Joe Justice: Managing a Collaborative Multi-National Team in Real ...

12:29 In Team WikiSpeed we had to try a different approach, and I have a
software development background as do most of the people in this room. I
was used to thinking I can’t design a whole solution at once, it was to big to
even have in my head at once. I had to split it up into pieces, modules.
Object Oriented Programming says: first have a clear interface, and then
have classes, then you can change those classes, and you have hotswappable
loosely-coupled modules. That’s exactly how we engineered the
car. The car’s built in eight parts, or modules, and they switch independently.
This means we can roll out the gasoline engine and roll in an electric drive
train, a bio-diesel drive train, a methanol or ethanol drive train, in about the
time it takes to change a tire. This means we can change the entire car body
from a convertible to a pick-up truck. This lets us change quickly, and this
also gives a level of flexibility for our customers that they’ve never had in the
automotive space before.
13:29 The team works using agile, lean, scrum, kanban, XP, and what I’ll call
XM, but its really just exactly the same processes, and we’ve taken the word
“software” and changed it to “customer visible value”. Here we see the team
doing a swarm. They’ve just taken the car apart into its eight pieces, and
now they’re putting them back together. This picture was taken at the X-
Prize. The X-Prize was a $10 million dollar prize purse, to see if it was even
possible to build road-legal cares that were safe, that achieved over 100
miles per gallon. Nobody knew if it could even happen. 136 cars entered
from all over the world, and we tied for 10 th place in the mainstream class.
We didn’t win. We didn’t get the $10 million prize. but we cam in ahead of
over 100 other cars, including cars from companies like Tesla, MIT, and Tata
motors in India. I think the only reason this was possible is because we used
agile project management and agile delivery, and we had a modular car.
14:33 When other teams were figuring out their planning phase, saying how much is this going to cost, how long is
this going to take, what materials are we going to make it out of, who’s going to do it, who’s our team – we just built
tests, test-driven development, saying we need to pass the side impact test, we need to pass the offset frontal test,
we need to achieve more than 100 miles per gallon on the EPA UDDS city driving cycle. And we had failing tests, and
said all right what’s the fastest leanest thing we can build that will pass this test, how about this test? And never
asked ourselves how much cost will this be, where will we build it, what materials will we build it out of, who will do
the work – instead we just had clear tests to know when we were done, and iterated as rapidly as possible on those.
And we had a Scrum master as a servant-leader. They are a process steward, but more importantly they’re there to
do anything they can do to accelerate the speed of the team. They’ll hand someone a screwdriver if they see they
might need it, they’ll run and get coffee, they’ll run and get lemonade, they’ll change the lights, they’ll see if they can
adjust the temperature. Anything they can do to increase the velocity, they sustainable velocity of the team, without
being in their way. And they’re a process steward. But by the time a team has done 10 daily stand-ups they’re calling
for the daily stand-ups themselves. And it only takes then a very savvy coach, scrum master, who studied some team
psychology to be able to add additional value.
15:56 – This is what a vertical slice of a car looks like in our
world. We had to have something on the road quickly to know
if we were on the right track, and so we could iterate. That
meant, just like in software, where we’ll have the user
interface layer, the business layer, the data layer, our n-tier
design if that’s how we’re doin’ it. We had to have a complete
version of something that’s road legal to begin testing. We
were able to develop this in three months. When we compare
that with the design and development cycles of traditional
automotive manufacturing the difference is two orders of
magnitude in time.
15:45 – Two years later we have this. I hope what you’re able
to see is that these methods might not only apply in broader
industry, but that they might be able to accelerate the pace of
new product development extremely, and that they might
even yield products that people might want to use. What I hop
you guys are starting to get out of this is that everyone in this
room is now not just on the avant guard of the transformation
of the software industry. We might be, everyone in this room,
on the transformation of what hardware development
manufacturing, entertainment, the financial sector, energy and
oil, government – might be doing. It’s because it’s predicated