KenB123
Dang. What made you post this? It is an almost like an omen.
My place of employment has been moving in these directions over the past few years. A lot of it makes sense and looks great on paper. Lean is essentially making your work flow more efficient. Evaluate the process and correct inefficiencies. Nothing wrong with that. Kanban I have not yet heard about (yet, I am sure). As of this year though, I was assigned to a full-blown AGILE-SCRUM based project. It is a shock to the system. Daily progress status meetings. Half-day sessions sitting in a room with the team of project owners, managers, testers, etc.. In addition, special story-grooming sessions. It is all new to me. I believe these are management tools. Management loves being able to closely monitor status and progress. It breaks projects into smaller chunks of success/failure. Again, great on paper. Great in concept. Great for management. Even developers can't necessarily argue with the concept. Where I have concern though is in the actual implementation of the process. For developers use to having there 'own' time for actual development, now have much less independence. I am adapting, but still have my concerns about successfully adapting. Maybe thiese concepts need a decade or two to become the 'norm'. Start the fresh graduates in this system and it will become the status quo.
Sorry, guys. I can't let this one pass without comment.
My last real job before I get laid off by a once-great company (starts with an 'M' and has a batwing logo) was Director of Strategic Quality and Director of Six Sigma, reporting to the president of 'M' University, where we housed our consulting business.
I was the first to be sent packing. Why? Because I wasn't a team player. I didn't go along with the way they were packaging and selling Six Sigma. They wanted to be like the big Six (then it was Five; now it's Four), running programs and projects and selling lots of consulting hours.
Well, if your goal is to generate maximum revenue with no regard for the eventual (maybe) and long-term (almost never) success of a given client with your program, then their way was just fine.
My experience taught that only those firms whose leadership team (C-suite and the one- and two-downs) not only went first, but walked the talk, and then created projects that were directly linked to their own success, would find long-term business success.
And as the inventor of Six Sigma and the face of 'M' to the external market, it seemed to me that I had the responsibility to lead by example. That rubbed several 'M' execs the wrong way, so they banished me to Asia and Europe, where I wound up spending 200+ nights/year in hotel rooms and many, many nights sleeping on airplanes.
Where I wound up doing $7.5MM/year vs. what the entire remainder of the team accomplished in the Americas ($5.5MM).
That REALLY p'd off those same execs.
Then I fired a $2.5MM client (big Euro pharma company) for ethics reasons.
Then I got called back to Chicago and laid off.
Every single one of my clients was abandoned and hung out to dry.
I am SOOOOOOOOOOO glad to be retired.
post edited by TheMaartian - 2016/02/15 17:22:55