Kelly Anderson wrote:
> Ron, I work for a company that is not primarily a software company.
> They have this system of setting measurable goals for every part of
> the company. Manufacturing, sales, marketing, and development. The
> same system is applied equally to every part of the company. Now, I
> think setting measurable goals for a sales person is pretty easy...
> I'll sell $350,000 worth of stuff this year. But applying the same
> system blindly to software and hardware development is where I get off
> the train.

Seems to me that this is a case of local optimization, probably at the
expense of the global optimization. Pushing for better performance
within a small part of the overall flow often increases the overall
waste. There's a neat little simulation about flipping coins that shows
this very nicely.

Mary Poppendieck talks about 3M applying goals to each division, and
everybody in the division inherited those goals and their compensation
was, in part, related to the meeting of those goals. This sort of
vertical slicing of goals seems to work a lot better than the horizontal
slicing of goals (e.g., sales, manufacturing, development, etc). It's a
lot like software development in that respect.

- George

--
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* George Dinwiddie * http://blog.gdinwiddie.com
Software Development http://www.idiacomputing.com
Consultant and Coach http://www.agilemaryland.org
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