled experiment comes into play. I never put people in a place that a failure would cause them long term harm. I must be willing to own the risk. The “failures” become teachable moments and can provide equal or greater professional growth than the successes.

In the agile world, the concepts of broadening the T’s, retrospectives and self managed teams all support and encourage professional growth and engagement. As agile leaders, we must build and protect the environment to support the agile principles.

Team Turn Around

I worked with a team demoralized by politics, unrealistic demands, technical debt and general tone of you suck. The team had a deliverable due in a week. The team was behind and the quality was low. I asked the team if we would make it. One person spoke up. This alone was amazing. The team mostly looked at the floor and waited for the “beating” to be over. The person said we will make the date. We have to. I then asked will it work and be good quality. The answer was a definitive no. I then asked when we could have a good release. I will tell the customer we will be late. I just need to tell them when we will deliver. The team did not know how to respond. We have never been asked that. When can you have a plan pulled together? The team thought for a moment and said can we tell you in the morning? I said sure. What if we do not make our final plan, the team asked? How are we doing so far on delivery with quality? Not so good. Then we have room to get better, so make it happen and let me know what you need.

The team began to turn around. People owned problems, asked for help, took on challenges, and people smiled in meetings. It was still crazy, less political, still had technical debt, but the people were allowed to own and grow. It takes courage to start. It becomes contagious and is fun to be a part of. The irony is that it provided professional growth for me and I too was more engaged.

Here are some ideas that could help with professional growth.

• Introduce agile and self managed teams. 
• Allow people to shadow or swap roles with another 
• When approached with a problem ask for some solution choices and help or let the person run with making it happen. 
• Create space in your plans for some controlled experiments. Time between releases is a good time for this. 
• Provide honest feedback to people. Tough love. 
• Look to remove toxic thinking and if needed the people behind it. 
• Meet one on one with your team members and find out about their goals and desires. Look for places to get them started. Ask them where they think they could get started. 
• Be truthful and what you will and will not do. False promises are worse than doing nothing. Apologize when you make mistakes and work to make it right.  

The Principles

1. Define and own the problem 
2. Follow your work to your customer(s)
3. Practice continuous improvement
4. Provide professional growth
5. Build and practice teamwork
6. Provide accountability

Practice Continuous Improvement (Principle 3)

I had the opportunity to swim at Laguna Beach. As a person that spent most of his beach time on the east coast in Florida, I found that the west coast provide three things that were different. The water is much colder, the currents are much stronger and the shore drops off quicker. The waves were awesome and the body surfing was great. I loved it and I was getting tired. I rode a wave in and was expecting to touch ground. No ground to be found. The current quickly ripped me back out to where I was before. I rode the next wave and tried again and again I found myself pulled back to the same spot. I was getting cold, tired and a little panicked. I took a moment to look around. I found that a group to the right of me seemed to be having less trouble getting in. I began swimming in their direction and sure enough I was able to make my way to shore.

Many organizations are happy to remain stuck in the waves. What has worked before is good enough. This is the way we have always done it. I am just doing what I am told. (Please comment on phrases you have heard that reinforce the status quo). Avoiding moving forward is in effect moving backwards. It took energy to create the product, the organization and the culture. What got you here will not likely keep you moving forward. Competitive environments depend on challenging the current state to reach a better state.

Here are some areas that I have had the opportunity to introduce the principle of continuous improvement in my career. I have done this at all levels of leadership ranging from individual contributor to the head of an organization. By practicing at the level you are today, it will afford you the experience and maturity to be ready to perform at the next level.

You must build it into your culture and make it part of your process. This means creating time, examining, following up and coaching to move things forward. Agile provides great support for this in backlog grooming as well as the iteration retrospective. Backlog grooming needs to address both product needs as well as technical debt. Focus on one at the exclusion of others will grind your productivity to a halt (A book for reference: Managing Software Debt by Chris Sterling). Product management and development must be as one when tying together business strategy and the technology needed to support it.

The use of the iteration retrospective (effectively) by definition guides the team to create improvement items. These retrospectives are powerful since they can address improvement areas in org debt, technical debt, team debt or other areas. As leaders, you need to understand and support their requests. Organizations need to have senior leadership support to remove organizational barriers (Scrum Transition Team). Do not ask for improvement if you are not willing to support it.

For teams that are not full agile, I have used iterative development and the teams complete a technical debt backlog that is estimated and stack ranked. That work is then broken down and completed over in the development iterations. It is important that this work be integrated with the all other work. If it is worth doing, it is worth doing it with core hours.

Some flags that point to continuous improvement items

• Repeat meetings with same topics and no decisions
• Manual steps in your process
• Documentation that is created and not used
• Lack of stats that measure productivity
• Defects not being corrected in an iteration
• People that focus on why not
• Corrected defects do not stick
• Endless review meetings
• Cancel all meetings once a year and see which ones come back
• Problems solved with long email trails.
• High defect rates
• Lack of continuous builds
• Lack of unit tests
• Look for high hour/low value activities

It is good to recognize the improvements and celebrate the wins. Get people to talk about the improvements and how they help. Work to make this principle part of your culture. Practicing continuous improvement leads back to define/own, follow to your customer as well as providing support for provide professional growth.

I would love to hear you comments or stories.

The Principles

1. Define and own the problem 
2. Follow your work to your customer(s)
3. Practice continuous improvement
4. Provide professional growth
5. Build and practice teamwork
6. Provide accountability