The Grant Talks • • •

Even though many of us work in a world of analysis, data and detailed measurements, Grant

never forgot what it was all for, he challenged everyone to help

people do better work, improve themselves along with their companies and societies,

to realise their human potential to create possibilities for a

better life.

So how do we respond to his challenge? How can we

influence companies who are simply concerned with

shareholder capital without respect for human capital starting with the software

development business?

The Grant Rule Trust. The Trust will be seeking to

promulgate the insights into effective business practice discovered or inspired by Grant through a series of

"Grant Talks" www.grantrule.org

Social Capital

Do we need an Ethical Framework in the Software Development and IT Business?

Welcome everybody to the first Grant Rule Memorial Talk.

I met Grant Rule a number of years ago, and I was very impressed with his wisdom, his intellect and his original ideas. He was very well respected and liked by most people. For me, he was a very important, intellectual partner because whenever I had difficulty trying to figure out what I needed to do when

perhaps working with organizational change or introducing Lean and Agile, he always had some words of encouragement and wisdom about how I could move things forward. Sadly, I miss that.

When it came to thinking about a subject for this talk, it set my mind back to the times I worked with Grant. ‘What was his main strength?’ I asked myself. I think his main strength, in addition to his knowledge on Lean, Agile and software development, was his patience. I think that ran through the way he approached all his work. He was always patient. He would listen

to people and gently lead them, through a series of questions, to new insights without making them feel silly or stupid. And that was an incredible gift.

So when I was asked to do this talk I had to think long and hard about ‘What would Grant like me to talk about?’ because there was a whole range of subjects he was very interested in. I started thinking

about what values he was trying to bring into the world of software development. Apart from all the methods and the tools and the processes he developed, he also had a very human side and it was that humanity he was trying to get people to really understand.

Technical Debt

In addition, he often talked about things like technical debt in software and he of course, as I said, had the methods and processes for dealing with it. He also talked even more about ‘social capital,’ which is basically the collective benefits

Grant Rule Memorial Talk By Stephen Parry

Author of Sense and Respond 11/8/2012 UK Software Metrics Association

23rd Annual Conference: 21st Century Metrics

The greatest waste in organizations is the waste in human potential.

derived from corporations between individuals and groups, while helping people realize their potential in the workplace. This was a consistent and really important theme that came from Grant and all his work.

Nevertheless, there were occasions when we got frustrated because of the large number of organizations who were just adopting the tools and methods in software development and IT without really thinking about what it meant for the way we manage the people who are actually doing the work. We know these methods only work when management behaviors and attitudes towards people changed from treating people as transactional workers to knowledge workers, to allow them to contribute their ideas and be free to experiment and innovate.

Social Capital

I wanted to make this notion of ‘social capital’ and changing the lives of people by changing the work environment, particularly software development and IT environments, the main theme for today.

When discussing software development, Grant talked about issues like technical debt, he worked very hard to reduce it by creating and teaching methods to produce software products that worked with little or no rework, that meet the needs of customers and the business. When he did so, he kept stressing that the work climate needed to foster respect for people, create a blame-free approach and even eradicate fear in the workplace. This way, software developers could become creative, innovative and adaptive.

Purposeful measurement

Unfortunately, software and IT measurement and development methods in the hands of a particular management style and approach, ones that tend to treat knowledge

work as if it were a commodity, is sadly all too common. Often there are well-intentioned managers who use software and IT measures for the wrong purposes, applying them in order to create work intensification, to assign blame and target underperforming staff. The wrong measurement applied for the wrong reasons in the wrong way often results in the wrong people being placed in the wrong.

Measurement is a two-edged sword that must be used wisely to avoid self-inflicted wounds.

Therefore, we return again to the fact that it’s all about the mentality of those who apply these measures— and to what purpose?

Work intensification

There are too many environments where management is striving to intensify the work, to speed it up, and this results in increased errors, rework, and technical debt. In these situations, what decreased was the

engagement of the knowledge workers themselves and their removal or withdrawal of their willing contribution and their innovation. Basically, they withdrew their talent. And not only is this a social capital issue—it makes no

business sense either because it results in the creation of products and services that are not as good as they could be.

I remember having many discussions with Grant about the software practice of refactoring, debating whether it was waste or value? And after a lot of discussions, we both came to the conclusion that it was unnecessary waste work, occasionally unavoidable but waste

work nonetheless. I’m sure some of you might take issue with Grant and me on that view. Software development organizations and IT businesses, however, are still dominated by the mass production, industrialization, command- and- control paradigm.

Having met Grant a number of years ago, I have since been introduced to many software developers. Often when delivering Lean Seminars to IT infrastructure staff, application support and development staff, I found really great people being constrained from great achievements.

The wrong measurement applied for the wrong reasons in the wrong way, often results in the

wrong people being placed in the wrong.

Measurement is a two-edged sword that must be used wisely to avoid self-inflicted wounds

And the one thing that I know about software developers and IT staff, having worked in the industry for some years, is that they have a great interest in creative ideas, new methods and theories but feel frustrated when they know they can deliver so much more but feel trapped by old world management thinking.

Taking control

What I think many are trying to do is take control of their environment in spite of the management structures and practices around them, in spite of the way the measurement is used against them. This I believe has given rise to the proliferation of so many new methods, such as Agile, Scrum, Lean, Kanban and the like.

They just want to get control of their work and their lives; they do not want to be treated as a commodity or as an interchangeable part. You often hear them saying, especially when they know there are better ways they are not allowed to try, ‘Look, it’s a creative act. It’s a knowledge-based complex activity and you cannot force that into simplistic tasks.’

So, I asked myself ‘is this a fault of management?’ and I think no, it’s not the fault of management. They are under pressure too. They are victims of the same way of thinking, and very often, if they don’t conform, they have to leave.

The right question is ‘how do we change the climate or the system and

the focus of current management practices?’

Well, we tried better measurement but that sort of misfired, not everywhere to be fair, but it didn’t succeed or break through to new management practices as much as we would have hoped.

We tried better methods. Grant was very good at that, but that too failed to change the work climate where the willing contribution was withdrawn.

So measuring software and IT SLA’s is not enough, better methods and processes are not enough. We must start measuring and changing the climate in which development and IT work is performed.

I’m at a point now, to issue a challenge to you all. Many of you are in the measurement business. Many of you know how measurement can be used wisely and how it can be used foolishly.

So, my challenge here to you as a community, is to start thinking about not only measuring the production methods but also start measuring the climate that workers work in.

I am issuing you that challenge because there is little point in being really good at measurement and production methods if the climate itself doesn’t allow us to realize our return on the potential in the people and the potential investment in the software and infrastructure. This is a

really big problem within the industry as a whole.

I have spoken to a lot of people, visited many workplaces, many were good but sadly there are not enough of them. Many are using industrial thinking, creating environments that are quite oppressive, lack flair and ingenuity and give rise to a feeling that people only deliver what is needed to survive and nothing more. Many would leave if they had somewhere to go. Many do leave and set up their own business but they often fail because they don’t have the connections; they don’t have the relationships; they don’t have the business acumen, and very often, they reluctantly return to places they’ve just escaped from.

Start measuring the work climate

So, we need to think about measuring the environment. We need to start talking to management about moving away from disciplined compliance towards disciplined experimentation. We need to remind people about human potential. We need to say that it’s all about the way we treat people, and we need to foster an environment for willing contribution, autonomy, innovation and customer outcomes, all fear free.

However, I am afraid that even measurement of the workplace climate is still not enough. Sure it’s important to know where we are, but what is even more important is knowing where we need to get to. I believe we need a professional ethics framework.

We have tried accreditations and manifestos and that moved us forward, but accreditations and

The right question is ‘how do we change the climate or the system and the focus of current

management practices?’

manifestos talked mainly about the techniques and methods for better production to reduce technical debt. I am now talking about something much higher than that. I am talking about software development organizations and IT businesses in general, adopting a set of management ethics—not the usual corporate stated values, such as, ‘We value teamwork,’ and ‘We value our customers.’ This is often rhetoric in the marketing brochure and absent in the workplace.

We need a set of professional ethics to provide a sounding board against which we can gauge our behaviors, with which we can test and challenge ourselves and be held accountable.

Ethical Framework

The concept of ethical frameworks is not new to businesses. In the medical, psychology and coaching professions, ethical codes of practice are well established. These are all examples of ethical frameworks being applied to knowledge work. There are even lesser-known ethical frameworks for non-knowledge work such as franchising.

I’m thinking, if an industry as reasonably straightforward as franchising can adopt a code of ethics to outline how the parties are going to behave, and professions such as doctors, can have ethical frameworks, then why can’t we have one for software development companies and IT businesses? They too are knowledge-based and requires technical skills. They too have to keep their skills up to date. They too have to keep learning modern techniques and methods. They too have to be creative and adaptive.

While I am proposing we create a new framework of ethics, I’m not asking us to put it in so that we can have a list of things we can go and beat people up with. That would be counterproductive, so we would need to build in safeguards.

What it would mean, however, is that we would be able to say, whether we apply Lean, Agile, Kanban, software measurement—whatever it is—we can say, ‘These methods will only work and deliver their full potential if we actually create an environment based on this ethical framework.’

What we all need to be working on, the staff, the managers and the owners of the business—is actually trying to figure out what those ethics mean in their own companies, workplaces and teams.

My challenge now, to you in the software measurement community, the software development community and the IT community, is to create a professional ethical framework specifically for your businesses.

Is there a need?

Before delivering this talk, I wanted to test the idea of an ethical framework. I wanted see if it was a crazy idea or not. So, I spoke at a number of software development and IT conferences and simply asked the audiences, ‘Is there a need for organizations to understand the ethical and behavioral part of development and IT support?’ and

they were all saying, ‘Yes, we really do need something like this, because at the moment, all we do is sit there and complain that our managers do not understand and we accuse them of being command and control managers,’ when in fact, they know no other way to evaluate their behaviors.

Creating wealth together

What I want to do now is create a unifying force, starting with a number of people who will come together to create this framework. I want to start small. I’ve got one or two people already interested. And I am pushing this out to you. If any of you are interested in helping me form a small group to set up the process by which we can start developing these ethics, then testing it with the communities such as the

Agile community, the Kanban communities, IT etc., then please let me know directly by email or via my blog site www.leanvoices.com

I know some people will be critical and say this is motherhood and apple pie and it’s all about soft stuff in a tough business environment, and my answer to that is: This idea is not only about people and social capital; it actually makes perfect business sense. It is more profitable. It is more innovative. The soft stuff is the hard stuff, and at the end of the day, the only stuff that creates wealth in the knowledge business. We are now in an age where we need to put away industrial thinking. We need to put away command and

The soft stuff is the hard stuff and it’s the only stuff that creates wealth in the knowledge business

Stephen Parry Author of Sense and Respond: The Journey to Customer Purpose

Senior Partner at Lloyd Parry www.lloydparry.com

control management. We need to put away the notion that everything comes top down, and we need to put away the commoditization of knowledge workers. Software and IT is so much at the heart of everything we do in the world today. This ethical framework is not only about realizing the potential of staff and managers, but helping realize the potential of the people in the world with software and infrastructures that are not only profitable but changes lives and creates new opportunities and social capital.

One more thought for software development

I will leave you with perhaps one more crazy thought, which is, ‘What would it be like if you had a software equivalent of a Fairtrade mark?’ Imagine we had a badge, which said, ‘This software is command- and control-free,’ or such like? I would like to examine whether that would be possible, because if we could do that, we could engage consumers by giving them an ethical-social choice about which software they purchase. Then, we would really demonstrate the power of social capital.

Now, I may be overreaching, but unless we look at the potential, we won’t get very far. With an Ethical Framework we can all start raising awareness and a debate. Let’s talk to

organizations that are making investments in new technologies, new processes, new measurement systems or frantically going after one accreditation after the other.

We no longer have to stay silent about the human factor; we can factor it in. And if we can do that, I think we will be true to what Grant has been telling us all along. We can really create a legacy and we can make command-and-control management history, at least in the software and IT industries. Then, who knows, we can move on to other industries?

Thank you very much.

Stephen Parry is an organisational designer, international leader and strategist on the creation of Lean service enterprises that are adaptive, innovative and engaging. He has a world-class reputation for passionate leadership and creating global

organizations with superior service climates by changing the way employees, managers and leaders think about the business. He developed the Sense and Respond 3.0 principles and methods to bring about customer, employee, management and

leadership behavioral change and organisational development.

If you wish to be involved with the formation of the new ethical management framework then contact Stephen directly via Stephen.parry@lloydparry.com or his blog www.leanvoices.com

If you wish to know more about the Grant Rule Trust or make a donation then please visit www.grantrule.org Thank you.