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I worked as a product champion for several years at 3M, and these
were incredibly fun years. My recollection is that on good teams, overload
/ overtime was something that the team members did to themselves due to their passion
for the product they were developing. I also do not see the product
champion as an all-knowing all-powerful person - just a person with a vision
that can excite passion in a team. When I was product champion, I
certainly never could do all of the things expected of even a product owner all
by myself, but I did know how to get the right people on the team and get them
engaged in the goal – so all of the necessary technical and marketing
things happened.
The problem with roles – ANY roles – is that they
tend to become a laundry list of stuff a person is expected to do, instead of a
checklist that a team is responsible for looking into.
Mary Poppendieck
952-934-7998
www.poppendieck.com
Author of: Lean Software Development & Implementing Lean
Software Development
From: leandevelopment@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:leandevelopment@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Robin Dymond
Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2008 11:06 PM
To: leandevelopment@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [leandevelopment] Re: Lead Toyota Engineer Dies of
Overwork.
I thought this was sad but interesting. The
lean product development model that Toyota uses rolls the product owner, scrum
master, and technical lead into one role, the chief engineer. Mary Poppendeick
and I have been talking about how this leadership model might apply in software
development too. The issue I have is that the Product Owner is already an
overloaded role and an achilles heel for a scrum team. Adding the additional
technical and process responsibilities has always struck me as being much too
heroic, and not sustainable. It looks like that this may be the case.
Of course I don't have Toyota to blame for my 80 hour weeks, just my OC
behavior in trying to be really good at doing lean agile and growing a
consulting company. I know I am not the only one on this list who is not practicing
sustainable pace... but I should... another opportunity.
Robin.
On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 5:20 AM, David Carlton <carlton@...> wrote:
On Thu, 10 Jul
2008 03:00:43 -0000, "Joseph Little" <jhlittle@...>
said:
> PS. Is it fair to hold Toyota accountable for the mental health of
> every single one of its employees? Still, it may be true that this
> death is not just one incident, and that Toyota may be (partially)
> culpable.
Well, a Japanese labor bureau
thought that it was fair to hold them
accountable in this case; do you see a reason to second-guess them?
It's certainly not the only story I've heard that makes me think that
the XP practice of Sustainable Pace isn't in complete harmony with
Toyota's practices.
David Carlton
carlton@...
--
Robin Dymond, CST
Managing Partner, Innovel, LLC.
www.innovel.net - www.scrumtraining.com
Ass't Producer, Learning and Education stage, Agile 2008
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