Hi Mary

>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.

Even though I agree with you on this but the opposite is also true and

I guess far more prevalant. A lot of  people I see putting in extra hours are not doing

that for the passion of it but because of looming deadlines (As is the case with

the Toyota employee also who sadly got there because of a hard deadline on him)

which can lead to lost jobs, bad appraisals and n number of other bad things that

can happen to you as part of the corporate appraisal cycles. I personally

know of an instance where over a period of 1 year, 6 very very passionate

employees left because they were asked to put in weekends after weekends to

meet deadlines where the initial problem was setting up of a wrong deadline

which came into place because their manager made an aggressive commitment

to stake holders without consulting the team members. 

>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.

I totally agree with you here because in the case I quoted above, the Manager took

upon himself to commit to aggressive deadlines and forcing team members to follow it

because it was an expectation set upon him (maybe by the organization or by himself).

Cheers

Pankaj

From: leandevelopment@yahoogroups.com [mailto:leandevelopment@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Mary Poppendieck
Sent: Friday, July 11, 2008 3:07 PM
To: leandevelopment@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [leandevelopment] Re: Lead Toyota Engineer Dies of Overwork.

Hi Robin,

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