6. Operational Principles:
Core Values:
E.L.I.T.E.
Common Purpose:
Top 10 by 2018
Mission:
Uniting people, systems
and processes for
competitive advantage.
Process
Improvement
Clarity
Simplicity
Visibility
Transpar-
ency
Account-
ability
Measur-
ability
Consistency
Efficiency
12. No Estimates?
Some researchers have already – and for our
benefit – decided what a “good” estimate is.
They defined in 1986 a good estimation approach
would provide estimates “within 25% of the actual
result, 75% of the time”.
— Steve McConnel,
Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art
13. No Estimates?
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you
expect, even when you take into account
Hofstadter's Law.
— Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An
Eternal Golden Braid
14. No Estimates?
In software development environments, the
modern formulation of Parkinson’s Law is “work
always expands to fill all the time available for its
completion”.
Another way to put it is: “If you wait until the last
minute to complete a task, it only takes a
minute”... Or does it?
15.
16. No Estimates?
If you always do the most valuable
thing first…
You will always have the most
valuable thing that you could have
built in the time available.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22. Challenges of
Managing Innovation in a
Deadline-Driven Culture
Estimating the “Unknown”
Jamal Pilger
SVP Software Development
jamal.pilger@onyxmd.com
www.linkedin.com/in/jamalpilger
@jamalpilger
Editor's Notes
My name is Jamal Pilger and I oversee the Software Development and Online Marketing functions at Onyx M.D.
Story: Annual Meeting question, “How long will it take to get the Monday Reports automated?” My gut said 1 mo, so I answered 3. “I’m writing that down”.
Why did I choose this topic?
More frustration due to misunderstanding and expectations in this area than almost anything else.
It is HARD (panic!)
I’m NOT an expert
When I read this definition I fell asleep because I was so bored. When I awoke and read it again, I started getting sick to my stomach, and my mind started flooding with thoughts of insecurity and inadequacy… “what did I get myself into?”
Some of you may have more experience in this field, but the fact is, we all manage the process of innovation to some degree or another. It’s not my goal to give a dissertation on this topic, but to challenge our thinking just a bit, enter into a productive dialog, and also have some fun in the process.
We’ve all been taught all our lives that “The Customer is Always Right”, right?
Rule 1: The customer is always right.
Rule 2: If the customer is wrong, re-read rule #1.
For a long time my boss kept asking my peers “are you getting what you need from IT?”, under the assumption that they knew exactly what they needed. Fast forward a few years with that question being the primary method of evaluating my team’s performance, and we ended up with a series of deliverables that met the customer requirements, but failed to address critical alignment issues across the company.
Estimating innovation is like predicting the future. You can make an educated guess, but you never really know what you're going to face until it happens.
When a wild guess becomes a contract, it sets an expectation that is doomed from the beginning.
Has anyone besides me ever found themselves in that kind of situation?
Clearly, it’s important that we figure out ways to be relevant in our organizations and find out ways to find that sweet spot where our contribution and our customer’s needs intersect. In the process, we have so many challenge we need to navigate in order to succeed:
The challenge of different mindsets.
The challenge of assumptions.
The challenge of expectations.
The challenge of communication.
Competing priorities, moving targets, people not knowing what they want, budget restrictions…
We’ve all created fancy charts and spent countless hours defining our mission, vision and values, all in an attempt to clearly define identity and purpose.
For example, we….
Even after doing this, we struggle with the question: Is there proper alignment between leaders, departments, objectives?
We create roadmaps to determine how we are going to get from our starting point to our destination.
Often we forget the fact that there are many roads that will take you from point A to point B. Depending on our objectives, one path may look quite different from another.
For example…
After defining our organizational purposes and a clear roadmap, we set out on our plan to change the world, only to find out that reality is quite a bit different than our plan. How can we have foreseen all those obstacles that would stand in our way?
Some of the challenges we face are from the outside, but some are self-created. For example:
Have you ever noticed that the most creative people are sometimes the most easily distracted?
What about Unnecessary Complexity – e.g. “New Docs” metric.
We set targets and deadlines to keep us on track and create “accountability” to get the job done. Deadlines are a good thing... or are they?
They enforce accountability
Some things will never get done without deadlines
Deadlines force us to limit scope
Deadlines cause us to prioritize and focus
They can stifle innovation
They can apply artificial, self-induced pressure to cut corners, compromise features and lower quality
Are they really necessary?
But what about the business Budget and other dependencies? We can't work with a blank check and no deadlines or accountability all the time!
As we gain more experience, we realize at some point along the way that some of the old ways of doing things no longer work. We’re all looking for a better way.
Innovation is doing something that's never been done before.
Pioneering new solutions means exploring uncharted territory.
Raytheon
Rocket ship-inspired (literally) project management process imposed upon IT projects
All projects <40 hours or >6 months
Degrees of innovation
Tesla - new entry level electric car
Apple - releases innovative new products like clockwork
Google - releases "lean" products in beta for years
NASA - high stakes, mission critical, expensive, never-done-before
