Evolve Your Ways of Working or Go Extinct

Here we are now, fresh at the beginning of the year 2019. It’s only fitting that I talk about changes and improvements at this time of the year.

Ways of working or commonly known as our “process” are something that a lot of teams and people develop in order to achieve something at a certain point in time. They are created using the best available information at the time. The thing is, that information is now history and may not be accurate anymore. If we think about this, it makes sense to always revisit and re-evaluate what we are currently doing and apply tweaks and improvements.

Interestingly, a lot of people are averse to change, even when the changes are small and gradual. I think it’s almost human nature though, we like stability, comfort and safety. This is something that we need to overcome though. Not evolving our ways of working is the same with not learning anything, which means not innovating, which leads to extinction in a business sense.

There are overwhelming pieces of evidence in the business worlds where products went from market leaders into the brink of extinction. Some examples are Nokia, Blackberry, 3Dfx. They were once the king of their markets yet now they are either much smaller or doesn’t exist anymore. Even Apple at some stage was nearly bankrupted during their stagnant years. In a smaller scale in terms of a development team, the same applies. A full waterfall development team will learn about their product much slower than an agile development team. Software running on traditional dedicated physical servers will scale slower than a software build for cloud-based infrastructure (think about AWS auto scaling and the likes). Even a mature agile team will need to re-evaluate their current process and adjust accordingly.

I think the notion of “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” doesn’t make sense. Technology improves every second and thinking process also evolves every second of the day. Being happy with our process even if it’s slow but not broken just doesn’t work. One of the historical quotes that I like is the one that Walt Disney coined “Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.”. If you look at the history, Disneyland (and the other parks) have never stayed the same since 1955 (heaps of tech improvements there for their rides). Can you imagine going to the same Disneyland from 1955? I think it’ll be pretty boring.

In addition, continuously looking at what we are doing now and coming up with improvements and innovations is exciting. One most important thing with experimenting with changes is the ability to measure. Being able to see if the tweaks made to the process have made some changes is a very rewarding experience because it means we learn something. It doesn’t have to be an improvement, sometimes tweaks can result in some degradation. That is why we do smaller gradual changes instead to minimize the risk and to be able to easily measure the impact.

Some ways to measure changes within the team are measuring cycle time, a cumulative flow diagram, throughput, defects statistics, wait time calculations, etc.

In any case, regardless of what you do, it’s better to try out something in the spirit of continuous improvements than sitting idle ready to be overtaken by your competitions. So go out there and be the positive change agent!