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|In: App Dev Methodologies|Last Updated:

There’s no such thing as an IT project. There is, on the other hand, such a thing as There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project: A Handbook for Intentional Business Change. It’s now officially available for purchase (or will be tomorrow morning). Humility prevents my coauthor, Dave Kaiser, and me from telling you it’s the most important business book published this year.

It’s a good thing we’re so humble. Or maybe not, because if you have anything to do with making business change happen … intentional business change, that is … you need this book. And I hope you’ll forgive a bit of hard selling because if you want the organization to change you’ll want your peers and collaborators to understand what it is you’re doing and why.

What’s the book about? It’s about 180 pages long. It’s about eighteen bucks … a dime a page … if you want the Kindle edition, more if you want crushed trees smeared with ink, and if you do, consider buying it straight from our publisher (https://www.bkconnection.com/books/title/Theres-No-Such-Thing-as-an-IT-Project ).

It’s about the difference between “implementing software” and something useful coming of it.

It is, we think, comprehensive without being tedious; practical and pragmatic while still presenting big ideas; clear and concise without being humorless.

If you’re a long-time KJR reader you’re familiar with the mantra, for example from this ten-year-old evergreen from the archives – https://issurvivor.com/2009/12/07/someone-elses-problem/ .

Now, instead of having to root around in the archives to pull everything together you’ll find it all in one place.

That’s how KJR works. You get a concise account of a narrow slice of a big topic once a week, out of the goodness of my greedy little heart. You get a complete view of subjects that matter from the books I publish from time to time (look here if you want to know what else I’ve written over the years: https://www.amazon.com/Bob-Lewis/e/B001HMOX0I/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1 .) It’s one way you can support KJR — something readers ask from time to time.

If you like the ideas and need help making them real, give me a shout. https://issurvivor.com/contact/ . With many consultants you don’t really know what you’re getting into. I am, more or less, an open book.

Well, 12 open books, but who’s counting?

Oh … one more request. Books aren’t real until they have a bunch of Amazon reviews. So I’m asking you to write one — preferably after you’ve read the book (as a consultant I have a strong sense of sequence).

If you like the book, please say so and explain why. And if you hate it, please explain that in a review as well. I’m not trying to put my thumb on the scale — I like good reviews as much as the next author, but it’s more important for the book to be real.

And don’t worry. Unlike public radio, I’m not going to hold KJR hostage until enough of you have bought the book.

I might badger you about it from time to time, but I won’t fill more whole columns pleading with you and your fellow readers to satisfy my deep craving for attention. Dave and I hope you enjoy the book and, more important, find it useful. We won’t know, though, until we read your review.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Is Amazon a brutal place to work? Do you have a reason to care?

To answer the first question you’ll have to do some googling, after which you’ll have to decide which sources you find more and less credible.

I don’t know if its warehouse workers pee in bottles to keep their productivity statistics in line with what is required or not. I also don’t know how accurate recent reports about its independent delivery contractors’ allegedly unsafe driving practices and working conditions are.

What I’m pretty sure of: An organization as big as Amazon is neither entirely innocent nor thoroughly guilty of allegations like these. If Jeff Bezos set out to make Amazon the worst place in the world to work he’d have almost as hard a time achieving this nefarious goal as he’d have if he wants Amazon to be the best.

Not that he’s off the hook. Not at all. Executives are, as has been pointed out in this space more than once, responsible for the business culture they preside over because how they behave in different circumstances has more impact than any other factor.

Which leads to the conclusion I’m least certain of, which is also the one I’m most confident of, and is the most important to you:

To the extent Amazon’s reported awfulness is real, it’s an unintended, or perhaps not-cared-about consequence of something quite positive that, as with so many other positive somethings, becomes quite negative when pushed beyond its limits.

Amazon is very likely the most efficient retailer in history — efficient in terms of:

  • Cycle time: How long customers wait for their merchandise after placing their orders.
  • Quality: The percentage of delivered merchandise that matches what customers ordered.
  • Marginal cost: The average incremental cost of one more purchased and delivered item.

If you’re Amazon or anyone else, you don’t become this good at what you do in one big implementation (and I’m going to resist the temptation to segue into a waterfall-vs-agile karaoke number).

You become this good in large part by establishing a culture of continuous improvement.

A culture of continuous improvement is a Good Thing (to coin a phrase). It means never being satisfied with how good you already are, and never assuming there’s no way to become better.

It’s a good thing right up until the organization crashes into the point of diminishing returns.

I first wrote about this phenomenon fifteen years ago (“Do you deliver?” KJR, 6/24/2004). What I said at the time was, Squeeze a wet sponge and water will come out. Squeeze it again, harder, and you’ll get more water. Try to dry a sponge this way and you’ll get pretty frustrated. No matter how hard you squeeze, it will still end up damp. You can’t get all the water out, but you can damage the sponge.

Squeeze a flabby organization and cost will come out. Squeeze it again and you’ll find more efficiencies. No matter how hard and how often you squeeze, you’ll always see more waste. But like the sponge, when you squeeze an organization too hard you damage it.

So … never assuming you can’t get better is good. But inferring that doing more of what made you better will make you even better … that’s a false and dangerous inference.

A very long time ago, Byte magazine reported on a newly announced file compression package. Its developers claimed it was loss-less. They also claimed you could run a compressed file through it as many times as you liked, and each time you did it would come out smaller than the last time.

Think of continuous improvement programs as process compression algorithms and you’ll see the point: Trying to squeeze additional inefficiencies out of a process by squeezing harder is like trying to compress an already-compressed file by applying the same compression algorithm to it that you’ve already applied.

Dispensing with the dueling metaphors, what’s a beleaguered manager to do?

In a word, think.

In a few more words: To make a process better, take the time to:

Decide what “better” means — which of the six dimensions of process optimization you’re going to improve.

Evaluate proposed ways to improve the dimension in question.

Determine the tradeoffs. Unless the process in question is pretty awful, improving one dimension will probably lead to making at least one of the other dimensions worse. And even if it doesn’t, it might very well do some other organizational damage that, if not anticipated, would become an avoidable unintended consequence.

Then you’re in a position to mitigate the tradeoffs, because … do you really want to be the one forcing employees to pee in a bottle?

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