10 ms·

"A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This ca

by mstank 9y ago

"A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp." Seems like this is exactly the kind of issue companies like United Airlines suffer from.

tyingq 9y ago
Amazon is guilty of this, not so much with customers, but with partners/sellers.
- eloisant 9y ago
  I don't think it's because they care too much of the process, but because they value consumers much more than sellers.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    I'm thinking, for example, how they dealt with the recent issues of counterfeit books. Their process did not help the seller or the customer.
dpark 9y ago
> It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” - Bezos > We sought volunteers and then followed our involuntary denial of boarding process - Munoz Ouch
- TheGRS 9y ago
  Yea, I'm not going to share which airline or which branch (other than to say it wasn't United or Chicago), but I have a relative who works at a pretty high position in one of them and they were, to my great surprise, in defense of United and the police in that episode earlier this week. Statements like "airlines bump people all the time", "they can't offer anymore than what they did, its a set rule", and "if they just complied none of this would have happened, its a crime to disagree with flight crew" kept coming up. This is the mentality that permeates the airline industry and is what lead to that episode. They don't put satisfying the customer above following the rules. Its also why no one who has flown much was particularly surprised it happened in the first place.
  - positivejam 9y ago
    Re: the notion that "airlines bump people all the time", there are those arguing that while it is indeed lawful and routine for airlines to bump passengers due to overbooking, this was not a case of overbooking, and once a passenger has taken their seat they have very different rights than when they are still waiting to board the plane. I am by no means an expert, but I found this article (posted on HN yesterday) to be illuminating: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/04/united-passenger-removal-reporting-management-fail.html http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/04/united-passenger-remo... Basically, this wasn't just poor customer service, it was a violation of rules.
    - TheGRS 9y ago
      As I understand it they followed the procedures and rules just as they are defined and in the law. Had the guy willfully gotten out of his seat he would have been compensated the "involuntary bumping" rate that is set by the Dept of Transportation. But the fact that United got to that point is the problem. They had the option to offer more money for volunteers, they even had the option to find a different flight for their employees, or maybe send them on a cab ride instead (one passenger in the video even pointed this out while it was happening). Of course, the excessive use of force is on the police and they should be the ones outside of the law on this one, I don't believe being loud in that situation warrants you get a concussion, that's just wrong.
      - lutorm 9y ago
        As I understand it, it's unclear whether they followed procedures and the law. The law and procedures governing oversales allow "involuntarily denied boarding" if there aren't enough seats. However, a completely different section of the contract governs the circumstances under which a passenger may be removed from a plane, and that basically comes down to safety. Some people argue that "boarding" continues until the plane is in the air and that the airline can execute their right to involuntarily "denying boarding" to any passenger up to that point. Others argue that the plain meaning of the word means that once you are "aboard" the aircraft, you can no longer (legally) deny someone boarding. They argue that since the contract of carriage does not define "boarding", it must be construed to have the plain language meaning (as in the United CEO in his statement saying that "the flight was fully boarded".) Airlines may do it all the time but, as far as I can tell, a court has never ruled on when "denying boarding" ends and "removal from aircraft" starts. Maybe now we will find out.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  Isn't this the standard corporate PR response when a company does something wrong? "We followed our internal process, so everything is cool! I guess we're done here!"
smokeyj 9y ago
This is how I feel about our democratic process. The process is you pick one of two parties. Then you get into a face bloodying fight with the other party. Nothing gets done, then you pat yourself on the back for doing your part. When you come to the realization that nothing has been accomplished, you blame those who didn't participate in the brawl. Suggesting that people work ON the process rather than IN the process will get you looks as if you've just insulted their religion.
- smokeyj 9y ago
  This comment seems to be well received based on the points. I think about this often and it drives me nuts that the two party system is the best we have. It's like we're trying to optimize an operating system at every level EXCEPT THE KERNEL. Suggesting that you don't buy into the two party system is met with skepticism, as if you're a closet supporter of one party. Or worse, that by not supporting a party you're implicitly siding with "the other side" (You know, because we're on different teams). "You're either with us or against us!!'. Can someone just make a p2p party already? Any billionaire in SV could bankroll this project with their weekend funny money. I'd be willing to donate development hours. I'm just wondering if people would be willing to venture out of their comfort zone and "throw away their vote" for something that isn't mainstream.
  - dangero 9y ago
    Without runoff elections its always going to veer towards a two party system. It would work if we did two votes: vote first for who you want, then second vote for the best choice from top two.
    - smokeyj 9y ago
      Which leads to the next question. Why are we voting for a human at all? If members of an organization want a resolution passed anyone should be able to propose it - and if the magic threshold is met - then whala - the resolution is law. I want to be able to vote everyday. I want to be able to pick who I want to represent my vote - and change it at will. I want to be able to pick Bill Gates to represent me on technology issues, and Sal Khan to represent me on education. Government is just an organization, and an organization is a network. We should be using computer science terms to describe how we want this network to operate in terms of resolution, latency, redundancy, centralization/decentralization, upgrade protocls, failovers, and so on. What I'm trying to say is.. Let's purge the politicians and put the people in charge.
hinkley 9y ago
tl;dr: the map is not the territory This problem is pretty much every company I've ever worked for if/when they got over six engineers. I spend more time and a hell of a lot more energy than I should trying to keep managers or easily enthused engineers from hugging the project to death. I ended up becoming a process expert out of a sense of self preservation. I use process a lot, but it's always in support of the 'why's. I don't always talk about the 5 Whys but it's always there, and in my experience the people who are usually the problem can't ever manage more than three. The worst of these are also the sort of people who, if your speedometer was broken, would insist that the car is not moving. Even after you told them to look out the window.
- Retric 9y ago
  Your trying to solve the wrong problem, it's generally a people problem not a process problem.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - hinkley 9y ago
    The people problem is that everyone has the instinct to solve problems with rules, but not the energy or interest to do it properly. If you don't try to steer the conversation toward reversible decisions AND avoid trivialities then you spend your problem solving budget on actively harmful plans.
- fbonetti 9y ago
  > The worst of these are also the sort of people who, if your speedometer was broken, would insist that the car is not moving. Even after you told them to look out the window. That's an amazing quote. I'm totally stealing this.
partisan 9y ago
Whenever a junior team member comes to me for help, the first question I ask is, "what are we trying to accomplish". Unfortunately, we have a tendency to lose sight of purpose when going through process. Discussions usually start with what they have tried and what they are doing, but when the question of purpose is asked, it's easier to see the steps to get the result.
fbonetti 9y ago
This is a surprisingly common trap to fall into. I worked at a startup in which the CTO criticized my dev team for not having a perfectly linear burn down chart. Every week in our retro we had the same discussion about how to improve the shape of our burn down chart; we tried putting higher valued stories at the front of the queue, involving QA earlier in the sprint, and cranking out 1 pointers mid week to tweak the graph. We rarely achieved the perfect shape. On top of this we also had one week sprints, which made it difficult to plan for the future or work on spikes, so we ended up doing very little high-level, architectural planning. I remember one week my team cranked through their allotted stories so fast that we ran out of work two or three days into the sprint. We decided to take on a couple extra easy stories that we knew we could finish before the end of the week. Rather than being praised for doing extra work, we were criticized for "introducing volatility into the sprint". In other words, we messed up the shape of the burn down chart. I'm currently working at a place that has virtually no process, which has it's own challenges, but I'm happy that I'm not arguing about burn down charts anymore :)
- wjamesg 9y ago
  Burn down chart?
  - zer0tonin 9y ago
    Nice excel graph with the number of "points" burned each sprints.
  - fjdlwlv 9y ago
    It's a project management strategy named for how it makes you want to burn down the office.
  - fbonetti 9y ago
    It's a common metric used in the Scrum methodology. You start off the "sprint" with a set number of "story points" (say, 30 points), and end the sprint with zero points. When you graph the team's progress over the course of the sprint, it should ideally form a linear, downward slope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_down_chart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_down_chart
ryandrake 9y ago
Reminds me of that Steve Jobs quote about IBM: “People get confused; companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success. And a lot of them think, ‘Well, somehow, there’s some magic in the process of how that success was created.’ So they start to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long, people start to get confused that the process is the content."
cowardlydragon 9y ago
Step 1 is the ticket wall.
mahyarm 9y ago
Netflix also talks about it themselves: https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/49-Process_Emerges_to_Stop_the https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/49-Proce...

by mstank 9y ago

tyingq 9y ago

Amazon is guilty of this, not so much with customers, but with partners/sellers.

eloisant 9y ago
I don't think it's because they care too much of the process, but because they value consumers much more than sellers.
- tyingq 9y ago
  I'm thinking, for example, how they dealt with the recent issues of counterfeit books. Their process did not help the seller or the customer.

dpark 9y ago

> It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” - Bezos > We sought volunteers and then followed our involuntary denial of boarding process - Munoz Ouch

TheGRS 9y ago
Yea, I'm not going to share which airline or which branch (other than to say it wasn't United or Chicago), but I have a relative who works at a pretty high position in one of them and they were, to my great surprise, in defense of United and the police in that episode earlier this week. Statements like "airlines bump people all the time", "they can't offer anymore than what they did, its a set rule", and "if they just complied none of this would have happened, its a crime to disagree with flight crew" kept coming up. This is the mentality that permeates the airline industry and is what lead to that episode. They don't put satisfying the customer above following the rules. Its also why no one who has flown much was particularly surprised it happened in the first place.
- positivejam 9y ago
  Re: the notion that "airlines bump people all the time", there are those arguing that while it is indeed lawful and routine for airlines to bump passengers due to overbooking, this was not a case of overbooking, and once a passenger has taken their seat they have very different rights than when they are still waiting to board the plane. I am by no means an expert, but I found this article (posted on HN yesterday) to be illuminating: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/04/united-passenger-removal-reporting-management-fail.html http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/04/united-passenger-remo... Basically, this wasn't just poor customer service, it was a violation of rules.
  - TheGRS 9y ago
    As I understand it they followed the procedures and rules just as they are defined and in the law. Had the guy willfully gotten out of his seat he would have been compensated the "involuntary bumping" rate that is set by the Dept of Transportation. But the fact that United got to that point is the problem. They had the option to offer more money for volunteers, they even had the option to find a different flight for their employees, or maybe send them on a cab ride instead (one passenger in the video even pointed this out while it was happening). Of course, the excessive use of force is on the police and they should be the ones outside of the law on this one, I don't believe being loud in that situation warrants you get a concussion, that's just wrong.
    - lutorm 9y ago
      As I understand it, it's unclear whether they followed procedures and the law. The law and procedures governing oversales allow "involuntarily denied boarding" if there aren't enough seats. However, a completely different section of the contract governs the circumstances under which a passenger may be removed from a plane, and that basically comes down to safety. Some people argue that "boarding" continues until the plane is in the air and that the airline can execute their right to involuntarily "denying boarding" to any passenger up to that point. Others argue that the plain meaning of the word means that once you are "aboard" the aircraft, you can no longer (legally) deny someone boarding. They argue that since the contract of carriage does not define "boarding", it must be construed to have the plain language meaning (as in the United CEO in his statement saying that "the flight was fully boarded".) Airlines may do it all the time but, as far as I can tell, a court has never ruled on when "denying boarding" ends and "removal from aircraft" starts. Maybe now we will find out.
ryandrake 9y ago
Isn't this the standard corporate PR response when a company does something wrong? "We followed our internal process, so everything is cool! I guess we're done here!"

smokeyj 9y ago

This is how I feel about our democratic process. The process is you pick one of two parties. Then you get into a face bloodying fight with the other party. Nothing gets done, then you pat yourself on the back for doing your part. When you come to the realization that nothing has been accomplished, you blame those who didn't participate in the brawl. Suggesting that people work ON the process rather than IN the process will get you looks as if you've just insulted their religion.

smokeyj 9y ago
This comment seems to be well received based on the points. I think about this often and it drives me nuts that the two party system is the best we have. It's like we're trying to optimize an operating system at every level EXCEPT THE KERNEL. Suggesting that you don't buy into the two party system is met with skepticism, as if you're a closet supporter of one party. Or worse, that by not supporting a party you're implicitly siding with "the other side" (You know, because we're on different teams). "You're either with us or against us!!'. Can someone just make a p2p party already? Any billionaire in SV could bankroll this project with their weekend funny money. I'd be willing to donate development hours. I'm just wondering if people would be willing to venture out of their comfort zone and "throw away their vote" for something that isn't mainstream.
- dangero 9y ago
  Without runoff elections its always going to veer towards a two party system. It would work if we did two votes: vote first for who you want, then second vote for the best choice from top two.
  - smokeyj 9y ago
    Which leads to the next question. Why are we voting for a human at all? If members of an organization want a resolution passed anyone should be able to propose it - and if the magic threshold is met - then whala - the resolution is law. I want to be able to vote everyday. I want to be able to pick who I want to represent my vote - and change it at will. I want to be able to pick Bill Gates to represent me on technology issues, and Sal Khan to represent me on education. Government is just an organization, and an organization is a network. We should be using computer science terms to describe how we want this network to operate in terms of resolution, latency, redundancy, centralization/decentralization, upgrade protocls, failovers, and so on. What I'm trying to say is.. Let's purge the politicians and put the people in charge.

hinkley 9y ago

tl;dr: the map is not the territory This problem is pretty much every company I've ever worked for if/when they got over six engineers. I spend more time and a hell of a lot more energy than I should trying to keep managers or easily enthused engineers from hugging the project to death. I ended up becoming a process expert out of a sense of self preservation. I use process a lot, but it's always in support of the 'why's. I don't always talk about the 5 Whys but it's always there, and in my experience the people who are usually the problem can't ever manage more than three. The worst of these are also the sort of people who, if your speedometer was broken, would insist that the car is not moving. Even after you told them to look out the window.

Retric 9y ago
Your trying to solve the wrong problem, it's generally a people problem not a process problem.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- hinkley 9y ago
  The people problem is that everyone has the instinct to solve problems with rules, but not the energy or interest to do it properly. If you don't try to steer the conversation toward reversible decisions AND avoid trivialities then you spend your problem solving budget on actively harmful plans.
fbonetti 9y ago
> The worst of these are also the sort of people who, if your speedometer was broken, would insist that the car is not moving. Even after you told them to look out the window. That's an amazing quote. I'm totally stealing this.

partisan 9y ago

Whenever a junior team member comes to me for help, the first question I ask is, "what are we trying to accomplish". Unfortunately, we have a tendency to lose sight of purpose when going through process. Discussions usually start with what they have tried and what they are doing, but when the question of purpose is asked, it's easier to see the steps to get the result.

fbonetti 9y ago

This is a surprisingly common trap to fall into. I worked at a startup in which the CTO criticized my dev team for not having a perfectly linear burn down chart. Every week in our retro we had the same discussion about how to improve the shape of our burn down chart; we tried putting higher valued stories at the front of the queue, involving QA earlier in the sprint, and cranking out 1 pointers mid week to tweak the graph. We rarely achieved the perfect shape. On top of this we also had one week sprints, which made it difficult to plan for the future or work on spikes, so we ended up doing very little high-level, architectural planning. I remember one week my team cranked through their allotted stories so fast that we ran out of work two or three days into the sprint. We decided to take on a couple extra easy stories that we knew we could finish before the end of the week. Rather than being praised for doing extra work, we were criticized for "introducing volatility into the sprint". In other words, we messed up the shape of the burn down chart. I'm currently working at a place that has virtually no process, which has it's own challenges, but I'm happy that I'm not arguing about burn down charts anymore :)

wjamesg 9y ago
Burn down chart?
- zer0tonin 9y ago
  Nice excel graph with the number of "points" burned each sprints.
- fjdlwlv 9y ago
  It's a project management strategy named for how it makes you want to burn down the office.
- fbonetti 9y ago
  It's a common metric used in the Scrum methodology. You start off the "sprint" with a set number of "story points" (say, 30 points), and end the sprint with zero points. When you graph the team's progress over the course of the sprint, it should ideally form a linear, downward slope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_down_chart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_down_chart

ryandrake 9y ago

Reminds me of that Steve Jobs quote about IBM: “People get confused; companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success. And a lot of them think, ‘Well, somehow, there’s some magic in the process of how that success was created.’ So they start to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long, people start to get confused that the process is the content."

cowardlydragon 9y ago

Step 1 is the ticket wall.

mahyarm 9y ago

Netflix also talks about it themselves: https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/49-Process_Emerges_to_Stop_the https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/49-Proce...