Now is the time to look back at an exciting 2008. As we witness the worst financial crisis in decades it is important to remember that - now more than ever - does everyone need to improve and innovate, in order to stay in business.

One thing I can say for sure is that throughout 2008 we have all learned a lot. I speak for everyone at BestBrains when I wish all the best in 2009 for our customers, partners and friends in Denmark, Japan, Finland, Sweden, and United States.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year from all of us. And remember, with continuous focus on improving - 2009 will be better.

By Sune Gynthersen

Today I had a talk with a family member who has considerable knowledge within procurement and service contracts in the public sector. We talked back and forth, for instance about cleaning services. I must do my utmost to remain a man of patience when I hear real-world stories like this:

"Let's force the company responsible for cleaning elderly homes, to reduce their prices with 30%." ... the rationale? "It should give them incentives to do the necessary improvements". Right? Wrong!

Go down that path, and you have apparently never heard the stories of how the American automotive industry tried to reduce costs on spare parts by putting pressure on the suppliers to the extend where they almost went bankrupt. This kind of behavior will be perceived by the supplier as a threat to their existence. And thus, they will react by survival instinct, which means extreme precaution, zero tolerance and distrust. It is impossible to have a prosperous partnership when one party is trying to take advantage of the other. And it is very hard to come up with creative
solutions for lowering prices in an environment of distrust.

A different (and better) approach for improvements could be to ask the supplier to work on increasing quality without increasing costs. That is not a threat to the existence of the supplier, thus they can respond with creativity instead of hostility and distrust. Hmm.. how can we increase quality without increasing prices? .. Maybe you are already bending your mind trying to figure that out.

In the software industry someone once faced a challenge like this, and then came up with the concept of Automated Testing -- Result? Increased quality, lower overall cost. Today we take it for granted. Naturally, this kind of innovative thinking can be applied to any domain.

By Sune Gynthersen

Believe it or not -- I saw this question posted dead serious at LinkedIn the other day. It made me think, we need to spend more efforts on training everyone to see the negative impact of individual performance measurements.

Have you ever been in an organization where testers were praised for no. of defects found? Though it is harder to measure, wouldn't you agree that it would be more useful to praise people for "no. of bugs that were never introduced due to close collaboration and mentoring of developers"? I need to emphasize that the latter is of far greater importance than the number of bugs discovered.

And here's the important part -- Doing individual performance ratings will seriously constrain peoples innovative abilities, and thus their abilities to do real value stream improvements. In addition, individual performance ratings will encourage people to NOT help each other, even when it is clear it will be of greater benefit for the company.

Promise me you won't do it

By Sune Gynthersen

Last week I attended an Agile conference in Copenhagen. Among the speakers were David J. Anderson, who did a session on kanban systems. He told the audience the story of the kanban system used in the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Japan. The Imperial Palace, is really like a big park with various buildings inside. I was in the park with my colleagues during our Japan 2008 Lean study tour last spring, and I remember being impressed with the kanban system used in the park, as a simple and truly elegant solution.

When you enter the park, which can be done at several different locations, you receive a little plastic brick. When you leave the park, you hand it back to the lady in uniform at the exit. My first thought was, that it was used to ensure that everyone got out before night. Interestingly that same answer came up at the conference when David Anderson asked the audience what they thought it was used for.

However, imagine a single plastic brick is missing when the park closes. Did someone loose their brick, or are they still inside the park? Should resources be spent on going through the park looking for them? With thousands of daily visitors, bricks will be lost probably on a daily basis, so it's not a way to ensure everyone gets out.

Instead it is a way to limit the number of concurrent visitors in the park. The number of bricks is limited to the highest number of concurrent visitors accepted. That means that the entrance booth may run out of bricks, and then stop letting more people into the park. They can start letting more people in when they get some of the bricks left at the exit. If a brick is lost? No big deal - that just lower the maximum number of concurrent visitors by one.

The concept is exactly what is also used in Lean manufacturing to control the amount of work-in-process. And of course it can also be used in software development environments to limit work to current capacity.

If you should ever go to Tokyo, I would highly recommend going to the park. It is quite beautiful.

By Sune Gynthersen

I'm reading Dr. W. Edwards Deming's main work Out of the Crisis for the first time and thought I would share some of Dr. Demings wise words with you. I didn't really expect it but Dr. Deming actually has something to say about software development.

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of reading his other main work The New Economics and was amazed by the insights of Dr. Deming and how little people in general and management in particular have understood what he actually said. Granted, his overall style could easily be termed idiosyncratic and collage-like but stunningly concise formulations are spread all over.

This is what Dr. Deming said about the "supposition that it is only necessary to meet specifications" when it comes to software development:

"A programmer has a similar problem. She learns, after she finishes the job, that she programmed very well the specifications as delivered to her, but that they were deficient. If she had only known the purpose of the program, she could have done it right for the purpose, even though the specifications were deficient."

That's it! Did I mention that Dr. Deming wrote this in 1984, long before anyone talked about Agile software development?

By Thomas Blomseth

Have you ever heard the old joke about how many programmers it will take to change a light bulb? -- None, it's a hardware problem.

After the following experience, one might think the answer above is the logic of HP -- the worlds largest provider of printers.

The other day I found my self in need of scanning a document. A company was asking me to fax a signed non-disclosure agreement to them -- Who has a fax these days anyway??

So I thought to myself, aha, I'll just scan the document with my signature on the HP PSC 2110 combined printer and scanner I have next door. Though I had not used the printer with my current laptop, I thought to myself, How hard can it be to get a bit of HP hardware running these days? (man, was I wrong...) I had already used it on my old laptop, so I set out with confidence on what was to become a quest longer than expected.

First I eagerly put the document in the scanner, and connected to it via a USB cable. Windows came up with "Found New Hardware" dialog. I nodded - Sure BillG, please attempt to find the right driver for me. Then confidence started dropping. Another "Found New Hardware", and another, and another, and another. Damn, how many different devices exists in this printer/scanner that needs drivers installed seperately? Well.. the number of dialogs wasn't really what scared me the most. The fact that some of them completed successfully while others said the hardware could not be installed successfully, concerned me a bit more.

Hmm... okay, plug and play -- yeah right. I decided to do it the ol'fashioned way. Pick the right drivers directly from hp.com, and install it myself. At this point I was yet to discover that the road ahead was to be filled with trouble and despair.

I went to Google and typed "HP PSC 2110 driver download" - And as anyone would expect I found the correct site in a few seconds. I clicked "Windows XP" as operating system and got a list of downloadable files. I scrolled to the "Driver" section. ...And stopped. I need to download a 166 mb driver?? You got to be kidding me HP! Though I haven't written a lot of hardware drivers I just know, that no hardware driver will even come close to 166 megs!

You would think that engineers at HP had tried Windows Update from Microsoft, which - though not perfect - features to ability to download, only whats needed, in the user's particular context. But no, some product owner guy at HP probably convinced everyone around him that users would rather spend their precious time downloading 166 mb of bloated irrelevant software (with photo viewing capabilities!! - amazing!)

Though shocked I convinced myself that if I just downloaded the driver, everything would work out just fine.

..30 minutes later..

I started the installer and for a second I was thinking ... "Hey, maybe it will just work right away". After a few moments the installer asked me to plug in the scanner in the USB port. And so I did ...and waited.... and waited... I went to pick up lunch, and came back 10 minutes later. Now it said that the installation was unsuccessful, and asked me to look in the readme file (only way out was an "Okay" button). What in the world should I look for in the readme file? Why was it unsuccessful? Why doesn't it just work...? I was all of a sudden feeling very tired.

I could see that the installer had put two shortcuts on my desktop. "HP Director" which I had no clue what might be, and "HP Photo & Imaging"... I clicked the latter, found a Scan button and clicked it. The program asked me to select a source... unfortunately the list of available sources was empty, though my scanner was plugged in. Hmm... great, a partial install.

..an hour passed, I tried back and forth but still wasn't able to scan my document and I gave up. I thought to myself, maybe I should just buy another scanner?

Looking back, I wonder if it is possible to find a vendor that takes software, drivers and particularly user experience more seriously?

I admit, that if had I bought a just-released-to-market, highly complex, all-new-technology piece of hardware - I might run into problems like this. But dammit, this is a printer and scanner, using technology that is 20 years old, running on the most common operating system on the planet.

Well.. the PSC 2110 is a couple of years old. So maybe HP is so busy releasing new printers that they don't update and maintain drivers for their old stuff? While this could be true... I certainly doesn't hope it is the case. Dear HP... users don't need new printers, they need working printers!

If I put my software background aside, and step into the world of my favorite fictional user, nice old Mrs. Jensen, it all seems even more bizarre. How on earth did HP expect her to figure this stuff out?

So dear HP - I got to say, you got one sceptic customer, to say the least. And I can't believe I'm the only one who is experiencing this. Why not seize this opportunity to tap into one of the most valuable sources of information -- user feedback. The guys responsible for maintaining content at hp.com seemed to get that user feedback is important. I guess otherwise they wouldn't have implemented an online feedback system. I got to admit that I found it a bit strange that they asked me to give them feedback about the web experience in the "driver downloads" section of their website. See for yourself: "Thank you for taking the time to provide this information. This will help us to provide a better download experience in the future."

I did consider writing "I'll give you feedback on the experience in 30 minutes, once my printer driver download is completed", but maybe they wouldn't get the irony.

Who gives a damn about the download experience anyway? I'm not the kind of guy that comes about driver download pages without an underlying reason, like wanting to scan a document. So why not ask me for feedback in the context of the whole experience, instead of "Is this web page useful?". I mean -- dear HP, you do not earn money from having a nice structured website. You earn money, marketshare and respect by understanding and helping users users facing problems - like "I need to print a document". So if I were to give you some advice based on this experience - ask yourself: "How can we solve the problems our users face, faster and easier than anyone else?"

I could talk for days about this bizarre experience -- but I'll leave it here, for HP or anyone else to comment

Oh and by the way, yes - I did submit this experience through HP's online feedback system. Now the real question is whether those responsible for the drivers download pages, will actually forward it to the appropriate team inside HP...

---
What if there was just ONE file to download from the HP website, no matter which HP printer you had. A simple probing utility no larger than 500kb, which would probe your printer, download and install the right driver. And I bet it could be done with no more than a single click by the end-user. I wonder how that would affect the number of support incidents at HP.

By Sune Gynthersen