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

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managers our garage in Seattle, Washington, to take a look at what we were doing. And then they invited me to their world headquarters at Moline, Illinois, to give a talk about what they called “frugal engineering” and “frugal innovation”, and I had found this quote. And we talked about modular tractors. We talked about a start-up making open-source agricultural equipment called Open Source Ecology. They’d already been familiar with Open Source Ecology and with this movement of much less expensive, quicker to make change, agricultural tools. They were very curious about it, and wanted to know about this trend. 26:52 – And then, I gave them this quote. John Deere and their predecessors have been building tractors for 175 years. Their current iteration of the tractor is the 8030 large tractor platform. The head of that team had given us this quote in 2007: “The 8030 tractor development process is quite predictable. We expect to hit the capital plan perfectly and R&D spending within 5 percent. We know how many resources we need and when we need them.” That’s from Mr. Wienkes, the large tractor engineering lead at John Deere in 2007. They’ve been doing this for 175 years, they have a high level of confidence on how long it takes and how much it costs. 27:32 – A Dartmouth study cam out that was handed to me by someone at John Deere about the same project, and they reported the project ran 6 months over, and the engineers were working 12 to 14 hour days. Even still they dropped some of the key features. That tractor shipped and made an enormous amount of money. John Deere was very happy but they know that the pace of development was changing in the whole world around them. And it might be time to evaluate the way they forecast and predict projects. When I gave them this quote and compared it to this piece of evidence I thought I’d be thrown out of the building. I was quite scared. Instead, they put me on a boat to give this talk again at their annual budgeting cycle, to say maybe our budgeting shouldn’t be annual. 28:24 – And I just got a call last week where they were saying “what would Wiki-Deere look like?” 28:42 – Then, Boeing contacted Team WikiSpeed, and their just up the road, the largest aircraft manufacturer in the world, and they’re in Mulkiteo and Everett, Washington, and all over the world, but that’s their headquarters. We’re in Linwood, Washington now, just north of Seattle. So were about 20 minutes away from each other. They said “we would like to give you a tour of our 787, 777, and 767 manufacturing lines. We went inside the largest enclosed space in the world. The building is so large, they’ve had clouds form inside and had it rain inside the building. Here we are standing, not even directly in front, but near one of the jet engines. You see how massive the scale of things is. It’s very easy to loose focus and it all seems small until you look at a person sized door, even just one quarter of the way down the building, and someone going in and out, it’s astounding. It’s like the Arc of the Covenant scene from Indiana Jones, but all planes. 29:40 – Then we talked about MakerPlane. MakerPlane is an agile aircraft company. They’re building four and size seat light passenger aircraft. They claim to be using the WikiSpeed method. Their team lead has emailed me and I’ve emailed them back, and as far as I can tell they’ve absolutely got it. I’m very excited to see what comes out of this group. And so Boeing is looking at these groups and saying “What does that mean in terms of pace of development? How can we accelerate the pace of development with high quality?” And those are sessions that all of you have been attending all week.
30:16 – So after going to their enormous building, we took them to our Lynnwood shop. They hosted a diner there and sent fifteen of the executives over. That’s the first time we’ve ever had a diner hosted in Team WikiSpeed with table cloths and everything. One of their double PhD computational fluid dynamacists said “You know, the machinery we’re using is more advanced than yours, but you guys are so far ahead of us culturally that we have so much to learn from you. I was very quick to say “Vice versa. We’re still very small. Let’s be good friends”. But the fact that they’re even interested in what a bunch of people are doing in garages and storage units lets me know that maybe we are actually seeing a big shift across all industry. 31:09 – Then I had the privilege to go to Tait Radio in New Zealand. Tim Myer went with me, another Solutions IQ employee, who also after work volunteer’s his time at Team WikiSpeed. Tim Myer’s expertise is test fixtures, and test fixtures now not just for software and continuous iterations and automated test coverage, but the same for physical manufacturing. He paired with our electronics team in Mea, France, to develop and implements an accelerator pedal recorder, allowing us to be driving and record accelerator pedal pulses and drive cycles, and play them back for automated testing to see if the changes we’d made to emissions and fueling were moving us higher or lower with the same recorded test procedures. This type of device is not novel in the automotive industry, but it’s still fairly new and doesn’t have full adoption. Some of the test fixtures we use are wholly new, and the only reason they’re wholly new is because we design tests before we try to solve any problems. We practice TDD. Or, maybe it’s TDM?. Manufacturing. It’s the same practice. It probably doesn’t even need another name. You folks are all experts on this now, just as you’re familiar with TDD. 32:18 – In New Zealand Tait creates hardware goods. They make radio systems. Now they make digital encrypted radio systems for ambulatory, fire fighting, and law enforcement services, among others. Here you see one of their P25 base stations. This unit sits in a rack and receives radio signals form other devices, performs digital signal processing, and reemits the signals to transmit them at further distances than a hand-held or a mobile can do to each other. 32:46 – This is what the scrum room for a hardware engineering team can look like. Tim and I landed and we told the team we’re doing an experiment to see if we can develop products more quickly. Let’s have everyone needed to create this product be in one co-located space, a scrum room. And we had hardware engineers there, they were doing soldering, chip testing, rapid circuit board simulation, And we had embedded software engineers. And we had application software engineers. And we had marketing. All in one room. We launched the team on Monday. 33:31 – And the product owner [video of Tait employee David Jenks begins]: “As the product owner/manager I was able to get a very quick estimate of the scope of work and the impact that it might have if we were to choose one option vs another option. So the example was that I asked about the 50 100 Watt change doing a 100 to 50 with respect to the different disciplines in the stand-up and were in three minutes able to get a good estimate of the impact on each of the disciplines. That contrasts I think with weeks to get a feel for making that choice. That was a real example for me. [Tim Meyer behind camera repeats for David’s confirmation]: “So in this case, being able to have the team in a colocated area, and simply ask the question of everyone at their workstations in this co-located area, you were able to get an answer in about three minutes. In fact I think the decision was made in ten minutes on a 50 Watt amplifier, and we ended up choosing a 100 Watt amplifier, by knowing how this would impact each team member and what risk that would give. And it would have taken a couple of weeks in a non-collaborative work model. 34:49 – [Joe Justice] The product owner reported see the same type of velocity increases in terms of team decision making, which was a novel concept entirely for a command/control culture previously in some of the organization. A decision/resolution made in three minutes, and a decision ratified among the entire team in ten minutes. Instead of the team being told what the answer was, the team came up and then spread consensus in ten minutes, in what would have taken, he said, multiple weeks. A small win. Later that same week, David Jenks again, the product owner, said information bubbled up by having people from different disciplines working together on this same problem, saving them more than one person year of work across a core team of seven people and a lot larger team of about 27 people.
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