Seems like this is exactly the kind of issue companies like United Airlines suffer from.
I remember one week my team cranked through their allotted stories so fast that we ran out of work two or three days into the sprint. We decided to take on a couple extra easy stories that we knew we could finish before the end of the week. Rather than being praised for doing extra work, we were criticized for "introducing volatility into the sprint". In other words, we messed up the shape of the burn down chart.
I'm currently working at a place that has virtually no process, which has it's own challenges, but I'm happy that I'm not arguing about burn down charts anymore :)
You are describing this far more charitably than I would. I would describe it as idiocy.
For some (idiotic) reason some management types have this belief that when they measure some metric, it should fit some ideal shape when they put it on a graph, whether or not that makes any sense.
This is exactly the fallacious thinking behind stack ranking where people persistently abuse/misunderstand the whole concept of normal distribution by changing employee evaluation scores to match a normal distribution. It's like these people took a statistics class and only remembered the shapes they saw (and really only one shape) and none of the concepts underpinning those shapes.
Anyone who subscribes to this dangerously simplistic mode of thinking shouldn't have a position of leadership. Unfortunately many times everyone in leadership subscribes to the same cargo cult so they can't hold each other accountable.
Shipping valuable features without regressions is my metric of success. Not y=mx+b applied to story points.
Burn down charts are misused far too much to be considered generally valuable.
The way he tells it, no one ever got in trouble for subpar products. But if production numbers were down, someone was going to the gulag.
Apparently, consumers were aware of this and would try to obtain goods that were produced near the start of each month.
On top of the large amount of process and the one week sprints, we also four different dev teams each working on their own microservice app which was tightly coupled to the other apps in the company. Every team had to deploy at the same time, and if one app went down, the other apps went down with it. The company's platform was essentially an ecommerce site that could have been one medium sized monolith, maintained by a single team of 5 or 6 developers, but instead we had 20+ developers, several dev managers, a scrum master, and a large QA automation team. I guess you could call it premature optimization.
There were also plenty of issues on the business side that prevented the company from truly succeeding. The place was a bit of a clusterfuck but it was an excellent learning experience.
In order to pull off this sleight of hand, real work is broken up into elastically-sized multiples of a subjective metric called "points" which the team is allowed to estimate. This estimation game is key as it builds buy-in from the team by appearing to "give them a seat at the table." Chunking the estimations into sprints is a smoke screen to keep the scam going.
Having acquired the buy-in from the people actually doing the work, the estimates are immediately converted to commitments by tracking progress on a burn down chart and telling upper management that the project will begin at 100% work remaining and proceed in a steady, linear assembly line fashion to 0% work remaining after the time allotted.
Deviations from a steady downward slope are interpreted as failures of the development team which paradoxically reinforces the standing of the chart presenter because they are able to "show the numbers". Unchecked, this ultimately elevates them to diety-like cult standing.
As the flawed assumptions underlying the chart are never questioned after the initial implementation, the use of burn down charts ultimately ends with:
- Blue Pill Ending: the company shoots itself in the foot by firing the team for failing to make the burn-down chart linear
- Seller's Market Ending: the team gets wise to the con and leaves the company
- Red Pill Ending: the process manager is fired after heroic intervention by the technical leadership
A process manager that wants to show up with their PMI certification and their burn-down charts faces a precarious end-game.
It's a line chart that shows story points starting at the top left in the beginning of the sprint. Which shows all points to be done, trending towards 0 points with 0 days left in the sprint, in the lower right.
Linear means that the same points are done each day to allow the line to be perfectly linear between the top left and bottom right.
Can someone just make a p2p party already? Any billionaire in SV could bankroll this project with their weekend funny money. I'd be willing to donate development hours. I'm just wondering if people would be willing to venture out of their comfort zone and "throw away their vote" for something that isn't mainstream.
Disruption in this vast market is difficult. Millenials and Xers will have to team up and work cooperatively. The baby boomers have gotten Democrats and Republicans to pander to them, there is no possible way those parties go away if baby boomers have any say about it.
As to why there are two parties, it's central to how the government is configured. No runoffs, range or preference voting, means that you get punished when voting for fringe candidates, because there's a very good chance the ideological opposite will win as a result of choosing a 3rd party candidate. Majoritarian democracies like the U.K. parliamentary system tend to have only two big parties, where consensual democracies like Switzerland and Germany have many parties represented in their legislatures. The U.S. is a hybrid, but the voting mechanism results in pretty much a two party system.
[I have seen a recent push of progressive voices against gerrymandering, including both political sides (e.g. Schwarzenegger on the right and John Oliver on the left)... It is important to understand that the elimination of gerrymandering would help make the parties a little more volatile and would thereby help things get done, but it is very much a "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" measure, the polarization and 50/50 split would stay there even if you used mathematical methods to do redistricting.]
We have a fine proportional system that we use to allocate our Representatives to the States, and it is worth remembering explicitly that the House was created to solve one big problem: we have a bicameral legislature because the Founding Fathers were split between people who said "every person should have an equal say in terms of what laws are passed" (House) and "every state should have an equal say in terms of what laws are passed" (Senate). People from low-population states did not want city-folk running over them, and that is what the Senate guarantees.
What we need is to use this same proportional system to allocate our House Representatives to the various national Parties. The founding fathers did not want to think in terms of political parties because they were all big intelligentsia egos who figured that you'd want to really know who you were voting for. What they didn't consider is that in a fork-o-philic model, someone can basically just make their own party about their personality and they'll get one or more seats if they're influential enough. (A great example is Trump's analogue in the Netherlands, a man named Geert Wilders, who basically just made a party that was about him and his own isolationist nationalism and it has been remarkably successful as the Netherlands has similar pressures to those that got Trump elected.)
No more gerrymandering, no more 50/50 partisan split: for the House, everyone gets an equal vote for a party, and the parties get proportional representation in the House via their Webster allocation of delegates. While the party composition starts off Republican vs. Democrat, in short order the Freedom Caucus and Green Party and Libertarians and so on will have their own representation there, too. The 50/50 split in the Senate will probably still infect the House, and your parties in the House will consistently be "left-ish" and "right-ish", but the openly nonpartisan House politics will also feed back into the Senate and kill some major road-blocks.
We also aren't even a majoritarian democracy, often the winner has only a plurality of votes. Most voter eligible citizens don't vote (in the U.S. where it's not compulsory). We don't have range or preference voting, or run offs. All of these have consequences in the outcome.
I don't see many brawls in politics. That's maybe at dinner parties, on TV, and in forums. City council meetings are pretty boring and docile. D.C. has lots of nice friendly people (haha), which maybe superficial, but they have more manners than brawls day to day.
Possibly the one thing going on right now that left, right, hard left, hard right, center, and maybe even non-participants can agree on is a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics. Entirely out. Publicly funded elections, do the hard work yourself, with volunteers, not moneyed special interests paying for your ads and so on. It would take an amendment because money is considered speech by SCOTUS, corporations have speech rights, so they can pretty much spend whatever they want on any message for any candidate. And those interests throw red meat to activate the brawls you see. They love that. It raises money. Activates people to vote who'd otherwise stay at home.
Oh it's applicable anywhere humans interact in modelled systems. It happens in writing too - some team might be in a creative mindset and write some funny or brilliant work; a subsequent team either accurately recreates the mindset and creates a 'true spiritual successor' to the original work that can develop things like 'where that story would have gone, taken to its natural conclusion' or 're-tell it better' or so forth;
or they can simply mimic the 'formulas' or even just 'copy the original jokes' and 'miss the point'.
I might have a list of these.
> We sought volunteers and then followed our involuntary denial of boarding process - Munoz
Ouch
One is that since 9/11 the airline industry has gotten far more comfortable with calling the police to remove passengers. In some cases it's totally justified. But in others airlines are jumping to the threat of police force in order to "solve" issues with customers. Basically using the stick instead of the carrot because the stick is easier and costs less money.
The second problem is a far more pervasive problem in society where people excuse the use of force on someone simply because that person didn't comply with a minor request. This is how someone who didn't want to accept a ticket for selling bootleg cigarettes ended up dead. Or the guy just this week who got pummeled by a police officer for jaywalking. "Just comply" they say. Sure, but it doesn't mean you should be beaten, bloodied, or even killed for not complying.
Basically, this wasn't just poor customer service, it was a violation of rules.
That's complete BS. It may be a United rule, but the law only defines how much they are required to compensate people who are denied boarding. When asking passengers to voluntarily not get on the flight, they are free to negotiate any deal that is acceptable to the two parties.
That the airline doesn't have to offer more before they execute the involuntary denial of boarding somehow has gotten twisted into the fact that they can't. That's simply not true, they just chose the cheapest way out.
However, they're missing the forest for the trees. Their processes are so bad that this type of thing actually ends up happening–which is the symptom of a marge larger loss of trust.
I fly less than I otherwise would if it was a dignified experience. Right now smart VCs are thinking about how to reinvent airlines and let's hope they get in soon.
This problem is pretty much every company I've ever worked for if/when they got over six engineers. I spend more time and a hell of a lot more energy than I should trying to keep managers or easily enthused engineers from hugging the project to death.
I ended up becoming a process expert out of a sense of self preservation. I use process a lot, but it's always in support of the 'why's. I don't always talk about the 5 Whys but it's always there, and in my experience the people who are usually the problem can't ever manage more than three.
The worst of these are also the sort of people who, if your speedometer was broken, would insist that the car is not moving. Even after you told them to look out the window.
That's an amazing quote. I'm totally stealing this.
If you don't try to steer the conversation toward reversible decisions AND avoid trivialities then you spend your problem solving budget on actively harmful plans.
“People get confused; companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success. And a lot of them think, ‘Well, somehow, there’s some magic in the process of how that success was created.’ So they start to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long, people start to get confused that the process is the content."