Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1505694
90 PCB007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2023 just improve our practices there, things would get better. It took me a long time to finally realize the constraints lay outside of the team. And that began to lead me slowly, inexorably, on a path towards discovering W. Edwards Deming. I founded my own consultancy in 2011 and I haven't looked back since. Largely, what I do now is try to help leadership and their teams make sense of Agile the way it is practiced today. I've directed my attention there to try to produce improvements. at's what I do. I write, and I have customers—sometimes vir- tual, sometimes physical. And I work with them on learning the Deming management philosophy. Barry Matties: Let's look at developing a strategy. Many times the problem is that leaders don't know exactly where they're going to take the business. What's the process for developing a "blue sky thinking" strategy? Well, Deming would tell us that we've got to have constancy of purpose. And he says that that includes having a well-positioned aim, and that you understand what business you're in, what business you're not in, and that you've got plans toward the future. You see that expressed a lot inside of Japanese culture, like Toyota, for example, as a management phi- losophy. With the Toyota production system, they will set goals that help align and direct everyone so that they pull towards that direc- tion or that objective, but they aren't necessar- ily something that you're ever going to achieve directly. You're always trying to move yourself towards greater and greater levels of improve- ment. ey've got to actually understand what it is like if they're going to set a strategy. Why are they moving in a particular direction? Have they considered, for example, whether they are in the correct business or not? In just the last six months, we've seen layoffs and restruc- turings of companies, and you can see that in such a way that we can actually control the variation that exists. e typical soware projects that I was ini- tially involved with were so big that you didn't see a release cycle in anything under several months. And the Scrum and XP and a lot of the Agile practitioners that were emerging out of the 2000s, influenced by the Japanese thinking around product development, were looking at releasing things in radically shorter timeframes. With more intense planning, this would happen in shorter, quicker bursts, with lots of touch points with customers, and lots of touch points with managers. is flew in the face of everything. I loved it, because I'm a contrarian. I really enjoyed learning about all these practices. I worked for a number of small- and medium-sized companies along the way. e last large company that I worked for as a full- time employee was Microso, from 2008 to 2010, in their enterprise services consulting division. I was responsible for checking in on customers across the country and deliver- ing materials training, advising, and produc- ing reports on how to implement knowledge management systems I was responsible for. Previously, I'd figured that if we just worked better as a team down in the soware and Chris Chapman