Hold me, I’m scared!

Fear is a terrible thing. And while some fears are justified, they are mostly overblown. Putting your fears into perspective is difficult. My first job out of college was a contact job working on the software for a blood banking system (I’m sure I’ve written about it before). Knowing you could kill someone if you screwed up the code… that’s fear! I can see how that might paralyze you from changing the code. On the other hand, if you knew something was wrong with the project, it is the same fear that would drive you to action.

In my case, the company was developing a new test for some sort of antibody screening. As I understand it, there are several types of blood products you can give the machine that it recognizes – centrifuged whole blood, plasma, or serum. For all intents and purposes, plasma and serum are interchangeable in the types of blood tests that the system could perform. However, this new test being developed for the system only worked with plasma (or serum, I can’t remember which, but it doesn’t matter except that it only worked with one of the two blood products). However, since in the entire history of tests they were interchangeable we listed the available option as “plasma OR serum.” Now, the people using the machine were supposed to know that they should only use the right product, but the machine didn’t have any warning about it.

While I knew there was something wrong with our system, I feared telling them that they needed to delay the release of their new test was going to raise their anger. Who was I to tell them? I’m not a scientist, I’m a programmer. But I swallowed deeply and expressed my concern. Their reaction was miraculous! They listened! They stopped, looked at me, thought about it for a minute, and said “you’re right. What can we do about this?” Then they invited me (a just out-of-college programmer) to meet with their scientists and discuss a solution! The collective desire to produce the best product outweighed the fear of management’s ire that we were delaying the product while we solved this problem.

So it was with some disappointment that just this other day I encountered fear at the office again. In the business I work in, no matter what we do wrong, nobody will ever die. The risks are not nearly as great, but it is still a business and there must still be a drive to do what is best – and to be ready to hear it if we are not doing the best we can.

We were in the process of reviewing a random sample of defects which we had gone back and looked for root cause. The data was pretty detailed – people seem to remember their bugs very vividly for some reason, especially high severity bugs that cause us to back out of pilots. We took all this data and we grouped it up and looked for patterns of mistakes where we could improve the process. Lo and behold, one big thing that came out was basic coding errors – the kind that could be caught by a static analysis tool like JTest. Stupid stuff. So I said to the manager we were working with “we need to go back to development and tell them they’ve got some basic coding issues.”

At first his reaction was “isn’t that kind of cliché?” I said “why? If they have basic coding issues, they’re really there and easy to work on.”

“Isn’t it quality assurance’s fault too?” the manager said.

“When’s the last time that QA ever injected a defect into the code?” I replied. “This is a development problem and it needs to be solved by development.”

“We can’t go back to development and tell them they have sloppy programmers! They have some good programmers too!” he retorted.

Alas, fear won out over doing the right thing here. The manager I was working with feared that we couldn’t go back to development and tell them they had a basic problem. It was ok if we went to them and said “you’ve got requirements issues” or “you’ve got a knowledge gap” but for some reason, if the blame fell directly on their shoulders they were unwilling to hear “you’ve got a coding problem.” We’ll never know if they would be willing to hear it, because apparently we won’t be telling them the truth of the matter on that one. We’re afraid they might react badly.

Fear of doing the right thing: 1, Us: 0.

Not one of the critical few

Ingrained in the Six Sigma school of thought is the critical few – the 80/20 rule. It is an important rule. In practice, there are a handful of things which often allow you to make big leaps from an incapable process to a capable one. There are more subtle characteristics of the process which can be refined to continually improve the performance, but this isn’t step change, it is refinement. And then there’s a class of things that just don’t matter.

So as I sat today through a long, long meeting trying to define a process, I spent a lot of time thinking about the things that don’t matter. That may have been because that’s all anyone spent their time talking about. And as facilitators, we were enablers of this dragging on. Having been instructed to drive to a single standard process and toolset, we discussed every little one-off thing that people wanted to allow for in the process to see if we could squeeze them out. A day’s worth of 25 people’s time to design a process spent talking about the equivalent of the carpet color.

We wanted perfect compliance to the standard, and that meant a standard which was not necessarily all-inclusive (because some of these one-off requests were truly ridiculous by any standard). This is where I believe we got off track with process work. Process design is about controlling the critical few things which will make the difference in process performance.

But that is not what we were discussing. We were discussing nuances, oddball cases, odd uses of the process, and data elements that some teams wanted and others didn’t. We talked about the 1% and largely ignored the 99%. We talked about things that weren’t going to make the difference, whether they were one way or another.

To begin with, we didn’t know what was going to make the difference. We hadn’t studied the existing processes to understand what made them work – what really mattered and what didn’t. This created unnecessary room for debate because we were unable to bring adequate materials to the table to help the team work through their differences. We had little to no information on what mattered and what didn’t.

Instead of define-measure-analyze-improve-control we just went right into improve. And there we got bogged down discussing every little quirk, because we didn’t know what else we ought to be talking about. Or more importantly, what we shouldn’t be talking about.

Instead of a conversation that was “do we really need that? How many of our teams use that process step?” we could have instead said “sure, it doesn’t matter to me if you allow for that.” And we’d be saying that not because we didn’t care but because we actually knew what did matter. Everything else, the little things that we debated with the teams could have instead been bargaining chips that we could dole out in heaps and have given up basically nothing that really mattered. We could have had a strong position, not because we won all the arguments but because we knew which battles were worth fighting and which were worth conceding.

Had we known what things were not one of the critical few things, we could have appeared very agreeable and allowed the teams as much “leeway” in the process as they claimed they needed. All along we’d be giving up nothing. Nothing that really mattered anyway.

It’s a reminder why a thorough measurement and analysis of a process is important. It isn’t just discovering what the current state is (measurement), but it also understanding why it works (analysis). And from there, narrowing down the bits of process that really do matter, and just letting the rest go. Some things just don’t matter.

They can’t make it work, so it’s exactly why it’ll work for us…

I happen to be a Democrat, but I enjoy reading commentary from both sides of the aisle.  Today I was reading this particularly ridiculous piece written by a Republican commentator.  Mr. Feehery feels that the splintered nature of the Democratic party is an opportunity for Republicans.  His argument goes something like:  our party’s values are small government, social conservatism, rigid enforcement of immigration law.  The Democrats are large governement, socially liberal, loose on immigration.  Therefore, since the Southern Democrats, Hispanics and African Americans aren’t as socially liberal as those
liberal nutjobs in Washington, they could be part of our party.  We could win them over! 

Of course, for each of the reasons the Republicans might win them over, it’s their current platform that also drives them away.  The Hispanic population isn’t generally a fan of tough immigration laws, African Americans have been ignored by Republicans, and while socially conservative, the Southern Democrats presumably still believe in a strong central government.

Even were I totally off on why each demographic will and won’t shift between parties, if the Republicans managed to attract these demographics, they’d be in the same position that Mr. Feehery claims the Democrats are now in.  They’d suddenly have people in their party who didn’t match the current party platform: socially conservative, fiscally conservative, pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-immigration.  Mr. Feehrey is a victim of survivorship bias.  He looks at his party and says “hey, we’re all aligned” but that’s because largely the people left in his party are those that shared the very narrow party platform.  Everyone else, the “non-survivors”, have been driven out.

So, sure, Democrats have a splintered party and they must sometimes compromise to maintain their voting bloc.  This somehow makes the alternative that the Republicans (who he superbly understates as “having their fair share of problems”) are offering workable?  Hey, these people didn’t vote for you for some reason… presumably because the things that the party ideals were against outweighed the elements of the party that people were for.

Which is the case with me, I’d probably be a Republican (I LOVE fiscal conservatism) except that Republicans are a disaster (in my opinion) on personal liberties.  I have chosen larger government, and more taxes, as an acceptable evil in exchange for a party that is willing to provide more social freedoms.  Anyway, I digress…

If you’ve got a situation which you deride someone else for failing at (or setting themselves up for failure at), and think that it’d work for you… take another looksie.  If it is failing, it is failing for a reason.  Just cause you could be running the show instead of them doesn’t get rid of the underlying problem.  This commentator’s entire argument appears to be “the pendulum will swing back” and from that one can reasonably conclude that it’d swing back yet again after that, and again, and again, and again, because nobody is actually solving the problem of why the splintered party doesn’t work.

Maybe it’d be better to be a minority, but at least a unified minority.  Maybe it’d be better to serve some customers really well than to serve many customers marginally…

The N Dysfunctions of a Team

A friend of mine passed along “5 Dysfunctions of a Team”, which I haven’t yet opened. In fact, before I opened it, I treated it much like a book that I was considering buying. I went to Amazon.com and I read the reviews to see if it was even worth me opening the book in the first place.

At a glance from the reviews, the book seemed very much like the school of management which believes teamwork will solve everything. It’s the same school of management which believes that hanging ‘Successories’ (you know exactly what I’m talking about if you’ve ever seen one) on office walls. So, I’m pretty skeptical about the book.

But it did get me to thinking. We (that’s the Royal we) believe that having great processes and not so great people is the secret to success. We have accepted that people are fallible and therefore that there must be an alternative solution which addresses the issue. We believe that solution is process.

But as I sat there and thought about it, I realized that making better processes to compensate for not-so-great people is avoiding the root cause of the issue. If you could just get really good people, who really cared about what they were doing, then they’d be great all on their own. They wouldn’t need great processes. Processes, in some respect, are an avoidance of the true root cause – people who don’t do the right thing.

And so I wonder, is learning to select, educate/train/mentor/whatever, and retain the right people the only secret there really is. If you could do that, why would you bother doing anything with process? Sure, if you can’t do the above, then maybe process is the second best solution.

Or is this a case of testing with software? Sure, we all know that it isn’t value added, but we know of no way to avoid it. Maybe that’s the case with process; that we do it because we know of no other way to successfully get the right people in the right jobs doing the right thing all the time. We can’t solve the first problem, so we solve the second one. It’s easier, presumably, to find one bright process designer than it is to find a large (or even a small) team of really good people.

It doesn’t change the fact that, in theory anyway, that good process is in itself a treatment of the symptom and not the root cause.

Which came first the fun or the fun committee?

The other day someone asked me if I’d be interesting in joining the team’s fun committee.  I declined.  For a couple of reasons – one, I don’t find being on fun committees much fun.  I don’t get any of my normal work taken away to plan events so it is just extra work.  I don’t need extra work.

But more importantly, it dawned on me why the idea of a fun committee was intrinsically doomed to failure.  When organizations aren’t performing well, people often (correctly) recognize that the ability and willingness of the team to work together is lacking.  Work gets reduced to a series of cover your a** conversations, documents, email trails and so on.  We exchange productivity for busy work.

And thus people dawn up the idea of improving morale and helping the team work together.  They form fun committees!  The thing is, if you team was having fun, you wouldn’t need a fun committee and the fact that you have one means you’re already in a tough spot.  Why did you create a fun committee?  We don’t do it because we genuinely believe it is fun.  We do it because we think the organization will get value from it.  And thus the goal is all wrong.

Yes, the organization does get value from a team who likes to be together, but you can’t make teams more productive by forcing them to have ‘fun’ together.  Sure, people may even enjoy the free lunches, beer or whatever else.  They may show up and socialize with each other, but it doesn’t build what you a really looking for, a shared sense of purpose and trust in each other.

People who have common mindsets form groups all the time in the real world.  They’re called friends!  But these friendships stem from the fact that the people in them want the same types of things – whether they rally around a certain sporting event, a hobby, or even just a good stiff drink.  And having found friendship, these people are inclined to do more for each other and also receive personal satisfaction from doing it.

But there are lots of cases where people get together, have a good time for a moment and never interact afterwards.  They’re called parties.  The relationship is fleeting, and while I may enjoy your company, once the party is over I am unlikely to think of you again.  Fun committees make the equivalent of parties, not friendships.  We may be all in the same place together sharing an experience, but I don’t feel more strongly for you from having done it.

If you’re thinking about a fun committee, I think you’ve already gone down a bad path.  Think instead about the things as a leader you are doing to prevent your team from gelling.  Are you isolating them, suppressing them, enforcing an hierarchy that need not be there?  Do you berate them for their failures but never reward their successes?  Do you over-reward (patronize) them for minor wins rather than great things?

Teams can function without gelling.  I still believe that good process is critical, even in a well functioning team.  However, it can only help to have a well functioning team, so why act to destroy it?  And that’s what is most important to understand.  You can’t make a team gell by having a fun-committee, but there’s a lot you can do to destroy them coming together on their own around whatever it is they feel is fun.

The End is Near!

Wow, it’s been a thought provoking day for me. I’m on post #3. I’m sure it’ll be a rare occurrence to post this much at once. As a matter of fact, this last post was somewhat motivated by the fact that I can now make new posts to my blog via email and I wanted to try out the feature. I’ve never been much of a fan of going to a site to do one specific task and I like the integrated nature of this. Plus, using Outlook, I get better spell checking capabilities for free.

On to the topic at hand! The End is Nigh!!! No, I’m serious, the Agile iteration that the team I’ve just joined is coming to an end. Surely you recall my less than stellar review of my own first Agile experiences. On the plus side, that entire team I was with was broken up and my misery brought to a prompt end. On the negative side, I just got dropped onto another team also trying pseudo-Agile. This is to say, they do daily meetings and stories and iterations, but no software development to speak of.

Anyway, I got dropped in the middle and we’re apparently about one and a half weeks away from the end of this current iteration. It’s triage time because the owner of this (what do they call it in Agile? Group? Stream?) team (for lack of a better word) realized that they weren’t going to get any of their stories done. So, rather than say “hey, we’ve got a deadline here people and things need to get done” they’re saying “don’t worry, we’ll just move it to the next iteration.”

Ah, the double edged sword. The reason for iterations is so the business doesn’t over ask. They learn to trust development and to have them deliver a small piece of useful functionality rather than requesting the world all at once. In theory, since there will be more iterations in the future, there will be another chance to ask for more features. On the flipside, which seems to be happening on this team, and probably others, the development teams ALSO know that there will be more iterations. And why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?

Sure, the end is near, but on a single-big-realease project, what goes in is what goes in. You get you chance and you need to deliver. With iterations, even if today’s end is near, there’s always tomorrow. I’m not saying this is endemic of Agile, but it is a risk that needs to be addressed. In any methodology, there’s still a need to commit and deliver and having chopped the commitments into smaller blocks should not be an excuse to procrastinate. But it appears to be that way.

On the goal of being lean…

It is to some degree a strange coincidence of events that I am writing this post:

1. I was reading EvolvingExcellence blog post regarding the author, Bill Waddell, who has committed to stop complaining and actually do something about the loss of manufacturing in the USA.  As his first salvo, Bill writes a well thought out article about the fallacies being spread by the BLS and both sides of the aisle in congress.
2. I recently read “What Happy People Know” by Dan Baker.

It’s times like these that solidify my position as Democrat more than a Republican.  Coincident events like above that make me understand why I don’t agree with the capitalist position. 

Bill’s post focuses on the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States as being a warning sign to the US failing.  He argues against the use of cheap labor elsewhere as being valid globalization, noting ridiculously low productivity and the oppression of foreign people as not good ways to build wealth.  He believes that wealth building manufacturing jobs in the US are being lost in exchange for a false value.  And he argues that sending more people to college to become more skilled isn’t going to fix it.

On most of these accounts I agree with Bill, except one.  “Wealth building.”  I’m not saying that manufacturing jobs aren’t wealth building.  I’m not qualified.  I’m arguing that the goal of building wealth is incorrect, regardless of how it is built.

See, I told you I was going to disagree with capitalism.  But why, you ask?  Because of the book “What Happy People Know.”  Dr. Baker’s book is very well written, and I’d recommend reading it (I get no kickback for saying so), but it is simple to summarize.  Money DOES NOT equal happiness.  It isn’t a Dr. Baker idea.  It’s a saying that’s been around forever.  It’s true.  It’s been studied.  Rich people are not, on the whole, happier than the less fortunate.  Having more stuff doesn’t take your worries away, it adds to it.

There are even joking retorts such as “money may not buy happiness, but give me the opportunity to prove them wrong.” or something like that.

It takes some introspection, but consider your life for an hour or two.  I’d say a minute, but let’s be honest.  Go for a walk, think about what truly makes you happy or what would make you happy.  Most people will tell you that they’d be happy if they made twice what they make now.  And yet, when people achieve that, they’re still not happy, and again believe that twice what they are now making is the magic number.

I have a good job, I make a decent living.  I can afford our house, our cars, food and health insurance.  And yet, if I made twice what I made today, how different would my life be?  I’d have a bigger house and take up more space.  I’d eat more expensive food.  I’d still be able to afford everything, and yet it really isn’t a different thing.  It’d just be more of the same.  The thing is, even if I had billions of dollars, though I could buy pretty much anything I wanted, I still only physically occupy so much space.  I still only need so much to eat.  What would I be getting for all that money?  I sleep well at night, my health is good, I love my family.  More money isn’t going to change the basic factors that make me happy.

Wealth building as a goal is misguided in my mind.  Being LEAN has a very important value aside from making people rich (and creating disparity).  Being LEAN means being able to provide everything I need to survive PLUS something that can improve the value of society as a whole.  If I can become twice as efficient and make 2 chairs in the time it took me to make one, then I can have a seat and so can someone else.  If I can figure out how to eat less food, or use less resources to get something done, then it is freed up for someone else to improve their lives with.

Being leaner doesn’t mean doing it to improve my standing.  No matter how much money I earn, I will never grow to be taller than trees, bigger than mountains or able to spontaneously fly.  My change in stature from being richer is quite insignificant in the big picture.  Being happy, however, has immense value to me.  And, freeing up the resources that I once consumed means being able to provide them to the less fortunate.  While giving my money (or resources) away, won’t make a rich person happier, it does have value to those living in poverty.  Some amount of wealth building helps those less fortunate meet basic needs.  And being lean means helping bring up the standard of life for all to a level that more people can be happy.

Happier people, not wealthier people, is the goal I want to accomplish.  Vibrant health, a comfortable place to live, enough (not an excess) to eat, and the freedom to enjoy a beautiful day is what LEAN could accomplish.

While I appreciate where Bill is coming from, if the USA weren’t the world leader, the world still wouldn’t end.  If I can continue to be happy, I’m pretty sure that’s what matters, not how much the US dominates the world’s wealth.  After all, you can’t take it with you…

Thoroughly considered or just the way it is?

I can never tell if my educational trips actually change mindsets of the people I bring along with me.  Sometimes I think that although people intuitively get the ideas being presented that it never affects behavior.  It’s like emotional intelligence (EQ).  Sure, you can know what the right answer is, but will you actually behave that way when push comes to shove? 

At any rate, though I wonder about the value I’m providing to people I often learn interesting things about my students.  In some ways, the teacher becoming the student is my favorite part of teaching.  Accepting that I know nothing (or at least very little) is what inspires this blog.  If I thought I knew all the answers, I wouldn’t be mulling them over in my head and writing my ruminations in this blog.

So I return to the scene of a recent trip to 5 Guys Burgers to discuss a student who came along.  This student, is an interesting sort of person.  I find that in some cases he’s really thoughtful and in others he doesn’t want to make the leap from “hey, if it works in a burger joint, could it work in a big company?”  It’s the power to extend a learning to a bigger thing, and I don’t think the inability is unique to him.

The interaction went something like this:

“Bob, see what they’re doing with the fries?  First they take a Styrofoam cup and load it with fries and then they put that in the bag and throw MORE fries on top.  What a waste.  Why do they need the cup?  Or why isn’t the cup the right size?”

And Bob’s response was “well, it’s part of their value proposition.  You get a lot of fries for your money.” 

Now, I’ll grant you that there were a lot of fries in the bottom of my bag, but I’m not sure that’s the issue.  The question in my mind is, did they get this way (of throwing excess fries into the bag) because they thoroughly thought it out or did it get that way by chance.  In effect, they bought cups that were too small and always intended to provide a larger order of fries than the cups could hold.  If they had bigger cups they’d just use them without the tossing of fries in on top.

It reminds me of a commonly told story about a woman who is preparing a roast for her family.  She takes the roast out, cuts off the end of it and discards it.  Her son, who is watching her, asks “mom, why do you cut the end of the roast?”

“Well, that’s what my mother did.”

“Why did your mom do it, ” asks the boy.

“Because that’s what her mother did.”  But it turns out that the only reason the boy’s great-grandmother did that was because her pan was too small to fit the roast.  The rest of tradition handed down is nonsense.  It doesn’t make the food taste better.  It wastes a part of the roast which could be eaten.  It’s not  a deliberately thought out thing, it’s just a thing she does.

And so it goes with french fries.  We find reasons in the things we see every day to believe we’re doing them for a valid reason.  And that we must continue doing those things hereafter because clearly they were well thought out.

It’s a form of superstition.  Just like wearing your team jersey on game day because you believe your team can’t win without it, continuing to do something without questioning why we do it at all is foolish. 

But it is also troubling.  LEAN thinking is a mindset to challenge the way things are done, and yet we find that it is our evolutionary misfortune to see cause where there is none.  To be leaner, you are going to have to fight against your urges.  While superstition may have saved us from being eaten by lions, it no longer serves the same purpose.  We have the luxury to be able to step back, think about the issue and make intelligent change.

The next time you look at something that needs fixing, you should be able to ask yourself “is this a thoroughly considered way of doing things, or just the way it evolved?”

You’re a 5 out of 10

No, sorry, it isn’t a comment on your physical attractiveness.  It’s actually a comment about an assessment that was recently done at my company.  It was a “LEAN assessment” and apparently it was conducted as follows:

1.  Select about 100 people to talk to.
2. Interview them using a series of questions that have open-ended answers.
3. Review the interview with a couple of your peers and decide how their answers rate compared to benchmark answers.
4. Reduce their detailed resposne into a 1 to 5 score.
5. Average all the scores and spit out a number.
6. Call this your LEAN maturity rating.

Where to begin?  Well, we can start with the methodology.  I have nothing against interviewing.  I have nothing against talking to a lot of people.  I do have an issue with an arbitrary translation of a free form answer into a score.

It’s a relatively unscientific process.  It is being conducted by an individual who may have biases.  In fact, we can be certain they have biases.  After all, if our organization was a 5 (on a scale of 1-5) already, then what job would the interviewer have?  They’re somewhat inclined to downplay any positive aspects.  After all, they want to improve our scores on a LEAN assessment.

Two, where’d the benchmark answers come from?  How do you know if the answer your interviewee gave is equal to, better or worse than the benchmark.  How come you didn’t just ask the interviewee for a rating of 1-5 on the various aspects?  I don’t fault anyone for wanting to get additional information for the score, but interpreting someone’s language to arrive at a score?  I don’t think I’d do that.

And finally, even if you can arrive at a score, who cares?  You’re a 6, he’s a 4, that guy is a 9.  Scores, regardless of how high or how low they are don’t make our customers happy or sad.  A good score, in theory, has some relation to something that our customer cares about.  So where’s that data?

Well, I asked for all the data that the team used to “score” the group and they didn’t have it.  Look, I don’t care if you score a one bajillion out of 10 on the rating system.  If the rating system doesn’t relate to an actual goal, who cares!?!?  Score me any way you like, because unless it holds some predictive value, it doesn’t matter.

• The questions may be irrelevant.  Even if you answer the question correctly there’s no evidence that it results in greater profits, customer satisfaction etc.
• The questions may be relevant but don’t represent real behaviors.  This is the oft stated problem with tests of emotional intelligence.  You might know what the right answer is, but you don’t necessarily behave that way in real life.

So instead of this nonsense of scoring people’s answers, how about you go to the gemba, watch people work, and draw your own conclusion about where we stand on the LEAN maturity scale you made up.  I’d like to offer, in return, a grade on this assessment – 0 of 10.  Inherently flawed.

We were just waiting for you to quit…

Talk about doing an undervalued job.  A fellow that I worked with for a year or two just left the company for greener pastures.  Well, I assume that’s why he left, I never really got into it with him.  And I’m not particularly sure what “greener” really means.  I’ve come to the conclusion that all companies are dysfunctional in some ways, and that you just have to choose the dysfunction that you like the most (or hate the least, I guess).

Anyway, his office chair wasn’t even cold when an email crossed my inbox.  “I understand you are involved in some new metric work.  Dave [the former employee] used to produce a bunch of metrics.  Can we stop doing that?”

Ah, the truth comes out.  The manager in question had a full time employee.  He liked his empire to be a certain size (which is to say, not smaller than it currently was), so the manager justifies the employee’s existance as being critical to (in this case) our organizational metrics.  But the minute that employee leaves the company… “do we need to do this anymore?”

What does this say about us as people?  Are we afraid to confront a question as basic as “is this worth doing?”  Are you saying that in all the time that Dave was employed that we didn’t think he could do anything else, so as long as we had the same thing for him to do that would be ok?

If the only time you consider whether a task you are doing is still worth doing is when someone quits (or gets laid off or shuffles off this mortal coil)  then you’ve got some serious problems.  If we aren’t taking an approach that is constantly questioning whether or not what we are doing is bringing value to the customer, then WHAT ARE WE DOING!?!?

We put our blinders on, and we march.  Like good little lemmings off whatever cliff is coming up.  Insanity?  Didn’t anyone bother to ask the customers along the way if Dave’s metrics work was adding value to the company?  Apparently not.  Did we not want to hurt Dave’s feelings?  (Not that I think people shouldn’t be respected)  But if what Dave was doing wasn’t worth it, and yet you found Dave himself to be a good employee, I am certain we could have found something that Dave could do that would be worthwhile.

Don’t wait until someone quits to evaluate what you are or aren’t doing.  This time, it was just Dave (no offense Dave, if you read this), but sometimes it’ll be your biggest customer who up and quits on you instead.