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

35:35 That team launched on Monday, and they had a working prototype in a proxy
customer’s hands on Friday, making calls through the radio system to test the system.
The engineers in the same room had direct feedback from the customer for the first
time ever. It normally takes three months, or in some cases I’m told longer, it can be
on the order of years, to have a prototype being interfaced with by a customer. It was
able to be done in one week. And we didn’t, Tim and I, tell them what process to use.
We walked in and said: You’re self organizing. You can do anything you need to do to
deliver quickly. Here’s the goal, let’s have a radio in a customer’s hand by Friday, and
have them using it, a prototype of this product. You can use any practice, process you’d like to up to breaking the law,
but Tim and I are here to coach you on agile, lean, scrum, Kanban, XP, XM if you’d like it. We ended up running
sessions on all of the above.
36:33 – Tait was already doing so many things right, it helped. Their manufacturing line, right next to it, has a rapid
prototyping lab to make test fixtures for the automated line. Their test fixtures are cardboard, just like many of the
parts that WikiSpeed cars start out as, as we iterate “stubs”. They already practices stand-ups in their line
manufacturing, in their HR department, and in their marketing and project management department. While we were
there they started using retrospectives in those departments. While we were their we talked about adopting a product
owner and a scrum master role to have a team steward servant-leader embedded in the team, and someone with a
clear vision of the end-state of the product. And we saw the result of that with product owners and scrum masters in
HR and in the company change-management team.
37:24 – Here we are conducting a cross discipline
retrospective, with the C-suite, product engineers, two
different types of hardware systems engineers, embedded
software design engineers, and application software design
engineers. There’s Tim Meyer on the far right in the blue
shirt.
37:42 – Why doesn’t every company do this? The number one reason that we
hear as we come into companies is: “I’m not sure that can fit with us”, and
that’s cultural inertia. Companies have been doing it the same way for up to 175
years. In some case even a little bit longer than that. Not the exact same way
but some of their processes have been inherited across that time. The
resistance we have comes from, often, middle management. We’re saying, go
back to line-facing work, create customer visible value directly, instead of
architecture documents that you hand down. Middle managers are typically
resistant to this, but report higher job satisfaction in engagement when they do.
They feel like they’re directly expressing themselves through the product that
the customer interacts with. Then we have enormous resistance from the financial team, the budgeting team, and
they’re saying we have these very painful annual budgeting cycles that we prepare reports months in advance, and
then afterwards we prepare months of reports saying why we went over or under our budgets. And we have to make
the best bet we can as to what will be needed one year from now, as we apply budget. And we say no, it’s much
simpler than that. It’s actually a short list of KPIs (key performance indicators) used to incrementally fund budgets
every week. Were not asking to do the big bang financial allocation every week. We’re asking for a very small piece of
it. The most essential piece of it. So that you can more accurately divide funds. And once they do, they report more
nimble company management. And that they’re actually able to be financial stewards of the companies resources.
39:18 – For more information about XM or any of the other practices I’ve talked about, please contact my day job,
that’s how I feed my family, at SolutionsIQ.com.
39:30 – Now here’s how Team WikiSpeed applies these principles. Here’s a safety
iteration of us going through an evolution of our car in seven days. The first time
we did a safety iteration it took us months. So we had to divide it into tasks and
stories that composed the overall value if we completely iterated the safety
systems of the car. Now we are able to iterate the safety systems of the car in seven days. Here’s how this happens.
First we pick a test. In this case it’s the NHTSA Side Impact Test.