Scott Bellware on kick-starting projects

At Lean Software Austin's Monday night meeting I saw Scott Bellware speak on kick starting projects. He suggested a "Just Ship It" mentality is not the way to go and offered Kaizen as a better goal of which http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen asserts: Kaizen, Japanese for "improvement", or "change for the better" refers to philosophy or practices that focus upon continuous improvement of processes in manufacturing, engineering, and business management. It has been applied in healthcare, psychotherapy, life-coaching, government, banking, and other industries. When used in the business sense and applied to the workplace, kaizen refers to activities that continually improve all functions, and involves all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers.

The obvious difference between the two is that one should care about everything instead of just "the bigger priorities" and the subtext here is that one should not take shortcuts. Mr. Bellware drew a few large circles on a whiteboard to represent "the bigger priorities" and then a smattering of little circles to represent all the shortcuts one might take. He then drew connections between the small circles and offered that their whole would add up a problem bigger than any of the "the bigger priorites." Shortcuts are defined as anything you do that you know that you shouldn't be doing in the name of "Just Ship It." They are conscious errors. Shortcuts are counter to the Lean approach of not letting something progress forward if it is flawed.

That was the whole talk, and yet, not unlike the last event I went to at Lean Software Austin, we went off a few tangents. Interesting things mentioned include:

1. This spectrum was whiteboarded. In Lean one focuses towards the top of this spectrum and the bottom is.... bad.

   ^ | | | | | | | | | v

   abstract principles     practices     tools and patterns concrete

2. Cargo-culting is the art of using technologies or patterns because you heard someone else suggest them to be good for fix. This goes at the bottom of the spectrum above and was heavily badmouthed. Cargo-culting is not the same as shortcutting as I am not necessarily making a conscious mistake when cargo-culting. The bad mouthing of cargo-culting and the suggestion that any pre-packaged approach is counter to an improving culture in which one is trying to be better in the name of chasing Kaizen was depressing. It made me think of Socrates' assertion that everyone learns in an Introduction to Philosophy college class that "all that you can know is that you can know nothing." It feels like our pursuit of knowledge as software professionals is Sisyphean.
3. Toyota! I end with one of my old notes from seeing Paul Rayner speak at No Fluff Just Stuff a year ago: The Lean Timeline featuring Taichi Ohno (and yes Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor)